Illustration by Sam Green
Paul Judge has spent nearly 20 years developing, leading, and launching new tech companies in Atlanta. A graduate of Morehouse College and Georgia Tech, Judge holds a doctorate in network security.
“You don’t necessarily see people doing serial entrepreneurship now—starting one company, finishing it, and then doing the next,” Judge says. Instead, he sees parallel entrepreneurship, or someone working on multiple companies at the same time.
Case in point: Judge got his start by helping found CipherTrust, an email security company, in 2000. That firm was acquired by Secure Computing in 2006, and, roughly a year later, Judge cofounded Purewire, which managed cloud-based web security. Barracuda Networks purchased Purewire in 2009, and Judge stayed on as chief research officer and VP. Concurrently, Judge helped start Pindrop Security, which protects phone networks and call centers. Other recent projects have included helping launch TechSquare Labs, an incubator for emerging companies, and cofounding Luma, which focused on home-network security and bandwidth management for increasingly connected families before it was acquired by First Alert earlier this year.
“Oftentimes, it’s not necessarily sitting on the hill waiting on the apple to fall out of the tree, it’s just . . . listening to the problems you encounter in everyday life,” Judge says, explaining how he conceives new business ideas. “Whenever you have those moments where you think: Why doesn’t this exist? I’m like, ‘Well, if it should exist, then maybe I should go make it happen.’”
This article originally appeared in our November 2018 issue.
