In his first year and a half as Fortinet’s chief operating officer, John Whittle ’95 has been collaborating with the company’s executive team to lead top strategic priorities, traveling two or three times a month to meet face-to-face with employees, customers, and cybersecurity agencies around the globe, spending hours each week pursuing acquisitions and strategic alliances, and representing Fortinet at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“It’s been very fun, challenging, and busy,” says Whittle, drinking his cup-of-coffee lunch after his Monday morning meetings with Fortinet’s executive team and data center team. “When you have a business grow like we’ve grown, new challenges arise constantly, and when you’re in cybersecurity, the threat environment is dynamic and you have to move fast to keep up.
“Nation-state hackers and other bad actors are growing increasingly pervasive and sophisticated, using artificial intelligence to infiltrate organizations, and meanwhile the whole world is becoming more and more networked,” he continues. “In the face of this cyber threat environment, the Fortinet team is adding a lot of value. Fortinet’s mission is noble: to protect the most important organizations from criminal cyber-attacks and unfair disruption and cost.”
Since Whittle was recruited to join Fortinet—a portmanteau of “fortified” and “networks”— the operation has grown from a small privately held start-up with a few hundred people to the leading publicly traded cybersecurity innovator worldwide with over 14,000 employees and approaching 1,400 patents. He started in 2006 as general counsel and received a series of promotions over the past eighteen years as Fortinet has grown.
Now as COO, he’s presiding over a company with a market capitalization over $70 billion that’s projecting $7 billion in annual worldwide sales. With the change in responsibilities, he’s been focusing much of this past year working with the team to support customers, helping build Fortinet’s infrastructure for the longterm, and reinforcing Fortinet’s strong culture, that’s “built to last.”
“As a cybersecurity company, trust is our business,” says Whittle, who learns a lot working with founding brothers Ken and Michael Xie. “Customers know we’re going to do right by them. We work hard to deliver value and make good on our promises. Our three core values are teamwork, openness, and innovation, always putting the customer first.”
“I’ve been at Fortinet for ten years, and John is a big reason why,” says Manoj Vittal, senior vice president of corporate development and operations. “He’s made a tremendous difference both in helping grow the business and improving our margins. He’s incredibly hard working. Trusted. Empowering. He leads by example, which is the sign of a true leader, and he has a knack for getting things done. It’s uncanny.”
Growing up in Virginia, Whittle comes from a long line of judges and lawyers, including a grandfather and great-grandfather who served on the Supreme Court of Virginia, and a mother who spent her career as a criminal defense attorney in downtown Baltimore; another grandfather, who worked as the president of Pannill Knitting Company, a textile company in Martinsville, Virginia, helped spark Whittle’s interest in business.
Whittle majored in history at the University of Virginia, and by his fourth year there, he’d decided to go to law school— but first, he needed a break. He headed to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, took a summer job as a ranch hand on a dude ranch, and fell in love with a waitress named Sarah. Working six days every week, they’d spend the seventh day hiking, mountain biking, fishing, camping, and exploring Grand Teton National Park, and at the close of the season, they weren’t ready to part.
With Sarah taking the lead, they moved to San Francisco, working entry-level jobs at different law firms. In search of the next adventure, they traveled to Guatemala City, where they taught at an American school before coming back to the States, continuing to plan their legal careers, and ultimatel arriving together at Cornell Law School.
“I really enjoyed law school,” says Whittle. “Even the Socratic method, which we all dreaded, turned out to be an important rite of passage. I remember cases with incredibly complicated issues, and not knowing how to untangle them, I would go out for a jog and think through the issues until the right answer finally came to mind. It was a challenge, a puzzle, and I enjoyed grappling for the solution.”
Following graduation, Whittle clerked for Judge Jackson Kiser of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, in Danville, driving with the judge from courthouse to courthouse hearing cases, including a case where Judge Kiser’s decision was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Judge Kiser was an extremely thoughtful person,” says Whittle, “a gentleman with great common sense and intellect. I’m fortunate that Judge Kiser was one in a series of great mentors.”
While John was clerking in the western half of Virginia, Sarah held an externship with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the eastern half of the state. They got together most weekends, and in 1996 they married in Sun Valley, Idaho, and moved together to the Bay Area to start their first postgraduation jobs: Sarah Hinman Whittle ’96 became an associate at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, and John an associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, both in Palo Alto.
It was the dot.com boom, and Whittle gained experience he couldn’t have found elsewhere. “Everybody was so busy that there was a lot of responsibility passed down to junior associates, who took leadership roles in IPOs and acquisitions,” he says. “It was serendipitous that the corporate tech world was accelerating, providing earlycareer learning opportunities. I enjoyed working with client entrepreneurs, all pulling together as one team for a positive purpose.”
After four years at Wilson Sonsini, Whittle decided he preferred to be in-house as part of one consistent team with a common positive mission, and he moved inhouse as general counsel at Corio, a cloud computing company that went public not long after Whittle started there. Whittle stayed for five years, gaining in-house business experience, and negotiating the company’s 2005 acquisition by IBM, and then stayed a sixth year with IBM to help with the integration, before beginning his current chapter at Fortinet. Sarah took time off to raise their kids and then went back to work as an employment attorney at VMware, a software company ultimately acquired by Broadcom.
“There’s a lot of change that comes in your twenties, and we were lucky to change together, with the same interests, values, and goals,” says Hinman Whittle. “John can come across in the work environment as serious and intense, but the other side is that he’s actually very funny, supportive, and a good husband and dad. He’s good at what he does because he’s passionate about it and enjoys his work. But he also knows how to shut it out and enjoy time with family and friends.”
With their three children currently in school—the oldest at University of Virginia Law School, the middle at University of California, Irvine, and the youngest at University of Southern California—John and Sarah are enjoying their empty nest, playing pickleball and backgammon, and skiing, and spending time with their puppy Scout.
“At Cornell, I buckled down and experienced the satisfaction of hard work,” says Whittle. “The lessons I learned there have been invaluable in so many areas of my life, my law career and beyond. Those lessons have helped me apply logic and common sense to solve business challenges, and I continue to still enjoy grappling to find the right solution. I look back fondly on my time at Cornell and very much appreciate the great teachers and mentors, smart and fun classmates, and all I learned there.”
~Kenny Berkowitz
