Shlomo Kramer

Shlomo Kramer ( born 1966), is an Israeli information technology entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder of cyber-security companies Check Point and Imperva, as well as Cato Networks, a cloud-based network security provider. Personal life Shlomo Kramer has been actively involved with technology all his life. As a youth, he worked on mainframes and sold video games. He landed his first job – selling personal computers at a Tel Aviv shop – at age 15. After discovering that one of the shop's best-selling games was developed and marketed by a 17-year-old in Britain who had set up his own company, Kramer knew that he "wanted to be like him – an entrepreneur, even though it would be quite a few years before I knew the word." Kramer served in the Israel Defense Forces' Unit 8200, a crack cybersecurity and intelligence team whose operations include gathering, analyzing and decrypting data; over the years, the unit has produced many of Israel's top high-tech entrepreneurs. After completing his military service, Kramer earned a master's degree in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University. Career Kramer, who has been called "the godfather of Israeli cybersecurity," is a serial high-tech investor and entrepreneur with "a long track record of success". He founded his first startup during high school in the 1980s along with Ofer Shemtov, and the company was later sold to a software firm. In 1993, he co-founded Check Point Software along with Gil Shwed and Marius Nacht; the company introduced the first firewall to the commercial market and went on to become "a world leader in protecting the information that flows round the Internet, and a flagship of Israel's high-tech industry". Kramer left Check Point in 1998 and used the money from the sale of his stake to strike out on his own as an entrepreneur and investor in numerous startups.