He used to call me to spin a few yarns. If Silicon Valley is rife with security problems, then much of it is avoidable, say investigators. After five years of living in the Bay Area, Blumenthal is stunned at the lax security on the West Coast. We have proprietary information leaking out about quarterly earnings. So we go out, and I run around, and I'm about 10 years older than everyone else.
Silicon Valley is built on risk.
We are in the business of mitigating risk. The challenge is to strike the right balance. Doing preliminary background employment checks on everyone, from janitors to more extensive due diligence on executives, could prevent a lot of loss and heartache. Twenty-five percent of the time, Gibbons says, his firm discovers something about an executive candidate, like a lawsuit, bankruptcy, or significant business problem that needs explanation. You don't want to make a guy a CEO of a company and the next thing you know, he's dragged into an antitrust suit by the U.S. government.