Orion Hindawi and the five-year wait for a fifteen-second answer

A company can own hundreds of thousands of computers and still struggle to say how many it has. Orion Hindawi has spent much of his working life in that peculiar gap between owning something and knowing where it is. The question sounds suitable for a stockroom clerk. At the scale of a bank or a government department, answering it can require a considerable amount of engineering and an uncomfortable conversation with management.

Hindawi co-founded Tanium with his father, David, in 2007. They spent five years developing the product before beginning to sell it in 2012. Their ambition was to let organizations inspect and act on enormous networks in seconds. There is a pleasing contradiction here: an impatient industry got its faster answer because a father and son were prepared to spend years on it.

By September 2015, Orion was describing a platform that could give institutions visibility and control across millions of endpoints within fifteen seconds. He also described the difficulty of persuading customers to believe what they saw. People accustomed to waiting days for information had arranged their working lives around the delay. A quick answer could be almost inconvenient. It removed an excuse that everyone understood.

Before the company, the computers

Hindawi grew up in Berkeley, California, with unusual access to the machines that would become his profession. His father built telecommunications software. Orion remembers being allowed near new computers at three, an arrangement that appears to have required a forgiving attitude toward hardware.

“Rumor has it I loved destroying technology before I loved using it,” he wrote in 2015. His elementary-school science teachers showed him how computers could simplify problems; he remembers exploring physics through mathematical libraries. When business recognition arrived, he credited those teachers alongside his father and colleagues. His account of an individual award kept turning into a list of other people.

He attended the University of California, Berkeley, arriving in 1997, but left without graduating to work with his father. Their earlier company, BigFix, developed software for managing computers and distributing updates. IBM acquired it in 2010. Tanium had already been founded three years before that sale. The next undertaking began while the previous one was still finding its eventual owner.

The awkward business of improving your own work

BigFix gave the Hindawis experience, a team and a benchmark they understood from the inside. It also gave them something awkward to admit: their own earlier work could no longer answer customers quickly enough. Familiarity with a product can make its shortcomings easier to explain away. They chose to make those shortcomings the starting point for another company.

Tanium's early design used linear peer-to-peer communication. Rather than require every computer to conduct a separate conversation with a central server, machines could pass queries and aggregate information along a chain. The technical idea involved changing how information moved. For the person using the software, the desired effect was wonderfully ordinary: ask a question, get an answer, do something about it.

That distinction helps explain Hindawi's career. He works on infrastructure, where the achievement is often hidden under an interface deliberately made to look simple. A useful query might concern installed software, a running process or a missing update. None is much of a party anecdote. All can matter greatly to the person responsible for keeping thousands of machines functioning.

When a demonstration looked suspiciously good

During an early presentation to Andreessen Horowitz, Hindawi opened a laptop and began querying a network. Steven Sinofsky, the former Microsoft executive who would join Tanium's board, later recalled seeing answers appear so quickly that the audience assumed it was a simulation. The demonstration was running against a live deployment of thousands of endpoints.

The skeptical audience knew the field. That was the problem. Its experience supplied a reasonable expectation of how long this kind of work should take, and the screen appeared to violate it. Hindawi had brought a functioning product into a room where the plausible explanation was that it did not yet function.

The Hindawis financed Tanium themselves during its first five years. In 2015, they held equal stakes in the business, while David served as CEO and chairman and Orion as president and chief technology officer. The family connection was also a working arrangement, with ownership divided evenly between two generations. A father could be the older founder without the son being a junior shareholder. Building together meant having a financial stake in the same outcome, as well as a shared history of making software. That arrangement gave their discussions about the company a rather durable set of common interests.

The commercial results soon gave the demonstration some company. Tanium's bookings rose from $2 million in 2012 to $24 million in 2013 and $74 million in 2014. Those are bookings, commitments recognized over multiple contract years, rather than annual revenue. Keeping the distinction matters. Even with the accounting properly labeled, a product that had spent years in development was finding buyers quickly.

