The CEO of $4 billion McAfee explains how to know when to cut your losses on a project and change course

McAfee Chris Young

When Chris Young became CEO of one of the computer security industry's most venerable brands, McAfee, he was immediately faced with a difficult decision.
He made a choice to kill an important project that ticked off a lot of people at his company.
How he made that difficult decision is a lesson that anyone can use to help them make difficult decisions.

Chris Young has had a charmed career, culminating about 17 months ago when he was named CEO of one of the computer security industry's most venerable brands: McAfee.

But almost as soon as landed that top title he was faced with a difficult choice on whether to launch an important and much-hyped new product or kill it. Either path had far reaching implications for his new company, he tells Business Insider. Ultimately, he made the difficult choice to kill it, a decision he knew would tick off a lot of people at the newly formed company he was tasked with leading.

How he solved that conundrum, and others like it, is something that anyone can do when faced with a difficult decision.

A star in the security world

Young is a well-known star in the computer security world, one of the people that built the internet security industry as we know it today, jumping from one "it" company to the next, with roles of ever increasing authority. He did security at AOL in the early '00's, went to RSA when it was hot, took on exec roles of increasing importance at EMC, VMware and Cisco.

McAfee, Chris Young In what felt like a risky move at the time, he left a cushy senior vice president job at Cisco to run Intel's wobbly security business, signing on as general manager four years after Intel bought McAfee for $7.6 billion. He jumped to the GM job at Intel "not knowing that Intel would spin it out," he tells Business Insider.

But in April, 2017, Intel did indeed spin out McAfee, retaining a 49% stake and selling 51% to private equity firm TPG in a deal valued at $4.2 billion, half what Intel paid. Young instantly went from GM to CEO.

And he was shocked to discover that being CEO of a multi-billion concern was suddenly different, even though the people, products and customers were exactly the same.

"Any executive level position has a lot of responsibility. You are on the hook for the numbers and there's a decent amount of pressure," he says. "But one difference between GM and CEO is there's no one else to look at after you any more. You can't pass credit on to anyone else and you can't pass blame on. You really are the final point of responsibility for your organization."

It creates a "different level of pressure on you as a leader," he says. People hang on your words, for instance. And they don't just watch what you do, they watch how do it, or "how you show up every day," he describes.

He began to see, in a very personal way, that how the leader acts is what can make or break the company's culture. It "establishes the unwritten rules, how people treat each other," he said.

So, he wanted to use that to his advantage. McAfee was, in effect, a new company and Young set about drafting corporate values with one priority in mind: he didn't want values that simply sounded good but values that would actually help him and others make decisions, especially the hard ones. And, once drafted, he had to "live them" and use them himself.

He was immediately tested.

Before the spin out, his team had embarked on a big project to build a new product, a cloud service known in the security world as a cloud-access security broker (CASB). A CASB helps companies ensure that all of their devices are properly secured. It was a new market that had been created by a few startups.

"We had been working on it for over a year. We had engineers dedicated to it. We were building it organically, inside the company," he described.

Around the time the spin-out was completed, the product was getting close to launch. But the team had missed some deadlines, as tends to happen when building a big new product from scratch, so not every hoped-for feature would be in the first release.

So, in one of his first big acts as CEO, Young killed the project.

"It was internally a very unpopular decision," he deadpanned.

People inside the company were angry. His sales teams had been hyping it up to customers in a highly competitive market. It had been positioned inside and outside company as McAfee's next big thing for growth.

But Young looked at its capabilities compared to what was out there and didn't feel like the product "was going to be a winner. And that's one of our values: we play to win or we don't play," he said.

He had created that value and it was time to walk-the-walk. So he did.

Happy ending

The story has a happy ending.

About seven months after the company was spun out, Young did see a way to "play to win" in the CASB market: an acquisition. McAfee bought SkyHigh Networks, one of the startups that invented the market, for an undisclosed sum. It had raised $106 million and was valued at $400 million.

"I made that call to not play well before we engaged in any discussion [to acquire] SkyHigh," he said. In other words, he killed the product before he even considered buying one of the market leaders.

Because Intel did not already have a CASB product, it was a much easier deal to do and, once bought, it was easier to integrate into the company. And the product is selling well, Young said.

The lesson Young learned is one that anyone can follow: When creating your own leadership values, define them in a way that helps you make hard decisions. Literally back the trade-off into the value. Can't win? Don't play, even if that means quitting. And then "live the value" as Young describes it, even if doing so is unpopular, at first.

And finally, have some faith that if living your values means deliberately closing one door, another will open another, a better one for you and your team.

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