Ventures
McAfee was employed as a programmer by NASA's Institute for Space Studies in New York City from 1968 to 1970. From there he went to Univac as a software designer and later to Xerox as an operating system architect. In 1978 he joined Computer Sciences Corporation as a software consultant. Later, while employed by Lockheed in the 1980s, McAfee received a copy of the Pakistani Brain computer virus and began developing software to combat viruses.
In 1987 McAfee founded McAfee Associates, a computer anti-virus company. He was the first to distribute anti-virus software using the shareware business model. In 1989, he quit Lockheed and began working full-time at McAfee Associates, which he initially operated from his home in Santa Clara, California. The company was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 1992, and McAfee resigned from the company in 1994. Two years after McAfee Associates went public, McAfee sold his remaining stake in the company. Network Associates was formed in 1997 as a merger of McAfee Associates and Network General. This company later became Network Associates, a name it retained for seven years until it was renamed McAfee. McAfee remains today as one of the largest anti-virus companies in the world.
Other business ventures that he founded included Tribal Voice, which developed one of the first instant messaging programs, PowWow. In 2000, John McAfee invested in and joined the board of directors of Zone Labs prior to its acquisition by Check Point Software in 2003.
In August 2009, The New York Times reported that McAfee's personal fortune had declined to $4 million from a peak of $100 million, the effect of the global financial crisis and recession on his investments.
Beginning in February 2010, McAfee started a new venture in the field of bacterial quorum sensing. His company QuorumEx is headquartered in Belize and is working towards producing commercial all natural antibiotics based on anti-quorum sensing technology.
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Famous quotes containing the word ventures:
“Wine and cheese are ageless companions, like aspirin and aches, or June and moon, or good people and noble ventures ...”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)
“If one ventures a word with you, will you be offended? But who can keep from speaking?”
—Bible: Hebrew, Job 4:2.
Eliphaz, one of Job’s “comforters,” to Job.
“At the moment when a man openly makes known his difference of opinion from a well-known party leader, the whole world thinks that he must be angry with the latter. Sometimes, however, he is just on the point of ceasing to be angry with him. He ventures to put himself on the same plane as his opponent, and is free from the tortures of suppressed envy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)