Can a company be older than its country of origin? Officially, ESET is a year older than Slovakia. Unofficially, the gap is even a bit wider. “Our founders started working on their first antivirus in 1987,” noted Richard Marko, its CEO. This was no small feat at the end of the 20th century, when Bratislava was still part of Czechoslovakia and the communist regime in place banned private companies.