“Grand but not great,” reads an old Washington Post review of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington DC’s Penn Quarter. The same can not be said for Orion Hindawi, CEO of security software company Tanium. If anything, the opposite is true. Sat in the vacuous Cabinet dining room in the bowels of the Hyatt hotel, Hindawi is clearly not a show boater. He has a calm, workmanlike manner. He’s not a salesman. He’s an engineer first and comes across as one of those captains you often hear about in sport, the ones who roll up their sleeves and lead from the front, not necessarily by what they say, the posturing or the cheesy one-liners, but by what they do.

A year ago, that came to the fore when he had to write a blog rebuffing stories in the press, such as the one on Bloomberg that claimed employee unrest and an executive exodus. Hindawi says the employees “didn’t recognize themselves in the articles,” but what it did do was galvanize the firm into “putting in as many belts and suspenders to make sure that what was said was never actually going to be true about Tanium.”