Tony Pepper and Neil Larkins EGRESS

Mixing friendships and business can be a winning formula or a recipe for disaster. It’s easy to see why people do it. Quite simply they trust their friends and enjoy their company. But the pressures of starting a business can take their toll, and whether it is differences of opinion, or financial worries, they can spell curtains for the business - and the friendship.

The risks of mixing friendship and business can be mitigated by choosing the right friend in the first place, a move that has paid dividends for Tony Pepper and Neil Larkins, cofounders of London-based data security firm Egress Software.

The successful partnership almost never came about. After graduating from university Pepper’s plan was for a career in politics, but a chance trip to see his brother at IBM in London changed all that, and inspired by his visit he took a Master’s degree in software engineering.

In 2002 he was hired for a sales role by Larkins, an engineer and sales director at data protection company Reflex Magnetics, and initially reported to him. Pepper quickly demonstrated an aptitude for business and within a year, with the founders removed from the everyday running of the company, the employee-boss relationship had evolved into more of a business partnership. The pair had also become very good friends.

The reality was that Pepper had joined Reflex at a tough time for the business. “We worked really hard together to help reinvigorate the company and get it into a position where it could be sold,” he says. “We were in the trenches together and we shared a gut instinct and probably a naivety that helped us to bond closely and also meant that we took risks together.”

Their efforts paid off. In 2006 Reflex was sold to Pointsec Mobile for nearly $30 million and just three months later, the combined entity was purchased by CheckPoint Software for $600 million.

The pair stayed with CheckPoint for a year, after which Pepper and Larkins got the entrepreneurial itch again. With a wealth of experience from their Reflex days, and a keen grasp of the growing importance of data protection and email security in an increasingly digital world, they bootstrapped Egress from a very modest London flat.

“We founded Egress in 2007 during the economic crisis, so funding wasn’t really an option,” says Larkins. “We spent a couple of years developing our first solution, email encryption, which we launched in 2010, and during that time we sacrificed our salaries to keep the company moving forward.”

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Originally posted by:

Alison Coleman

www.forbes.com

February 25th, 2020