Kerio History
Martin Viktora, Kerio co-founder
As a university student I spent a lot of time hanging out in the computer labs where I first met the latest Internet invention, a service called World Wide Web. WWW superseded then popular text-based service called Gopher by combining text and graphics.
To improve my coding skills, I took a part-time job in a small subsidiary of a German company. Very soon I hijacked the office modem we used for sending reports to our overlords in Germany and hooked it up to the Internet. Unfortunately, only the person sitting at the computer with the modem could access the Internet. To give everybody in the office access to the wonders of WWW from their computers as well, I started looking for a solution.
In my free time and with help from Merlin (Martin Rubas; still works for Kerio), who was also working in the same office, we wrote a functioning proxy product in a couple of months.
Looking for a way to distribute the product, I met Lan Projekt, a small local firm that had just recently started offering commercial Internet access in the Plzen region. That's where I met Tom (Tomas Hnetila, another Kerio co-founder), who was working there as a technical guru and network administrator. Based on his review and recommendation, the owner of the firm Lan Projekt agreed to distribute the product.
Tom had a unique experience working with the first customers interested in Internet access and understood the ISP market. That proved to be invaluable in suggesting many great improvements and establishing business contacts that further helped with the sales success.
In the spring of 1997 we rented a small office in Pilsen on Sedlackova street and with saved and borrowed money we were able to put down 100,000 CZK of the statutory capital to form a limited liability company. We posted a note on a bulletin board at the entrance of one of the university's buildings. Soon showed up at our door a guy he could do what we needed. Very quickly it became apparent that not only he had that kind of skill but was also extremely good at it. That's how Standa (Stanislav Kolar) became the part of the founding team.
If one believes luck is an important aspect of business success, ours was in the form of finding Standa. As it turned out, the driver component he wrote and kept improving over the years was such a critical piece of technology that none of our competitors was able to match the robustness of our solution. The driver allowed us to develop a hugely popular product WinRoute, the predecessor of Kerio Control.
From the beginning our dreams were big. We did not want to stay just a local Czech company. We made the product and web site available in English, which allowed us to sell world wide. By 2001 we were also getting ready to launch a new email server product that evolved into our flagship product and is sold under the name Kerio Connect today.
In November 2001 Dusan (Dusan Vitek – the new member of our team) and I landed at San Francisco to open our own office in the United States because the product distribution arrangement we had originally there started to crumble. With the majority of technological companies concentrated in the area south of the city of San Francisco, known by the name of Silicon Valley, a decision was made to base our U.S. operations there.
After a short trip back to Czech we were ready to say goodbye to our home country. Tomas stayed back in Plzen to manage the growing office and I and Dusan headed overseas to develop our U.S. and world wide business. The beginnings in the U.S. were not easy but thanks to the great original team there we managed to pull through the first years and plant the seeds for future growth.
Over the coming years, Kerio opened offices in many locations around the world. Today, we founders, are very happy to see that Kerio has turned into a thriving enterprise led by an outstanding management team.