How I Built PlexTrac

I’ve always kind of had the entrepreneurial spirit, and I do credit that to my dad as well. My dad was a college professor, and before that, though, he owned his own consulting business doing software engineering, and so he always had kind of that dabbling and inside hustles and things like that. So when I was in high school, actually, we started our own business selling portable batting cages. I was a baseball player growing up, and we built our own batting cage in our backyard and thought, hey, other people might want to buy this kind of model. So we started selling those online. I kind of got exposure to early stage company and business principles through that. I always say I got into cybersecurity probably the most formal way that one does most of the time.

You hear about people that were hacking in their bedrooms and basements early on as a child, and I was not that way. I went to college and got a bachelor’s degree in computer science. I went to the naval postgraduate school and got my master’s degree in computer science with an emphasis in cybersecurity. When my time in the DoD. I really started to narrow in on penetration testing. So hacking websites, hacking mobile devices, embedded devices, and just loved solving that puzzle around, how do I outthink the coder? What would the engineer not have thought about how to break into this device or this website? So that really was just always fascinating and fun to me. Through my career at doing pentesting, I hated writing reports after a pentest, hated how much time I was spending on this, and then I hated coming back a year later or six months later and rewriting the same report for whoever the engagement was for.

That was really the impetus for PlexTrac. And I was like, well, I have this problem, so I’ll start here. Maybe this turns into something. Maybe this turns into a business. So because I had two degrees in computer science, I started writing the software, started getting some validation from other peers, right? Like, yeah, this is something that we really need. And at that point, I really recognize, like, hey, I’m onto something, and just continue to progress. Like, yeah, there’s a big market here, right? And obviously, we knew cyber security itself is a big market.