The unfashionable appeal of basic questions

Hindawi's public arguments about security have often resisted the industry's taste for elaborate villains. In a 2015 podcast, he challenged the assumption that attackers were simply too sophisticated to defend against. He emphasized routine defensive work and the organizational difficulty of acting on information that somebody may already possess.

There is an institutional problem inside that observation. Knowing that a machine needs attention is useful only if someone can get the issue recognized, assigned and fixed. A security team and an operations team can each have tools, reports and perfectly understandable reasons for doing things differently. The computer remains in the middle, waiting for the humans to agree.

By March 2021, Hindawi was writing about the poor quality of IT data itself. Teams supporting data-driven decisions elsewhere in a business could still be stitching together incomplete, outdated pictures of their own equipment. He connected that problem directly to automation. A system that acts more quickly also needs a dependable account of what it is acting upon. Speed increases the consequences of a bad assumption.

His December 2021 letter about the Log4j vulnerability addressed chief executives directly. It argued that manual workarounds and stale information left their teams struggling to respond. The intended reader was the person accountable for the organization, even if someone else would perform the fix. Hindawi's technical argument had become a management argument: responsibility extends beyond the people holding the tools.

“we can't defend against these attacks because we can't deal with the sophistication of the attackers”

Orion Hindawi, 2015

A lake, a new city, a longer obligation

In June 2020, Hindawi moved his family to Seattle. Tanium subsequently moved its headquarters to nearby Kirkland. Several executives were already in the area, and he described the formal relocation as recognition of a shift that had happened. He had considered locations on both sides of Lake Washington before choosing Carillon Point.

The move also produced an unusually cheerful contribution to the local debate about whether Seattle welcomes newcomers. Hindawi dismissed the famous “freeze” as “complete garbage.” He had discovered wake surfing, too. “Wake surfing was not in my lexicon before,” he said. After years spent making computers communicate, he was finding the people reasonably approachable.

There was a different kind of long-term commitment already on paper. In May 2018, Orion and his wife, Jackie, signed the Giving Pledge. Their letter committed them to giving away the vast majority of their wealth during their lifetimes, with public education and opportunities for veterans among their priorities.

Both described themselves as products of public schools. Orion connected that experience to the teachers and adults who had helped them, and to wanting other children to receive similar opportunities. He also wrote about hiring hundreds of US veterans across his companies and wanting to do more. The letter contains an ambition and a promise; it should be read as those, rather than as an accounting of money already distributed.

The chair changes. The question persists.

In February 2016, Orion succeeded David as Tanium's CEO. Seven years later, in February 2023, Dan Streetman took the chief executive role and Orion became executive chairman. David became chairman emeritus. The family that had started the company made room for an outside chief executive, while Orion remained involved in its direction.

That sequence complicates the tidy picture of a founder who simply stays in charge. A company has technical work, commercial work and governance work, and the titles allocate different responsibilities as it grows. Hindawi's career has included building the product, running the business and chairing it. The same person can encounter different versions of a familiar problem from each seat.

On August 20, 2026, Tanium announced that Orion was returning as CEO, effective immediately. Streetman would leave the role and the board while advising during the transition. David would return as chairman. The stated priorities included expanding autonomous IT and AI capabilities, alongside deeper relationships with customers and partners.

Hindawi's own explanation on LinkedIn was direct. “I'm back because the next version of that problem is here.” He described AI agents taking on tasks that IT and security teams perform manually, and identified Atlas as Tanium's answer. The aspiration is to put more of the work of maintaining and securing computers into software that can act for customers.

The return leaves a familiar practical question under a newer vocabulary. Before software can make a useful change, it needs to know what exists, what is happening and where to act. Hindawi has been working toward better answers since the BigFix years. He is now responsible for what Tanium does with them again. The machines may get more autonomous. Someone still has to answer for the result.