Luke Koestler chuckles at comparisons with other young entrepreneurs whose ideas sold for megabucks.

Four years after Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg turned dorm room hi-jinks into big money with a $240 million deal with Microsoft for less than 2 percent of Facebook, Koestler is poised to sell his tech company for a deal smaller in sum but no less significant in impact.

“It’s important for people that have ideas that work to do them,” he said.

Koestler, 32, founded Seventh Knight Inc. in 2000, a scant two years removed from graduation from Warren Central High School. College life and keeping up with class schedules didn’t seem as interesting as his boyhood passion — figuring out how computers worked.

“I was paying way too much to go to Mississippi College,” Koestler said Thursday from his home in Brandon, hours after an announced sale of more than 9.6 million shares of the company to Fusion-Q, a subsidiary of Dallas-based ALL-Q-TELL Corp., in an estimated $47 million deal.

“I’d be in my dorm room at night working on ideas,” he said. “It slowly progressed, and I said, ‘I’ll just start a business.’”

Seventh Knight’s security system software offers a form of global process authentication, or “white-listing” — which Koestler said the company ushered in by allowing computers to run only “good code” by asking a user if they wanted to allow certain functions. “The concept was ours,” he said.

The firm changed its name from Silent Knight to reflect defense and integrity, and the thought that the number 7 represented “the side of good,” he said. It operated from an office on Mission 66 until 2010, the same year future values of Seventh Knight’s patents and proprietary technology were estimated at $297 million by independent intellectual asset manager CONSOR.

His role in a combined company is undetermined,but Koestler said his plans are to remain in Mississippi. Where the companywill take its technology next hasn’t been launched, but the safest bet is that it will capitalize on mobile technology, he said.

Pride in an enterprising son came long ago for his father, Danny Koestler, vice president of Ergon Marine and Industrial Supply — in the late 1990s, to be exact, when the Internet was a dial-up drag.

“He wrote a program that kept Windows 95 from crashing,” Danny Koestler said. “I’ve been proud. He’s intelligent and I’m very appreciative of the investors who stayed behind him.”