In August 2026 Orion Hindawi returned as CEO of Tanium, the company he and his father had started in 2007. He replaced Dan Streetman after less than four years. He had been here before, and the way he left the first time still matters.
To see why, go to Baghdad. David Hindawi was born there in 1944 to an Iraqi-Jewish family. In 1951, when he was about seven, the family moved to Israel. He served in the Israeli Air Force's operations research department, then came to the United States in 1970 and earned a PhD at Berkeley. Orion, his son, was born in Berkeley in 1980 and studied at the same university.
A week later the Wall Street Journal reported that Tanium's software had been demoed on a hospital's live network.
They built things together twice. David started a software company in 1984, sold it in 1995, and founded BigFix in 1997. IBM bought BigFix in 2010 for $400 million. In 2007, father and son founded Tanium on a peer-to-peer idea: let machines pass questions down a chain rather than send everything to one data center. Tanium raised $52 million from Andreessen Horowitz in 2015, then $120 million that September at a reported $3.5 billion valuation.
In February 2016 Orion became CEO, and his father became executive chairman.
What almost nobody remembers is how fast the praise turned. In April 2017 Bloomberg published a story under the headline 'Tanium's Family Empire Is in Crisis.' Business Insider's summary says it alleged Orion kept a list of staff nearing option vesting and fired some of them, a practice employees called Orion's List, and that he publicly insulted people. Tanium said it was not a company in crisis and denied the claims. A week later the Wall Street Journal reported that Tanium's software had been demoed on a hospital's live network. The hospital said it had not authorized it; Tanium said it had not protected customer data well enough in demos, though it said no patient data was revealed.
The company kept growing. TPG put $175 million in during 2018, revenue reached $440.2 million in 2019, and its valuation was reported at $9 billion in 2020. In 2023 Orion stepped aside for an outside CEO.
The valuation has not been renewed since. Secondary-market estimates this year put it between about $3.9 and $4 billion, though those are estimates, not rounds.
For a founder, the question the Hindawis raise is what happens when the company is also a family. A son can build the product, lose the room, leave, and come back. The story that began with a seven-year-old leaving Baghdad is, six decades later, still about whom you hand the keys.