Marcin Kleczynski

Marcin Kleczynski (born November 1, 1989) is the chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder of American Internet security company, Malwarebytes. After a period working as a computer repairer and being involved in forums in the mid 2000s, Kleczynski co-founded Malwarebytes with Bruce Harrison in January 2008. By 2014, Malwarebytes had treated over 250 million computers worldwide, with a range of popular products including Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit, and more recently, advanced anti-ransomware package Endpoint Security. Kleczynski was named one of Forbes Magazine's '30 Under 30' Rising Stars of Enterprise Technology in 2015.

Kleczynski was born in Łódź, Poland in 1989. His family emigrated to the United States when he was just 3 years old. Despite moving from Poland at such a young age, he speaks fluent Polish. As a child he had aspirations to be a train conductor, and later, an airline pilot. He has retained his fascinating with flying—in 2011 he obtained his pilot's license. Kleczynski attended high school in Bensenville, Illinois and received his B.S. from the University of Illinois in 2012.

As a teenager, Kleczynski found a job working as a technician in a computer repair shop in Chicago. It was while working at the repair shop in Chicago that Kleczynski noticed that whenever infected computers arrived, they would generally reformat the computer, regardless if the infection was only minor. It was only when his mother's computer became infected that Kleczynski learned more about why the virus wasn't directly attacked, finding that neither McAfee nor Symantec would remove the malware from his system. He later recalled "I've never been as angry as when I got my computer infected", and professed that his mother told him to fix it "under penalty of death". It was only after Kleczynski posted on the forum SpywareInfo, popular at the time, that he was able to learn how to cure it, which took three days. The company was unofficially founded after this, when Kleczynski conversed and became friends with several of the editors of the forum, who tempted him to buy an unused domain from them. As a result, Malwarebytes was informally established in 2004.

Kleczynski began writing his own free software tools in Visual Basic. With one of the site's regulars, Bruce Harrison, Kleczynski wrote the inaugural version of the company's software. In 2006, worked with a college roommate to produce a freely available program called "RogueRemover", a utility which specialized in fighting against a type of infection known as "rogues", which scam computer users into giving away their credit card information through fake anti-virus software. RogueRemover proved instrumental in developing Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, and Kleczynski was able to set up a forum which enabled him to improve the software through feedback. Kleczynski and Harrison formally launched Malwarebytes on January 21, 2008 while Kleczynski was studying computer science at the University of Illinois. Bruce became the VP of Research for Malwarebytes, and he further hired Doug Swanson, and experienced freeware development technician. Kleczynski and Harrison reportedly made $600,000 in their first year of selling the software, despite not having met personally at the time. Kleczynski reportedly made his first million by the time he was 19.

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