Tony Huie is the co-founder and chief executive of Twingate, a zero trust access company in Redwood City, California, that aims to replace the corporate VPN. He worked on growth at Dropbox before starting Twingate in 2019 with co-founders Alex Marshall and Lior Rozner. He is known for arguing that security tools get adopted when they are easy to deploy and pleasant for employees to use.
Taking Dropbox to the Business Market
Huie worked on growth at Dropbox during a period of rapid scale. In the post announcing Twingate's general availability in October 2020, he wrote about himself and co-founder Alex Marshall: Alex and I first saw the power of treating usability as a first-class citizen when we helped take Dropbox to the business market a decade ago.
He described how the simplicity of Dropbox changed workflows built around clunky tools such as file servers, and he saw the same pattern in remote access.
Alex Bovee, the chief executive of ConductorOne, hosted Huie on the All Aboard podcast and summarized the lesson in a guest post on Twingate's blog. At Dropbox, Bovee wrote, Huie saw the consumerization of IT up close, and a little more than a decade later the same movement had reached security.
Founding Twingate in 2019
He started Twingate in 2019 with Alex Marshall and Lior Rozner. In the general availability post he described the idea behind it: the team's core hypothesis was that the VPN problem was more than just a technology problem.
After about 18 months of building, Twingate reached general availability on October 28, 2020, with a pitch aimed at IT teams stretched thin by the pandemic. He promised a deployment process designed to take 15 minutes or less.
He was blunt about the target. He wrote that The time has come for corporate VPNs to go the way of the fax machine.
Making Zero Trust Easy to Start
In a July 2022 question-and-answer with the access-management company Opal, Huie said the barrier to zero trust is the work of getting started. It’s never too early to adopt a zero trust strategy in my opinion
, he said, and he credited Twingate's focus on ease of deployment and administration for the fact that Many customers get up and running in 15 minutes or less.
He expects most companies to move in stages. Most companies are not ready to move to a full zero trust model overnight
, he said, and teams often keep their VPN running while they try a first use case. One frequent use case we see companies start with for zero trust projects is access controls for third-party contractors.
Contractors usually need a few systems, so the change to existing infrastructure stays small.
Security as a Shared Responsibility
On the All Aboard podcast, Huie described a core idea of zero trust as moving away from broad-based access to granular access.
He also argued that access decisions work better when more of the business takes part in them, calling that shift really healthy because it makes security a shared responsibility.
Usability runs through his explanation of why. He told Bovee that when a company forces employees into a process they dislike, they're just going to figure out a way to get around that.
The Series B announcement on Twingate's blog, which appears on his author page, opens on the same observation: When given a choice between security and convenience, people almost always choose the latter.
Access for Users, Machines, and AI Systems
On his Twingate author page, Huie describes the company's current focus as providing precise access controls for how users, machines, and AI systems interact with an organization's most critical assets. He says Twingate is built around identity, context, and software-defined controls.
He has also pointed to how Twingate enforces policy. In the Opal interview he said that we do all checks locally before a connection leaves a user’s device.
He added that Twingate was expanding the checks to more contextual signals and to more forms of authentication, such as biometrics and security keys.
Sources
- Twingate blog: Twingate Series A announcement (October 28, 2020)
- Twingate blog: Series B announcement
- Twingate: Tony Huie author page
- Twingate blog: From Command and Control to Shared Responsibility (guest post by Alex Bovee)
- Opal Security: Q&A with CEO of Twingate (July 13, 2022)
- ConductorOne: All Aboard podcast, Tony Huie of Twingate
- TechCrunch: That dreadful VPN might finally be dead thanks to Twingate, a new startup built by Dropbox alums (October 28, 2020)
Sources retrieved October 27, 2026.
