Many founders build a single company, take their exit, and step back. Mike Walters has done it twice.
First with Netwrix, and now with Action1, Walters has a track record of building highly successful cybersecurity companies, laser focused on a specific niche.
What set Walters on this path?
It began with writing software. An early appreciation of scale and the realization that writing code alone couldn’t deliver impact fast enough pushed him and business partner Alex Vovk toward executing their own product vision.
From here, the pair launched Netwrix and Action1 into profitable, founder led businesses with no outside capital or investor pressure. Today, Netwrix is a multibillion-dollar organization with thousands of employees.
With Action1, Walters and Vovk are doing it again—but with even bigger ambition. They reinvested $20 million of their own capital to build a cloud-native platform engineered for the remote-work era. The bet has paid off. Action1 is now the fastest-growing private software company in America.
We sat down with Walters at a pivotal moment, as Action1 rolls out major new features and prepares for its next phase of growth. Here’s what he told us about founder-led companies, building in a time of disruption, and why patching is the $3-billion market that everyone has overlooked.
You can listen to our full conversation with Mike Walters on the Expert Insights Podcast. Listen here.
You’ve co-founded two very successful cybersecurity companies with Netwrix and now Action1. If we start at the beginning, how did you first get into the cybersecurity space? What put you on this path?
In my first job, I was developing software that was run by large enterprise companies on tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of computers—specifically agents. When you have so many computers and servers, it’s amazing. It’s my code, and it runs on a million computers. Isn’t it cool? It’s power. It felt so powerful!
To me, you can develop software so easily and you can scale it. I went to the product management side because I felt I couldn’t make impact fast enough just by writing code. And I thought, maybe I should start my own company?
I always played around with this idea since I was a little kid. I wanted to have my own company. I didn’t know what company. But when I was a child, we used to play this game of “Corporations.” I thought it was really cool.
So, we founded Netwrix in 2006. Pre-cloud days. There was mostly a lot of on-premises server infrastructure. We created a product called “Change Reporter.” Super basic idea. It looked at the current configuration and then every day compared it to what it was before.
We sold the first copy before we even had the actual software written. The demand was outstanding. We spent the next two nights actually developing it, delivered on it, and customers got excited.
Netwrix was a super successful run. It was a bootstrap—not a single penny was ever put into it other than sweat equity. Long nights, no weekends for the first couple of years. But no outside investor money. Always profitable—not a day of not being profitable. And then we exited. We sold the company to a private equity firm.
Now, Netwrix is a multibillion-dollar company. It’s amazing, and it’s still going. It has made a lot of acquisitions and has thousands of employees. It’s amazing to see our baby graduating into something so huge and impactful.
And then with Action1, we committed $20 million to building this new company from scratch. Everything was done right. An engineer’s dream! Do everything right and you have an endless runway. We’re building something truly outstanding here this time.
It’s very clear how much you love developing products. And when you sold Netrix, you didn’t just retire to Southern California, you’ve gone again with Action1. What do you love about growing a company?
I already live pretty much right on the beach. I didn’t need to retire to get that! I love it. I love where I live. I think what mattered this time is that we had all this firepower and knowledge to make it happen.
The timing wasn’t great. Covid had just started. Lockdowns. Everybody was terrified, everyone thought they were going to die, the world felt like it was ending. But it created this opportunity—remote work. Pretty much every systems-management product stopped working because everybody went home.
Action1 was cloud-native from day one and designed for this environment with remote workers and endpoints not connected. We started looking to see how we could take advantage of this. We said, OK—let’s try creating a platform that could do endpoint management in general and see where it takes us.
Then we quickly realized that to build an endpoint-management platform, it has to include a lot of different functions. We started digging deeper. We asked our early customers to name one thing that truly matters, that they couldn’t live without. And it turned out to be patching—patch management.
We thought, well, that’s an old, boring category. Problem solved. But it turned out to be completely unsolved, because it just didn’t work. And there are so many vendors that claim to be doing patching to a certain extent. But they all have different issues, inconveniences, and in many cases simply don’t work.
So then we figured—what if we focused on that? Put together a great foundation of a generic endpoint-management platform. We could plug in different modules. But instead of working on 20 different modules, we figured we’d make just this one module absolutely perfect, absolutely the best in the world. And we picked patching as that module. And it took off. That was one of the key successful moves we made while building this new company.
Action1 is growing extremely quickly. You’ve been listed on the 2025 Inc 5000 list as one of America’s fastest growing private companies. What would you say is behind that growth?
More than that—we’re the number one fastest-growing private software company. No private software company in America is growing faster than Action1. This is exciting.
We’re number 29 in the overall list across all industries, but in software, we’re number one. Beyond our wildest dreams, we never thought we would end up growing so hyper-fast. Sometimes it feels terrifying. It is a nice problem to have.
