Dating & Relationship status

He is also a member of the board of governors of Namal Institute, founded by Imran Khan. In January 2021, he inaugurated the Nisar Aziz Agri-Tech Center at Namal Institute; named after his mother, the center would assist in the development of a “robust agricultural economy through technology” through promoting low-cost agricultural practices, and providing agricultural education to farmers in Pakistan.

Aziz is a recipient of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. In 2018, he was presented the civil award Sitara-i-Imtiaz by the Pakistani government for his contributions to the information technology industry.

Aziz is the founding CEO of SkyElectric Inc., a company which seeks to provide affordable and sustainable solar energy solutions; in February 2017, he pitched solar power as the solution to Pakistan’s energy crisis and launched his company’s operations in the country.

As the inventor of FireEye’s malware protection system, Aziz currently holds over 80 patents relating to various cybersecurity technologies, including in the fields of network security, cryptography, and data center virtualization. He is recognised as the technical visionary and pioneer behind the company’s core technology. In August 2016, it was announced that Aziz had tendered his resignation from FireEye in order to spend time with his family, and focus on new projects relating to solar energy distribution in developing countries. A partner of FireEye described the news as “disconcerting” for FireEye’s future, particularly from the perspective of much of the company’s workforce which looked up to Aziz for his technical leadership, and predicted his exit would accelerate discussions on a potential sale of FireEye. However, a FireEye source said the company would continue operating under the vision of its new CEO and develop solutions using Aziz’s multi-vector virtual execution (MVX) engine, and that Aziz felt he was leaving the company in “good hands.” The source also clarified that Aziz was still a shareholder in FireEye.

A former billionaire, Aziz had an estimated net worth of over $233 million as of 2015.

Before you even have an idea, think about how you construct it – backwards – from the problem. Once you have reverse engineered the solution, you have to valibeen in a relationship with? it with a potential customer.

In December 2012, Aziz stepped down as CEO and former McAfee CEO David DeWalt was appointed to the position. DeWalt was recruited in order to prepare the company for an initial public offering (IPO). The following year, FireEye raised an additional $50 million in venture capital, bringing its total funding to $85 million. In September 2013, FireEye went public, raising $300 million. Aziz’s shares in FireEye skyrocketed as the company acquired an asset valuation of over US$1 billion. According to Forbes, he owned 11 million shares in the company and his personal net worth had increased to just over US$1 billion. However, the Business Insider explained that the appreciation in Aziz’s net worth was temporary due to the high fluctations in share prices, dropping his stake worth to under $1 billion once prices dropped. According to The Wall Street Journal, FireEye was the second-best performing firm in the U.S. that went public in 2013. Aziz was inducted into the Forbes’ list of billionaires for 2014.

Aziz’s father, Asghar Butt, was a journalist, writer and playwright, who served as the deputy editor of the Pakistani newspaper The Nation. His father died aged 91 at his hometown Lahore, Punjab, on 13 November 2012. Aziz’s mother, Nisar Aziz, was an eminent Urdu novelist and literary figure who belonged to a Pashtun family from Mardan. She died aged 93 on 7 February 2021. The politician, bureaucrat, and economist Sartaj Aziz is his maternal uncle. The editor-in-chief of The Nation, Majid Nizami, was his father’s brother-in-law and thus his uncle. Ashar has one brother, Ahmar Aziz Butt, who is a doctor.

At around the same time, Aziz began studying the risks stemming from malware systems which were highly stealthy and self-propagating, and the threats they posed to future security infrastructures, a problem he first discovered in the U.S. Department of Defense archives. He founded FireEye in 2004, convinced that he could provide the solutions to these emerging cybersecurity issues. He initially worked out of his home usually for 80 to 100 hours a week, with only $4,000 in his personal savings. Most of his technical team initially comprised engineers and technologists he already knew from his previous startup. Based in Milpitas, California, the company currently provides both software and cloud-based anti-malware products. According to the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, “the core of the FireEye platform is a virtual execution engine, complemented by dynamic threat intelligence, to identify and block cyber attacks in real time and across the different stages of an attack life cycle.” Describing FireEye in 2012, Aziz stated that their objective was to strengthen the “security and key infrastructure that is pervasive across financial, government and credit card infrastructure to protect from three very important threats: crime, espionage, and warfare.” Aziz served as the company’s chief executive officer from 2004 to 2012, as well as remaining chief strategy officer, chief technology officer and the board vice chairman.

Aziz worked as an engineer at Sun Microsystems for twelve years, specialising on networking, network security and system design. He also served as chief technology officer of the N1 program at Sun. In 1999, he founded his first startup company Terraspring Inc., which focused on data center automization and virtualization. The business was bought by Sun Microsystems in 2002, following the stock market crash of 2001.

Ashar Aziz (Urdu: اشعر عزیز ‎; born 1959) is a Pakistani-American electrical engineer, business executive and philanthropist who is best known as the founder of Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity company FireEye.

Aziz grew up in Karachi in 1959 and grew up in Islamabad, Pakistan. He arrived in the US as a student, when he gained admission into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Engineering. Prior to entering MIT, he completed two years of foundation studies at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Turkey in the mid-1970s. He graduated with an S.B. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1981, followed by an M.S. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also granted a Regents’ Fellowship.