Technology >> CEO Interviews >> November 13, 2000

Wyatt Starnes – Tripwire Inc

WYATT STARNES is the President and CEO of Tripwire, Inc. He has held technical, sales, marketing, and senior management positions and earned the dynamic business sense of a successful high-tech entrepreneur. Early in his career, Mr. Starnes became proficient in semiconductor test applications at companies such as Data General Corporation, Monolithic Memories, Inc., and Maruman Integrated Circuits. His expertise took him to Megatest Corporation in 1978. A start-up at the time he joined it, Megatest grew to become one of the top-ranked semiconductor test companies in the world and the largest supplier of test equipment to Intel. For much of that growth, Mr. Starnes was Vice President of Sales and Marketing. For two years, he was President of Megatest Japan. After that he served as President of Trisys and founded Eclipse Technologies before selling his interest in it and joining Infinite Pictures, Inc. There he met Gene Kim, who had coauthored Tripwire software while at Purdue University. Mr. Starnes and Kim left Infinite Pictures and were awarded the commercial license for the Tripwire software by Purdue in 1997. They formed Tripwire, Inc., and in 1998 released the first commercial version of the software. Today, Tripwire is regarded as among the world's leading integrity-assessment software. Profile
TWST: Could we start out with some history an little overview of

Tripwire, Inc.?

Mr. Starnes: Tripwire was founded as a company three and a half years

ago in May 1997. I founded the company