Tim Prendergast Of strongDM: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became a CEO
An Interview With Ben Ari
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Be the most inquisitive person in the company. I will ask “why?” constantly, like a toddler. Things in business change constantly. This is all in the name of making sure we’re doing the right thing for our customers.
As a part of our series called ‘Five Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became A CEO’ we had the pleasure of interviewing Tim Prendergast.
Tim Prendergast is CEO of strongDM. Tim has over 20 years of experience in cloud and security leadership across several industries, such as McAfee, Ticketmaster and Ingenuity. He also led Adobe’s cloud architecture team through a pivotal transition. In his non-professional time, Tim contributes as a seed investor in technologies he feels passionate about. His primary areas of expertise include cloud security, cloud infrastructure, as well as building and scaling SaaS businesses.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
This is an easy one. The story behind how I got into technology is actually pretty funny. I grew up in the middle of the Arizona desert on a cattle farm as a redhead. I learned to stay indoors most of the time during the day (especially during the brutal summers) in order to avoid the sun’s wrath. As a result, I got exposed to computers at a pretty young age. I’ve always been the type of person who likes to disassemble things to look at processes and systems, which eventually led me to a cybersecurity career. Then, I worked my way up from building a product to leading and managing teams and taking on more responsibility. Eventually, during my time as a cloud architect, I saw a big problem in the industry as we were all moving to the cloud that needed to be solved. I went and forged forward and pioneered a space that now has some big, successful companies in it. That was my first shot as a CEO and founder of a company. Since then, I have jumped back in as…
