At the age of 14, Marcin Kleczynski had a problem: After downloading video games from shady online sources, he accidentally infected his family computer with malware. Who among us hasn’t faced that decidedly nerdy teenage crisis?

Traditional antivirus software didn’t cut it and Marcin had to dig deep to find a solution to his malware problem. But from that exploration he evidently caught a different sort of bug as well, and continued to research malware and viruses out of curiosity while collaborating with other volunteers online.

That hobby snowballed over the years as Marcin taught himself to code and what started out of necessity eventually grew to be its own product and company. Now Malwarebytes has a team of over 320 employees and its various products have been downloaded about half a billion times. Not a bad place to be for something that started on the family computer in the basement. We spoke with Marcin to learn a little more about his experience in the fight against malware.