In 2000, Jim Bidzos opened a bottle of champagne at the RSA Conference and toasted the government officials onstage with him. For years, restrictions on exporting encryption had made Washington an obstacle to his business. Now the rules were loosening, and the occasion called for a drink. A long argument about mathematics, commerce and who should be able to keep a secret had produced a scene familiar from any successful negotiation: former adversaries sharing the platform.
Bidzos had spent much of the previous decade and a half trying to make encryption commercially ordinary. It was an awkward ambition. The technology could protect a customer’s transaction, yet selling it abroad could trigger government scrutiny. Businesses needed reassurance. Officials wanted controls. Cryptographers had opinions of their own. Nobody was short of an opinion.
“It was that one defining moment,” he said of the celebration. He had stepped back from running RSA, the company he had helped sustain through its precarious early years. His interests included flying small planes and playing classical guitar. The champagne might have made a tidy ending. His subsequent career at Verisign would make it a rather premature one.
The difficult distance between a proof and a purchase
Born in Greece, Bidzos moved to the United States as a child. His father worked as a barber; his mother managed a restaurant. He began his technology career at IBM. His later reputation would come from a different kind of work: finding a commercial future for ideas whose importance was easier to demonstrate than their immediate profitability.
When he joined RSA Data Security in 1986, the company was struggling. Its name came from Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, the inventors of the RSA algorithm. Bidzos supplied none of the initials. His job was to help supply customers.
The distinction matters. Public-key cryptography was a mathematical advance with an unusually practical promise: people could protect communications without first finding a safe way to exchange a shared secret key. Turning that promise into software other companies could integrate required tools, support and agreements. An algorithm does not negotiate its own licensing fee.
Early customers included the people developing Lotus Notes. Over time, RSA’s technology entered products from companies including Apple, Microsoft, Novell and Motorola. Bidzos spent the lean years traveling, pitching and negotiating. He recalled periods when he went without pay to reduce costs. The business needed to survive long enough for the market to need what it had.
One early customer, Addison Fischer, came away from a negotiation thinking he would rather avoid another encounter with such an effective salesman. It is an affectionate sort of professional compliment, provided you are the person collecting it.
A place to have the argument
The difficulty extended beyond closing deals. Encryption policy affected what companies could sell and how broadly they could distribute it. Bidzos became a public opponent of restrictions that stood between strong cryptography and commercial use. His company’s interests and the privacy concerns of a wider community often overlapped.
They did not always coincide. RSA controlled valuable intellectual property and charged for its use. Some privacy advocates worried about depending on a private company for technology they considered essential. Bidzos occupied a complicated position: arguing against government limits while defending his company’s commercial rights. The history becomes more interesting when both facts are allowed into the room.
In 1991, he created the RSA Conference. The first event consisted of a single panel discussion about digital signatures. A subject involving technical standards and public policy needed somewhere to be discussed, and the meeting gave researchers, industry participants and others a common room.
By 1994, Bruce Schneier had a practical request. Could he sell copies of his book, Applied Cryptography, at the conference? Bidzos arranged space in the hotel lobby. Schneier later recalled the episode as the beginning of the event’s exhibitors. Before the elaborate booths came a book and somewhere to put it.
The episode suits this part of Bidzos’s career. He helped create places where technology could meet its potential users: a licensing conversation, a panel, a lobby. Each lowered a different barrier. A community needed occasions to explain itself almost as much as a company needed customers.
“Risk never goes away, it just becomes better understood.”
Jim Bidzos, 2002
The certificate gets its own company
Browsers changed the size of the opportunity. In 1994, Netscape integrated RSA’s public-key infrastructure software into Navigator. Microsoft followed with Internet Explorer in 1995. Security could now reach people through the software they used to explore the web.
But a browser equipped with cryptography still needed a way to establish whose keys it should trust. Digital certificates linked identities and public keys. Someone had to run the service that issued and managed them. The work included checking identities, protecting signing keys and handling certificates across their useful lives.
