From: To: [email protected] Subject: this dude seems great Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 14:49:59 +0000 http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/10/technology/lookout-hering.pr.fortune/ A hacker who helps John Hering wants to show me something. We're standing at a busy intersection in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood; he pauses, takes off his black Tom Ford sunglasses, and points to the one-story-tall graffiti art on the side of a building. Next to a boy wearing a gas mask, the tag line reads: "If at first you don't succeed — call an airstrike." A probable criticism of America's military, the work is one of several in the city by the enigmatic British street artist Banksy. "What really appeals to me is his willingness to leverage different mediums in incredibly creative ways to communicate a message that causes the viewer to truly think and ask questions," Hering says later. His admiration seems fitting, given that both men thrive off challenging the status quo: One stretches the creative boundaries of walls and bridges; the other hacks into electronics to figure out how to protect them. When Hering, 30, co-founded Lookout in 2007 with University of Southern California classmates Kevin Mahaffey and James Burgess, they bet that consumers would use their PCs less as mobile devices advanced by leaps and bounds. Fast-forward six years: Now more than 45 million smartphone users run Lookout's free security app to retrieve lost devices and back up data. (The app also comes preloaded on many T-Mobile devices.) This September, Lookout announced a move into the enterprise realm, offering companies a way to manage and secure employee mobile devices, whether those devices are work-sanctioned or not. Lookout for Business serves as a standalone management and security system for companies, or it can be used to supplement an existing mobile management system, blocking malicious software, spyware, and other threats. To do that, it takes advantage of the company's Mobi