Last year we had over 300% growth. We achieved profitability. We’re not burning cash anymore. We have pretty much endless runway. And I think the key component of that is the power of focus.
Instead of being okay at many things, we’d rather be the absolute best at one thing. They call it a “Category Killer.” When you put all of your efforts into just one thing, and do nothing else, you become an expert.
You become the absolute best in your class. You create the best product. You start crushing things, and you put a lot of thought into it because it’s all you care about.
As with Netrix, Action1 is very much founder led. You’re not pursuing a fast exit, or an acquisition. Why do you think that’s important for Action1’s growth? And more broadly, the type of company you want to build?
When you’re building something great you just can’t think about exciting. You just lose your focus. And you absolutely need control. Look at great companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft. A lot of experts attribute their astounding success to the fact they were all founder led.
Bill Gates had control of Microsoft for pretty much 35 years. It was founder led, fully controlled. Same with Larry and Sergey, the way they designed their controlling stocks. They have full control. They can make decisions. Or Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, same thing.
In our case, we don’t have any dilution. We have endless run. We’re generating more cash than we’re able to spend. We’re doing 300% growth and we’re profitable. We don’t need any investor money, at least not in the next through years.
We’ll see what happens next, what the next chapter is, but we just don’t feel like we need it. I think companies lose spirit when founders leave. And when I look at competitors, if that company is not founder led, I’m not fearful. I know we can crush them because there’s no one behind that company who’s put their all into it.
We have everything to lose; they have nothing to lose. There’s no person there whose life depends on out. Our life depends on it. And there’s no way we’re not winning in this game. Only founder-led companies have that spirit, capacity to execute and win.
Zooming in, Action1 is adding some exciting new features this week, like Linux support and other new features for MSPs. How do these features this fit into your vision of the future of Action1?
We’re seeing huge demand from the large enterprise category and MSSPs—managed security service providers. Because Action1 is able to scale really well—because we’re a cloud-native solution—we have this capacity. We have millions of endpoints under management already, millions being patched and controlled by Action1.
The larger you get, the more diverse these environments become. There are too many point solutions. If you look at the different platforms—macOS, Windows, Linux, mobile—it’s very convoluted. Big enterprises don’t like it because it makes things more complex.
By becoming cross-platform—by being able to patch pretty much everything under the sun—we become that single go-to product. It is still highly specialized but solving one specific need everywhere. Because you need to patch every device—anything that runs software needs to be patched. There are always vulnerabilities that people are going to find, and those need to be patched. We do that.
We integrate into a larger ecosystem. We can’t exist on our own island. There are other platforms like ServiceNow, Palo Alto Networks, Tenable, CrowdStrike. We can become part of that. We’re still highly specialized in solving one particular need, but we are part of the greater ecosystem.
Especially these days, in the world of AI—there’s agentic AI. If you plug into that, you can make systems autonomous. You can have your firewalls, your patching solutions, your zero-trust solutions, all cooperating together and controlled by AI, or AI-assisted humans.
When I was a kid, I was a big fan of the Terminator franchise. In Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger brings from the future a robotic arm. We are creating this highly specialized robotic arm that’s going to create this technological breakthrough. It’s an arm. It cannot exist on its own. But it has to be absolutely perfect to be successful. We are creating the best robotic arm in the world.
But the arm has to be best-in-class. That’s how you win in this specific category. And the category is huge. By 2030, it’s forecast that patching alone is going to become a $3-billion market. This is how much money people are willing to pay every year just to get their systems patched.
Looking ahead, what excites you about the journey with Action 1? What are you looking forward to? And where is it all headed?
The opportunity is huge. The addressable market is $3 billion just for patching.
That does not include any adjacencies that come with it. So even if we stay focused purely on patching and get just ten percent of the market share, we can become a multibillion-dollar company. We are still at the ground floor of this opportunity.
It’s tempting to not limit yourself and look for other markets you can expand into—new functions you can add and build on top. But at the same time, being specialized and highly focused is still going to be key to winning.
Even if we get to that stage and become a multibillion-dollar company, going back to that robotic-arm analogy, we have to keep making it the absolute best in the world. The key is to stay ahead and continue on this path. This will bring us tremendous success.
And finally – you are an avid surfer. Are there any lessons that you take from surfing into leading Action1 and the team?
The whole concept of surfing is when you paddle out and catch a wave. But the waves come as you are paddling out. You have to fight those waves. Once you get out there, you have to wait for the right wave and catch it.
In building a business, you are going through the same journey. You get slapped by those incoming waves all the time. There are challenges you have to solve. You have to paddle out as far as possible and wait for the right wave.
If you catch a wave too early, it’s not going to be as big. It won’t take you as far. But if you get all the way out there and catch the biggest wave, this is how you win. This is how you become highly successful.
I think it’s a very direct analogy between surfing and building successful companies as founders.
