'No toxic culture': Tanium CEO responds to barrage of bad press in open letter

In letter to staff, Orion Hindawi addressed reports that the end-point security vendor exposed a hospital's network in demos and allegations of staff mistreatment

The CEO of end-point security start-up Tanium, Orion Hindawi, has written an open letter hitting back at a torrent of bad press over the last week.

Despite recently being valued at $3.5bn, the California-based outfit's reputation has been battered over the last seven days, first by allegations that Hindawi mistreats staff, and then by a Wall Street Journal report claiming that it exposed a hospital's network in demonstrations without its permission.

Hindawi (pictured) today responded with an open letter to customers, which include every major global bank, acknowledging that many would be "tired of waking up to the bad Tanium press stories hitting your inbox in the last week".

"I don't think they're painting an accurate picture of our company, so I'm reaching out directly to all of you to give our side of this," he wrote.

Hindawi stressed that Tanium does not have access to its customers' on-premise installations of Tanium (it is an on-premise solution) unless they have explicitly provided it to the vendor. Other than that, it does not - and cannot - demonstrate customer environments with Tanium, Hindawi asserted, admitting however that the vendor could have done more to obscure and anonymise the identity of the specific hospital in question.

But viewers "didn't connect the demo environment to that customer for years, and we do not believe we ever put our customer at risk with the data we showed", he said.

Hindawi also addressed reports alleging that he fired workers before they were able to acquire shares and ridiculed staff in front of their co-workers.

"It is true that I personally can be hard-edged, and that I've had to apologise to people at Tanium when I've gotten too sharp at times," he wrote.

"What is not true is that we have a toxic culture. Mission-oriented, hard-charging, disciplined, even intense, but not toxic. We do not belittle each other at work, and it is completely untrue that we fire people to save a few shares of stock."

The full open letter can be read here.