The outgoing chief discusses going public on the London stock exchange, the AVG acquisition, and the joys of being a UC Irvine Anteater
This summer Vince Steckler is retiring as CEO of Avast after a decade leading the cybersecurity company. A native Californian and proud alum of the University of California at Irvine, he began his career as a programmer. He served as Senior VP of Worldwide Consumer Sales at the cybersecurity company Symantec before joining Avast. When he joined, Avast had about 40 employees and sales of under $20 million a year. Now it employs more than 1,500 employees and earns more than $750 million in sales, and its security software stops over 1.5 billion attacks per month. He sat down with the Avast Blog as part of a tour of the company’s global offices to say goodbye to employees.
What was your biggest achievement as CEO?
Probably the acquisition of AVG Technologies in 2016. We didn’t just acquire a company, we gained the AVG team, AVG customers, and the carrier and channel partners. For nearly 30 years, AVG and Avast grew up side by side, and the similarities made integrating the two pretty smooth. We’ve been able to support both the AVG and Avast branded products, and transformed into a full service security company with the largest consumer installed base in the world. This expanded our user base to more than 400 million users worldwide. It was a big deal, and I’m very proud of what we all – everyone in both companies – were able to accomplish through it.
What was the hardest challenge in your tenure as Avast CEO?
The IPO (Avast’s initial public offering last year on the London S ..
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