Benjamin Hathaway
About
Drawn to things that take years to get good at.
I'm an engineer, and I've been the CTO of Mailprotector since 2008. Most of those years have gone into email security: software that should be hard to break and easy to live with. Twelve patents came out of the work, which mostly means I've lost a lot of sleep to edge cases other people will never notice.
Those unnoticed parts are the ones I care about. A feature left out, a screen that asks for one less thing, a thousand lines deleted instead of shipped. None of it announces itself, but you feel it, and getting it right is the part of this job I'd do for free.
Home is Greenville, South Carolina, with my wife Julie and our three sons, Lincoln, Nolan, and Easton. Julie chose the boys as her own and they chose her right back, which is the best thing I get to be part of. When I'm away from a keyboard I'm building something out of wood, on a pair of skis (I started at three and never quit), or partway through another obstacle race, wondering whose idea it was. About 174 miles of mud, and counting.
Family
Julie
Julie is my wife and my best friend, and the spark this family runs on. She's full of energy and life, fiercely independent, and stronger than anyone knows. She spent years in the tech world before going back to what she loved first, trading the keyboard for the dance studio where she now teaches. She's an award-winning speaker who stays grounded with yoga, two cats, and a dog. She's the energy in this house; I just get to be the calm.
Lincoln
Lincoln earned his private pilot license at seventeen and is working toward a career flying commercially. When he isn't in the air he's an advanced skier, on snow since he was six, and a certified open water diver.
Nolan
Nolan is our all-season athlete, a wide receiver in the fall and a sprinter and jumper on the track team come spring. A decade on skis has made him an advanced one, and like his brothers he's a certified open water diver. At home he's rarely far from Chloe and the cats, Katniss and Jon.
Easton
Easton has a creative spirit that shows up in everything he does. He's a swimmer, has been on skis since he was three, and is a certified open water diver. He's devoted to Chloe and the cats.
Work
The long bet on email security.
I started my first two companies as a computer engineering undergrad at the University of Cincinnati and graduated in 2005. By 2008 I was after a harder problem, so I exited the company I'd built in school and put my money and my time into Mailprotector. I had no idea what I was signing up for.
Email security was exactly that hard problem. I tore our stack down and rebuilt it, all the way to the operating system, and shipped the new foundation in 2010. At the time just one public cloud existed, AWS, and I became convinced it was where we belonged. So we made the bet that would define the company: move everything to the cloud, lean into the software and design we did well, and leave hardware and data centers behind. The migration finished in 2015, and almost nothing we've built since would have been possible without it.
Free of our own servers, we could finally build. In 2017 we launched Bracket, a way to send encrypted email that people actually liked using. It caught on immediately and doubled the size of the company by 2020.
By 2021 I wanted to do for email security what Bracket had done for encryption. We started a clean-sheet effort we called Apex, and it became Shield: a zero-trust email security platform, and still the only one of its kind. Years on, we're building it out toward the full vision I imagined when we started.
Play
Easy was never the appeal.
Away from a keyboard, I'm happiest making something with my hands, usually out of wood. There's an honesty to it that software never quite gives me. A joint either fits or it doesn't, a board that isn't square stays that way, and you can't refactor a mistake out of a finished piece. Building real, physical things has been the throughline of my life since long before I wrote a line of code.
The rest usually involves mud or snow. I race obstacle courses, miles of trail broken up by walls to climb, wire to crawl under, and heavy things to haul uphill. And we ski every winter, something I started as a kid and never grew out of, now with three boys who ski circles around me. I like the pursuits you can't talk your way through: you clear the wall or you don't, you make the turn or you don't.
A few years ago I earned my advanced open water scuba certification, which still feels unlikely, because I've been afraid of being underwater my whole life. Doing it anyway was the point. The fear never fully left; I just learned to stay calm inside it, breathing slow with the surface a long way up. I'd rather move toward the thing that scares me than around it.
And when I'm sitting still, which isn't often, I'm reading about people who built things that lasted, the founders and inventors and designers who saw something nobody else could and spent years making it real. I never get tired of how great work actually gets made. Most of what I believe about building started as someone else's story about refusing to do it the easy way.
Contact
Email is still the best way to reach me.
I've spent most of my career making email better, so it would be strange to ask you to reach me any other way. I'm on the usual social networks too, though I check them about as often as I check my fax machine.