Pictures from the truly awesome Tripwire farewell party...

The Tripwire farewell party was a really special event, and I want to thank everyone who put it together.  It was great hanging out with so many friends and colleagues, many who I've worked with for over ten years!

My wife and I had a wonderful time, and we'll remember it for a long time to come.

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the evening -- Flickr page with running commentary is here.

The Reprint Of Internal Tripwire Departure Announcement

Yesterday, I posted my blog article about "An Exciting Day! Leaving Tripwire To Begin My Next Chapter In Life".  As I described in that article, it was a tough decision.

Shown below is the email announcement I sent out after a quick meeting to announce my departure from the company.

Date: July 1, 2010
Subject: The toughest and most bittersweet email I’ve written in 13 years

Hello, all –

After my identical twin sons were born in March, I had the luxury of spending two months with my family.  Some of it was around the clock, and some of it was while working half-time.  But, in either case, against all my expectations, it was the two best months of my life.

At the end of this period, my wife asked me, “Do you really have to go back?”

Of course, I responded, “Of course I need to go back.  That was our plan.”

But, over the next couple weeks, my wife kept bringing up how much life had changed after I returned back to work, especially for our two-year old, Reid.  And each time, I had more and more difficulty looking her in the eye and telling her again and again, “Darling, it’s absolutely impossible that we can live just like in those two great months.”

In the middle of some night, I wondered if one day, years later, when I’m like Jim [Johnson, Tripwire, CEO] with far more years behind him than ahead of him, as he squints in the dusky sunset of his life, whether I’d be thinking, “Holy crap. Should I have done it differently?”  Which led to making one of the toughest decisions I’ve made in my life.

Thirteen years after I co-founded Tripwire, I’ve decided to leave the company.

I told Jim, “First, I want what’s best for the company and I want the IPO to be successful.  But I’d like to discuss when would be the best time for me to step down, in a way that doesn’t jeopardize the first goal. It could be a couple weeks, a couple months, or even a couple of years. You tell me what would work best for you and the company. Because no one wants you to screw up the IPO.”

And Jim has been absolutely terrific in every way, and I am grateful to him and the entire team for making this sensitive and (for me) difficult process so easy. My last day will be July 23. And there will be a party at the Nines. And booze! It’s July 20th at 4:00 pm PST.

You might be asking, “So, what’s next for you, Gene?”  Well, first off, not traveling, much to the relief of my wife. And I’ll be working on some projects that I’ve back-burnered for years, including finishing a book that I started five years ago.

From the very bottom of my heart, I am grateful to everyone for making Tripwire such a success and company that so many people admire, as well as for the amazing memories I’ll always treasure, accumulated over the last 13 years. And I genuinely wish that everyone will someday have the freedom and ability to make the same choice I’m making.

So, to everyone: if I don’t see you before July 23rd, see you then.  And again, thank you for everything.

PS: I noticed that my copy of the book “How Even Auditors Can Find Love And Happiness” seems to be missing.  I really need it back. If you have it, please return it, and I promise, no questions asked.  There might even be some drink tickets in it for you.

PPS: Feel free to contact me anytime at genek(at)realgenekim.me.

Cheers,
Gene

An Exciting Day! Leaving Tripwire To Begin My Next Chapter In Life

The evening of July 20 was a both joyous and bittersweet.  Why?  It was joyous because I spent the evening with so many Tripwire colleagues that I’ve loved working with, who were all congratulating me and wishing me well.  It was bittersweet because this was my farewell party at Tripwire: thirteen years after I founded Tripwire, I was leaving the company to start the next chapter in my life.

I had announced to the company on July 1 about my plans.  I'll be posting this letter tomorrow.

I am very proud of my contributions to the company. Looking back, I’ve achieved almost everything I set out to achieve at Tripwire.  Eighteen years ago, I wrote the original version of Tripwire in 1992 with Dr. Gene Spafford. Now, it is a company that has thousands of customers, booked over $80MM in 2009, and continues to be used as part of information security, compliance and IT operations programs worldwide.  And as widely reported, the company completed its S-1 filing in May.

I am very grateful to Jim Johnson, the Tripwire CEO, for making something that was so difficult (for me) so easy.  He is a genuinely great guy with unquestionable integrity. The company future has never been this bright, and I am deeply grateful to everyone who has helped make that happen, including our customers and investors.

For me, the time was right to take some time off to spend with my family and resume work in area of passion: to complete the study and enable the replication of what makes high performing IT organizations tick.

As many of you know, since 2000, I’ve been studying a group of IT organizations that simultaneously achieve the best IT service levels, the best posture of compliance, the best integration of information security into the software development lifecycle, and also have the highest release rates and project due date performance.

How these organizations made their “good to great” transformation is what my colleagues and I captured in the Visible Ops and Visible Ops Security Handbooks, why we created a non-profit research organization, which benchmarked over 1500 IT organizations to conclude which practices led to improved performance.

Along with some trusted collaborators and fellow travelers, I believe that the conditions are now very favorable to propose some new solutions, dramatically different than the status quo.

In addition to spending half-time with my family, here are the three things that I intend to complete in the next two years:

Project #1: Finish My Book: "When IT Fails: The Novel"

Finish the novel “When IT Fails: The Novel.” The novel describes the fall and eventual triumph of the CEO and VP IT Operations of a 100 year old, $4B/year company at the brink of existential failure.

The CEO must close the gap with the competition.  But the two most critical projects necessary to achieve this are years late and way over budget, mostly because of IT. Furthermore, the company is losing customers due to outages and fragile and insecure IT infrastructure, SOX-404 IT audit findings are jeopardizing their 10-K with disastrous footnotes, PCI compliance failures threaten to damage the company brand, and developers are taking dangerous shortcuts in order to meet external promises.

It starts to dawn on the CEO that his survival now depends upon the success of IT and information security. And while he believes that IT is not their core competency, he learns that the company cannot function without it, and is therefore a competency that they must develop.

You can learn more about the book here.

Project #2: Start An Exciting New Venture

During my thirteen years at Tripwire, I was very focused on the mechanics of how organizations can detect and manage configurations and changes.  But in reality, the problem actually starts far upstream, in how the business and IT organizations made decisions that necessitated those changes.

I am starting a new venture to develop the methods, procedures and enabling software tools needed to support the transformations described in “When IT Fails: The Novel.”

I am very excited to be working with some very talented and trusted colleagues, so stay tuned for more details.

Project #3: Continue Engaging With Kick-Ass Communities Of Practice

Work with the communities that I believe will be an instrumental part of creating the management movement to change how IT is managed.  These include: DevOps, PCI Security Standards Council, Service Management, the Institute of Internal Auditors, the Software Engineering Institute, and I know I've forgotten mention some others!

I’ve had tremendously productive collaborations with these groups, as well as forming lasting friendships.  And I believe bigger and better achievements are still to come.

So Stay Tuned!

Thank you again for all your support, and I look forward to collaborating with you in this new chapter my new story.  If you want information on my progress, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter.

You can find my internal email announcement of my departure to the company here, as well as pictures from the amazing farewell party that they threw for me here.