Ventures & institutions
A through-line from internet security to AI research: building the thing, not only studying it.
SafeWeb
Jon co-founded SafeWeb in 2000 with Stephen Hsu and James Hormuzdiar and later served as CEO. SafeWeb ran one of the largest web-anonymization services of its era and built Triangle Boy, a proxy system used to reach censored sites. It received the first security investment from In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit strategic investment firm affiliated with the CIA, and was acquired by Symantec in 2003 for $26 million. After the acquisition Jon was director of development for Symantec's clientless VPN appliance line.
Patents — early VPN appliances
The SafeWeb work produced two US patents on what were among the first SSL / clientless VPN appliances:
- US 7,730,528 — “Intelligent secure data manipulation apparatus and method” (filed 2001; issued 2010). Originally assigned to SafeWeb, Inc., then to Symantec following the 2003 acquisition.
- US 8,065,520 — “Method and apparatus for encrypted communications to a secure server” (continuation of a May 2000 application; issued 2011). Assigned to Symantec.
The Human-Centered AI Lab
Jon co-founded the nonprofit Human-Centered AI Lab, an umbrella that lets distributed teams of researchers and domain experts secure funding and collaborate on AI across institutional and disciplinary boundaries — filling gaps traditional academic structures leave open. humancenteredailab.org →