Trent R. Hein is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Rule4. Trent is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in infrastructure cybersecurity and automation. Prior to Rule4, he co-founded and served as CTO of XOR Inc. (now part of FICO) for more than a decade before co-founding and serving as Co-CEO of AppliedTrust (now part of Flexential).
A technology entrepreneur and winner of the CTA Colorado Entrepreneurial Excellence award, Trent has built an impressive track record of successful bootstrapped startups and has lifted other entrepreneurs and engineers along the way. Bedrock to all his ventures is helping clients maximize their IT investment in the areas of security, performance, and availability, and he champions practical cybersecurity and automation: “Don’t automate what you don’t understand.”
Trent writes and speaks about topics across the entire range of tech and entrepreneurship. He is a co-author of the “Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook,” currently in its fifth edition, which has been translated into at least 16 languages and is recognized around the world as the bible of Unix system administration. Trent also leads the DevOps Boulder meetup, now well over 1,000 members.
Trent is a University of Colorado Boulder Boettcher Scholar and a recipient of the Kalpana Chawla Outstanding Recent Alumni Award, one of the university’s most prestigious honors. He was also awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the USENIX Association for his work with the University of California, Berkeley’s Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG).
Outside of his tech pursuits, Trent loves hiking, skiing, fly-fishing, camping, bluegrass, dogs, and the Oxford comma. He is currently a board member for the Harvest of Hope Pantry and has served on the board of directors of the Humane Society of Boulder Valley.
