More About Dave

Dave-Rand

Dave Rand
Co-Founder

Dave Rand is a Silicon Valley technologist, serial entrepreneur, CEO and CTO with a 30 year track record of successful products and patents spanning networking, privacy and cybersecurity.   Dave’s unique insights and understanding of both core technical challenges and user needs shaped his vision to restore the basic foundations for privacy and security of end users in the digital world.  He has participated on the boards of several companies, both public and private, and helped raise more than $4 billion over his career. He remains one of the foremost cybersecurity leaders in the United States, with an ongoing role as a go-to expert within the industry.

  • Angel Investor and White Hat Hacker

    Since retiring from Trend Micro, Dave has devoted his time and energies to Angel investing as well as being an active member of the cybersecurity community as a 'White Hat' hacker, consultant and strategist. Dave has regularly participated in teams that placed in the Top 5 at DefCon and maintains one of the largest databases and tool sets in the world for analysis of IP attacks.

  • Trend Micro

    After coming on board through their acquisition of Kelkea, posts Dave held at Trend included Chief Technologist, CTO, Internet Content Security, and Technical Fellow. While at Trend, he invented several new products and services, including database technologies that have allowed them to create the largest spam database in the world, tracking the activities of more than a billion IP addresses. Dave retired from Trend in 2017.

  • Kelkea

    As Co-Founder & CEO of Kelkea, Inc., Dave built on earlier groundbreaking work and innovations in the area of antispam technogies that he invented in Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS). Kelkea was acquired by Trend Micro in 2005.

  • Sanlight

    Dave co-founded Sanlight in 2000 with Sherman Tuan and Mark Kaleem. Sanlight's prime technology was a “time-travel” file system, which is used for freezing the state of a disk volume in order to make backups, as well as advanced applications like forensic accounting. Sanlight was In 2002, Dave also became CEO of Sanlight, in 2002 and drove its acquisition by Quantum in 2003.

  • Metromedia Fiber

    After the acquisition of Abovenet Communications, Dave served as CTO for Metromedia Fiber, helping to grow the Internet side of the business and drove a raise of $2 billion in bonds to expand its infrastructure and footprint.

  • Abovenet Communications

    Dave was co-founder and CTO of Abovenet Communications, Inc., one of the last “tier 1” networks created and introduced a new model for Internet services – selling bandwidth. This now-common practice allowed Abovenet to grow its customer base and revenues, taking advantage of the massive growth in Internet services. Dave then supported Abovenet's secondary offering, raising an addition $240M, and spearheaded the acquisition of the Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX) from Digital Equipment Corp / Compaq in 1999. In the fall of 1999, Dave was the lead in the sale of Abovenet to Metromedia fiber for $1.7 billion.

  • MAPS

    Dave co-founded the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS), with Paul Vixie. This was the first anti-spam service, and introduced the concept of email reputation. The now-standard DNSBL technology was created by MAPS.

  • National Semiconductor, Novell and Cisco

    Dave started his career immersed in chip design and the networking layer that laid the foundation for the Internet we know today including National Semiconductor, Chips and Technologies, Novell and Cisco, along with several startups.