Tim Nufire

I’ve been certain of two things in my career, and wrong both times. In college I wanted nothing to do with computers — yet that’s all I’ve done since. And when I left Apple in 1997, I was sure the company — now worth trillions — was doomed. It’s easy to see problems; it’s hard to appreciate the possibilities. The future will surprise you.

That “not computers” conviction has a backstory — ironic, since I was proud of the Breakout game I wrote on my TRS-80 in high school. I spent my freshman year at the University of Missouri, Rolla (their engineering campus), with a separate building for each technical discipline. They had just one small building for all of the liberal arts, and the history course I took there focused on the harm engineers did during the industrial revolution. This soured me on tech, so I transferred to the University of Kansas for a broader education. Once there, I took whatever interested me most each semester, and ended up with a math degree because it was the one constant. My only computer course was Pascal to satisfy my foreign language requirement.

My tech aversion didn’t last. After graduation, working in my physical-chemistry professor’s laser lab, I enjoyed programming the computer to control the experiments more than the research itself. That Pascal course paid off.

Alan Oppenheimer hired me in 1992 to work with him at Apple in Silicon Valley. I joined his AppleTalk router team — adding TCP/IP tunneling — and also rewrote the Windows version of the AppleTalk Data Stream Protocol (ADSP). After moving to Apple’s Advanced Technology Group (ATG), I wrote SoundSprocket, the 3D-audio part of Apple’s Game Sprockets, under Dick Lyon. At Excite@Home, the challenge was web infrastructure at scale (webmail for 6 million users).

My sweet spot is startups, including MailFrontier, SearchFox, and Aplia (acquired by SonicWALL, Yahoo!, and Thomson, respectively). In 2008 I co-founded Backblaze, spent fifteen years writing code, designing Storage Pods, scaling data centers, and building teams. We took it public on the Nasdaq (BLZE) in 2021.

I’ve kept busy since leaving Backblaze: initially making our condo as “smart” as possible, and more recently leveraging AI to modernize our ten-unit building’s HOA. Mastering new skills motivates me — but as a generalist, this means broad proficiency rather than focused mastery. I’ve taken photographs since high school and raced triathlons since 2007. In April 2026 I finished my first full marathon in Eugene, Oregon. I’m always learning, balancing collaboration with autonomy, and want to leave the world better than I found it.