Jimmy Treybig

James G. Treybig, known as Jimmy Treybig, founded Tandem Computers in 1974 and served as its chief executive from 1974 to 1996. Tandem designed and manufactured the first fault tolerant computers, which were marketed to transaction processing customers who used them for ATMs, banks, stock exchanges, phone companies, emergency telephone services and military applications. Treybig grew up in Bellaire, Texas, took a B.A. from Rice University in 1963 and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering there in 1964, and earned an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1968. He began as a salesman for Texas Instruments, then worked for Hewlett-Packard as marketing section manager on the HP 3000 project, and in 1973 joined the venture capital company Kleiner Perkins, which helped fund Tandem. Under his leadership Tandem delivered its first product in 1976, first issued public stock in 1977 and was ranked in 1980 by Inc. magazine as the fastest-growing public company in America. When he left in 1996 it was a $2.3 billion company with about 8,000 employees, and Roel Pieper succeeded him. In 2002 he became a venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, and Upside Magazine named him one of the 100 people who changed the world.