Today we have a rather special guest on Techzine Talks on Tour. During Check Point’s recent CPX conference in Vienna, we sat down for a 20-minute conversation with Gil Shwed, co-founder of Check Point and widely regarded as the inventor of the firewall. We asked him about the past 30+ years, the present and about the future for Check Point and the broader cybersecurity industry.
Gil Shwed, co-founder and now Executive Chairman of Check Point Software Technologies, talks about how he conceptualized network security technology in 1990, years before the World Wide Web existed. He recognized early that internet connectivity would transform global communication, but also that it would create security challenges.
“We actually started a new industry, the cybersecurity industry, not just network security,” according to Shwed. He describes Check Point as “probably the number one company that was founded solely around the internet that has survived up to these days, 32 years later.” This longevity is particularly remarkable in technology, where few companies maintain market leadership for decades.
Shwed now transitions to his role as Executive Chairman alongside new CEO Nadav Zafrir, We talk about how the new CEO is different from Shwed and not different at the same time and what the new CEO may have in store for the company. However, Shwed is still acutely aware that a vendor like Check Point doesn’t control the pace of innovation. “It’s the attackers that are setting the stage,” he notes. Cybersecurity will always be challenging and relevant. That is true three decades after Shwed and Check Point helped create it, but is most likely still the case three decades from now.
Listen to this new episode of Techzine Talks on Tour now.
Techzine Talks on Tour: season two
We started Techzine Talks on Tour in May of 2024, with the goal of doing at least one episode every two weeks. After 25 episodes in 2024 we were close enough to that target for us to call the first season a good start. That’s what it is, a start, because we’re not done yet. We continue with a second season, with the goal of growing our reach even further. We will once again try and serve up a fresh new episode of Techzine Talks every two weeks or faster.
A big thank you to the people who found us in 2024 already. We hope you continue to listen to Techzine Talks on Tour in 2025. If this is your first encounter with our podcast, there’s much more to come! We hope you enjoy this episode.
Where to find Techzine Talks on Tour?
Techzine Talks on Tour is available on all the well-known platforms. So you can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube for example. Just search for Techzine Talks on Tour in your favorite podcast app.
Previous episodes of Techzine Talks on Tour:
- MuleSoft meets AI: Powering the Agentforce revolution
- AI without ethics will never truly serve humanity
- Cisco wants a (big) piece of the AI pie and doubles down on compute
- After SASE and Unified SASE, there’s Sovereign SASE: what is that?
- Embracing sustainability in data Center modernization
Get in touch
We hope you like this new podcast series. If so, please let us know. If you have suggestions on how we can improve, we would like to hear those too. We’re also open to suggestions around specific topics, or specific people that want to appear in an episode of Techzine Talks on Tour. You can find both Coen van Eenbergen and Sander Almekinders on LinkedIn, or you can send an email to info@techzine.eu.