Bidzos founded Verisign in April 1995 as a separate company for those services. Investors included Visa, Intel, Mitsubishi and Ameritech. RSA’s business supplied technology and tools; the new venture needed the facilities, operating procedures and independence appropriate to a trust service.
The small browser padlock and Verisign’s checkmark became recognizable signs during the expansion of online shopping. Beneath the symbols sat a considerable amount of unglamorous administration. A buyer and a merchant who had never met could exchange sensitive information using a system neither needed to understand in full.
That arrangement made security part of an ordinary purchase. A shopper could concentrate on the book, the ticket or the bill. The identity checks and cryptography happened elsewhere. Verisign went public in 1998, giving a business built around online trust a stock-market identity of its own.
Returning to a changing business
Verisign acquired Network Solutions in 2000 and became the registry operator for .com and .net. That added a different kind of responsibility. A certificate helps establish identity; the Domain Name System helps computers find the resources associated with a name. Both sit beneath what a person sees on a screen.
Bidzos’s relationship with Verisign continued through changes in title and management. He served as chairman, then vice chairman, and later returned to executive leadership. When the board appointed him interim chief executive in 2008, the company was already pursuing a strategy of concentrating on its core businesses and disposing of other operations.
He explicitly supported continuing that strategy. The return involved carrying forward a restructuring, with the founder again responsible for the business he had helped start. In August 2011 he resumed the CEO role. He remains executive chairman, president and CEO.
His early career had involved persuading people to adopt something unfamiliar. At Verisign, much of the responsibility concerns something people already assume will work. Internet naming is rarely a subject of conversation when it behaves as expected. That silence places its own demands on the organization doing the work.
.com and .net registrations in Verisign’s domain name base at September 30, 2026.
The colleagues who stayed in the picture
In April 2025, Bidzos stood with Rivest to present Burt Kaliski with an RSA Conference Lifetime Achievement Award. He could describe Kaliski’s beginnings at the company precisely: September 1989, employee number seven, RSA’s first full-time cryptographer.
Kaliski had helped customers integrate cryptography and led the development of Public-Key Cryptography Standards, with participants including Lotus, Apple, Microsoft and Novell. Decades later he was Verisign’s chief technology officer. Rivest was an advisor. Bidzos was still CEO.
“He has never left the family,” Bidzos said. The line gave a corporate history an unusually domestic sound. These were people whose working relationships had outlasted products, transactions and several changes in the way the internet was used.
There is a personal counterpoint to the boardroom chronology. In a 2022 MIT lecture, Bidzos recounted a stranger asking whether his license plate was about mathematics. It was. The stranger guessed it referred to dividing property after a divorce. The supposed conversation between fellow enthusiasts ended before it had properly begun. Even after years of explaining cryptography, a number plate could still defeat communication.
A job that continues between the headlines
On October 22, 2026, Verisign reported quarterly revenue of $443 million. Its .com and .net domain name base had reached 182.5 million registrations, up 6.1 percent from a year earlier. Bidzos also discussed the planned rollout of .web and a limited beta for Verisign Informed, a high-assurance validation service. Those initiatives were still work in progress.
The established obligations continue alongside them. Verisign operates the A-root and J-root identities within the root server system and maintains the root zone under an agreement with ICANN. The root system’s 13 named identities represent a distributed network of servers. Keeping that shared system dependable involves coordination as well as technical capability.
Bidzos’s career has repeatedly brought him to that meeting point: mathematics and customers, researchers and businesses, private companies and public institutions. The champagne celebrated one change in the rules. The work carried on through new companies, new responsibilities and old colleagues who kept turning up.
A useful measure of the result is how little of it an ordinary internet user has to consider. Type a name. Follow a link. Buy the book. Years of arguments, standards and operating decisions make those small actions possible. Bidzos has spent a substantial part of his life attending to what happens before the click.