How to Catch a CEO

Dan Streetman interviewed for his new job after swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112 miles and running 26.2 miles. And he did it while tethered to another person.

Streetman, an accomplished Ironman athlete, had scheduled a meeting with Tanium co-founder Orion Hindawi in October 2022 to talk about the CEO job at the Kirkland-based cybersecurity company. Hindawi, who had led the company since co-founding it in 2007, wanted to focus more on product and less on operations. To make that transition, he needed a successor. Enter Streetman, an accomplished executive and West Point graduate.

Hindawi had contacted Streetman about the CEO role about nine months before. Streetman, however, was leading Tibco Software through a transformation and couldn’t leave. When Streetman finished with Tibco, Hindawi reached out again to gauge his interest.

“I wanted to hire him the first time I met him,” Hindawi says. “He just wasn’t ready. I guess I have a long memory.”

The two executives and their wives met for dinner at Ad Hoc in Napa Valley, but the timing wasn’t ideal for Streetman. The day before he completed the Ironman California in Sacramento, serving as a guide for a visually impaired friend.

Streetman rode 112 miles on a tandem bike with a partner who was much taller than him, meaning the bike was a poor fit and wind made the ride even more treacherous. The swim event started as a chaotic scrum. And he completed the run portion while tethered to his friend, as well.

It was all a prelude to his meeting with Hindawi.

“The first time we had dinner I was literally stooped over and sore and all bloated from salt,” Streetman says. “We still had a wonderful conversation.”

The opportunity was laid out in front of him. Streetman would be taking over for Hindawi, who co-founded Tanium and built it into a $9 billion company over 16 years. Hindawi wasn’t leaving the company, but rather stepping into the executive chairman role.

When a founder cedes control after years of successfully building a company, the process can be lined with pitfalls. Hindawi and Streetman recently took the Business Journal inside Tanium’s leadership transition, candidly speaking about how the company might evolve in the coming years and how the dynamic of their relationship will set the course.

160 interviews to find the right hire

The search for a new CEO started more than three years ago when Hindawi felt he was spending less time on product and more time on operating the company, which he didn’t feel was his strong suit.

He talked to his dad about finding someone to help with operations and soon realized they were talking about Tanium’s next CEO.

“It wasn’t as much I was dreading coming to work. It was more just that I realized there was somebody who from a comparative advantage would do a better job than I did at some of this stuff,” Hindawi says. “How would we find somebody who loved doing that stuff? Because I think the company can feel it when the CEO loves what they’re doing, and how do I get to go back to the stuff that I love doing?”

Hindawi, 44, co-founded Tanium with his dad, David, in 2007. The company blossomed under Hindawi’s leadership, securing clients such as Barclays, Honeywell and AutoNation.

By the time Hindawi moved to Seattle’s Laurelhurst neighborhood in 2020, he was in transition mode. Later that year, the company relocated its headquarters from Emeryville, California, to Kirkland. Tanium has more than 1,800 employees, though only about 80 are based in Washington. (The company is looking for a larger office in Bellevue to house its growing team.)

The search for a CEO began with a recruiting firm. Hindawi interviewed about 160 people in the process but was particularly drawn to Streetman. He felt Streetman, 56, would do right by Tanium in the long term, and he wouldn’t cut corners for short-term gains. Perhaps most importantly, Hindawi thought he would enjoy working with Streetman.

After interviewing Streetman the first time in early 2022 while Streetman was with Tibco, Hindawi said he met with about 100 more people. Still, Streetman was the clear choice.

Hindawi says there were other candidates who had deeper backgrounds in cybersecurity. Expertise in the specific field was less important to Hindawi than what Streetman had to offer.

“I tend to believe that great athletes are going to be able to pick up sports pretty quickly,” Hindawi says.

Streetman had heard good things about Tanium’s technology. But, much like Hindawi, he was most concerned about working with someone he could believe in and trust, even if there are surface-level differences.

“We’re different people, and I think that’s a powerful thing to be able to embrace that you want someone to work with you that’s not exactly like you,” Streetman says. “Orion is exceptionally technically proficient. He can drill into a problem set or code faster than anybody I’ve ever seen. I like to code, but it’s not my highest utility as a leader.”

