Ken Xie was six foot five and wanted to play professional volleyball. That is not the origin story anyone expects from the founder of a cybersecurity giant. Born in Beijing in 1963, he told Forbes in 2017 that he had hoped for a sports career in China. His parents, both academics at Tsinghua University, had a different plan: a PhD at Stanford, then home to a professorship.
He followed the first part. Xie studied electrical engineering at Tsinghua and went to Stanford for a master's. What happened next was not in the parents' plan. At Stanford he met students who wanted to start businesses, something he said he had never experienced growing up in China. While still a student he started Systems Integration Solutions in 1993 to help small businesses get online securely.
Xie studied electrical engineering at Tsinghua and went to Stanford for a master's.
Three years later he co-founded NetScreen with Yan Ke and Feng Deng, and built the first firewall and VPN box around a custom chip, an ASIC, in his Palo Alto garage. He became a US citizen in 1998. Juniper bought NetScreen in 2004 for $4 billion in stock. By then Xie had already left.
In 2000 he quit and began again with his brother Michael, an engineer who had studied at the University of Manitoba. The company began as Appligation, then ApSecure, and finally Fortinet, from Fortified Networks. He took a second shot at the same idea: security built into the network hardware, not bolted onto it.
The early years were lean. Fortinet raised $13 million of private money between 2000 and 2003, and its first product, FortiGate, shipped in 2002. Opponents arrived fast. Trend Micro filed a patent complaint in 2004, a German court issued an injunction in 2005 over open-source code, and a report that year alleged its products were used for internet censorship in Myanmar. The first profitable quarter came in the third quarter of 2008, and Fortinet went public on Nasdaq in November 2009.
Reputation trouble followed. In 2019 a whistleblower case over mislabelled Chinese-made equipment sold to US government users was settled, and security flaws in its devices drew attention in 2021, 2025 and 2026. ProPublica reported in 2023 that Xie had claimed over $30 million in tax deductions by giving shares to a family foundation, which spent $3 million on a house he lived in.
Bloomberg valued his 7.4 percent stake at about $1 billion in 2019. In 2025 Fortinet reported $6.8 billion in revenue, and on 6 November 2026 its market value was about $90 billion.
Xie's parents wanted a scholar and got a founder. Sometimes the plan a family makes for you is the reason you leave to find your own.