It hasn’t sunk in yet. The guy’s worth about $170 million–depending on how his stock is performing this morning–and he’s 24, lives in an apartment, drives a 5-year-old car with a big dent in the rear bumper, and shops for suits at stores where the most famous designer is named “Marked Down.”
No, it hasn’t sunk in yet.
“I guess you could say I won the business Lotto,” Christopher Klaus acknowledges. “But I’m not sure how it feels, I’ve been so busy. Ask me in a couple of weeks.”
Odd thing about overnight kazillionaires: They always seem to be the last to know what to do with the dough.
Maybe that’s because the rest of the world has gone and spent it for them.
Pick up a recent Wall Street Journal, read the headline–“A 24-Year-Old Strikes Gold With IPO”–and already you’ve got a house in the Bahamas and a fleet of cars to fit your whims (“I’ll take the Porsche to the dentist, the Land Rover to Kroger.”)
Not Christopher Klaus, Atlanta’s latest entrepreneurial sensation. Klaus’ company, Internet Security Systems, went public in March and made Klaus, who owns 26 percent of the stock, mega-wealthy and nouveau famous.
“I must have gotten 500 e-mails that day,” he says, meeting a reporter over coffee at a Starbucks.
“I’ve had to screen my telephone calls. I got a lot of calls from brokers. But I don’t need any help from anybody who’s on the street giving me investment advice. There are people out there who will scam you.”
Klaus is dressed about as flashily as the clerk who sold you golf balls Saturday: knit print golf shirt with contrasting collar, pleated dark blue Dockers, and loafers. It would be impossible to pick him out of any lineup of post-college twentysomethings running behind on their Visa payments.
He is shy, unfailingly cordial–“Do you want more coffee?”–and a bit uncomfortable with the subject. Because the subject is him.
No, he’s not married. Yes, he has a girlfriend. They’re engaged. She works for Pepsi-Cola in Atlanta. She lives downtown. He lives in the ‘burbs.
But let’s keep her name out of the paper, OK?
Sure. This isn’t “Geraldo.”
Instead, we talk about chess and computers.
By the time Klaus was 7, he was so accomplished at chess that his dad quit playing him. “I just didn’t like losing,” Clifford Klaus, a lawyer who lives in Christopher’s hometown of Sarasota, Fla., says later. “And he used to beat his uncle, and his uncle quit playing him too.”
Klaus made his fortune designing computer software that outfoxes computer hackers. So, who was he rooting for when IBM’s Deep Blue computer played–and beat–world chess champion Garry Kasparov?
“Probably Kasparov,” Klaus says. “I’ve played computers in chess before and I’ve won a few times, but only on the lowest level. They win because they don’t make stupid mistakes.
“Against a computer, because it’s a computer, I’d rather see the human win.”
As a student at Georgia Tech, Klaus studied electrical engineering. He was in Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. As a freshman, he seemed to be on the same beaten, occasionally beery, track as everybody else. “We used to socialize pretty heavily,” says friend Darren Rush, declining to give particulars.
But in his sophomore year, Klaus settled down. Already he had developed a version of the Internet Scanner security software that has made him millions, and distributed it free on the Internet.
He became focused on upgrading and selling the next version of his program. He worked on that, sometimes from dusk till dawn, and attended school by day.
After he sold his first program to an Italian company for $1,000, he dropped out of college, and, for a year, worked out of a spare room at his grandmother’s house in north Fulton County.
“It was almost like he wasn’t there,” says Jean Klaus. “I would pass him in the morning in the kitchen. I was getting up to make breakfast and he was finally going to bed.”
Klaus in person comes across as stereotype: a high-tech indoorsman. Medium height. Comfortable-at-a-keyboard build. More at ease with logarithms than idle chatter.
Get him talking about computers, however, and his voice gets an authoritative edge–suddenly he’s gesticulating, not watching his words. He can’t. They’re just pouring out.
This is his religion and he sells it with fervor.
“We’re just seeing more and more attacks on computers,” he says. “It’s only going to get worse until something bad happens.”
He suggests a number of apocalyptic scenarios, including passenger planes crashing because somebody hacks into the computers used by airport control towers.
Or how about this? You go to the hospital for laser surgery. A hacker has gotten into the hospital’s computer system, and the “laser goes haywire.”
Although he is famous in the hacker community, Klaus insists he’s never hacked on the wrong side of the law. His zeal for stopping them and the inspiration for his business, he says, came from a book he read in the ninth grade: William Gibson’s 1984 sci-fi thriller, “Neuromancer.”
In that book, bad guys steal precious computer information and use it for evil purposes.
“Knowledge can be used for good and for bad,” he says. “And I knew, morally and ethically, what I wanted to do was take the information hackers had–how to break into computer systems–and use it for good.”
As the chief technology officer of ISS, he still spends nights cruising the Internet and working with his company’s “X-Force”–a kind of anti-hacker SWAT team–identifying computer vulnerabilities and looking for serial hackers.
He’s been traveling in person since ISS, which he started in 1994, scouring up investors and clients. Last week he was in Chile and Brazil.
“I love going on the road,” he says. “I like to travel. I like to get the sense of what people are saying. That’s something you can’t get unless you see them in person.”
His personal life, as a result, is still on hold. He’s looking to buy a home–“I try to keep that quiet. I don’t want a lot of brokers calling”–and planning an exotic vacation with his fiance.
