Gil Shwed
Israeli entrepreneur who founded Check Point in 1993 and turned the firewall into something you could buy off the shelf.
Shwed did his military service in Unit 8200, Israel's signals intelligence corps, and co-founded Check Point in 1993 with Marius Nacht and Shlomo Kramer. FireWall-1 shipped the following year, built on stateful inspection: rather than judging every packet in isolation, the firewall tracked which connections were already open. Add a graphical rule editor and a firewall was suddenly something an ordinary IT department could buy and run.
Check Point became one of the first large security vendors and one of Israel's best-known tech companies. Shwed was CEO for more than thirty years before handing the job to Nadav Zafrir in December 2024 and moving to executive chairman. A fair number of the industry's later founders, Nir Zuk among them, passed through Check Point on the way.