Ken Xie

About Ken Xie

Ken Xie is the cofounder and CEO of Fortinet, a cybersecurity firm that offers firewalls, cloud security and other services to businesses.

The son of two Chinese academics, Xie's parents hoped that he would become a professor and sent him to Stanford University to study engineering.

Xie became interested in entrepreneurship while at Stanford, founding his first company, a software firewall business named SIS, in 1993.

He started another cybersecurity firm, NetScreen, three years later, before founding Fortinet in 2000.

The California-based company, which went public on the Nasdaq in 2009, had $5.3 billion in 2023 revenue.