Tanium timeline

Navigating a founder’s mentality

At some point, CEOs who are also founders have to let go of their company. Sometimes founders want to move on to something new because they like the early days of a startup more than running a large company. Other times it’s because the company’s board wants someone more proficient in late-stage growth.

Whatever the reason, finding the replacement is only the first step. What comes after the new CEO takes the reins is the journey.

Dunigan O’Keeffe, head of Bain and Co.’s global strategy practice, helps clients keep what he calls “the founder’s mentality” even after a founder leaves. For O’Keeffe and Bain, this means having a sharp sense of insurgency, a front-line obsession and an owner mindset. While hiring a CEO from within the company means that person will know the business, they might not have bold new ideas. Hiring a CEO from outside the company can result in the opposite problem.

These transitions can be tricky, O’Keeffe says, when the founder doesn’t leave the company but takes a new role.

“What can happen, and what we’ve seen happen but you need to be careful of, is the shadow veto to everything the CEO says,” O’Keeffe says. “Even if the founder is trying to be supportive of the CEO, in some ways it’s really hard to help yourself. You know all the details of the business. You’ve seen things that have been tried before that didn’t work. You have an intuition about the customers. To sit on your hands and say, ‘That’s the CEO’s decision,’ is a really hard thing for the founder to do.”

O’Keeffe says these new roles for the founder are often a transition while the founder looks for something new. If the founder plans to stick around, however, it’s important to give them an energizing, challenging role that is worthy of their visionary status.

Hindawi, for example, is Tanium’s executive chairman, free to focus on product, which he says is his natural passion anyway, especially compared to operating the company. When asked about Tanium’s potential to go public given its value and maturity, Hindawi deferred to his successor.

“That’s something that is up to Dan, and I’m going to support him on his decisions,” Hindawi says. “There are some CEOs who thrive as being public company CEOs, and I think Dan is one of them. He has run a public company. He enjoyed it. He’s good at it. If that’s the decision that he makes, then the board would support it.”

About Tanium

Hindawi’s day-to-day now consists of working with the product and engineering teams, as well as talking to customers.

But why not just take a break? Hindawi jokes that his wife wouldn’t allow that. He also wants his kids to see him working and being productive. He believes that what Tanium does is important, especially given that the company works with multiple branches of the military.

Another commitment taking up Hindawi’s time is the Giving Pledge, a commitment from some of the world’s wealthiest people to give away the majority of their wealth. Hindawi and his wife, Jackie, signed on to the Giving Pledge in 2018. The couple has been researching causes to give their money to, and Jackie now sits on the board of Muso, a nonprofit focused on rapidly delivering health care to impoverished communities.

“You can only deploy so much capital thoughtfully for yourself, and after a while it becomes just gratuitous spend,” says Hindawi, who has an estimated net worth of more than $1 billion, according to Forbes.

Streetman views Hindawi as an adviser and a coach. But at the end of the day, he knows it’s his job to lead the company as CEO.

“He has more context about our technology and about our industry than I’ll ever be able to learn in the time I’m leading here,” Streetman says. “I’ve got a lot of experience setting strategy and establishing objectives and key results. Helping big teams move faster and engaging customer programs. We’re very complementary that way.”

Streetman says staying private has been advantageous for now given uncertainty in the public markets, but the company is at a size where going public would make sense. Getting liquidity for employees and the brand-name recognition both make going public appealing. Streetman is happy with Tanium’s cash position and will choose the right moment for its IPO.

Tanium is growing its presence in the Seattle area, which is relatively nascent given the company switched its headquarters to Kirkland in 2020. The company still has its highest concentration of employees in the Bay Area, where Streetman is based.

Nevertheless, both Hindawi and Streetman say the tech talent in the Seattle area is strong. The proximity to partners like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft is also key.

As Hindawi considers the future both for Tanium and himself, the excitement of starting a company is always tantalizing. He says landing that first deal as a young company is “euphoric.” But the journey and inherent uncertainty — even for a seasoned and successful entrepreneur — are daunting.

“There is a lot of me that would love to start another company today. A big part of me. I think that it’s really easy to get lost in the concept of manifest destiny. You think, ‘I’m so good at this, so I won’t fail.’ I think statistically if I started another company today, the likelihood of it being as successful as Tanium, no matter how good I am at this, is pretty low,” Hindawi says. “It is an incredibly exhausting journey to start a company. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s fair to do that to my kids and to do that to Jackie.”