Began a twenty-five year stint with a full head of hair and big ideas with Printware as a software engineer, working my way up to sales and ultimately President of our CtP division. Our company has recently developed our fourth generation product (inkjet) following very successful toner print systems, and two industry leading Computer-to-Plate solutions. From a small technology based start up to a short run as a public company and then a long run as a private company with sister operations for metal CtP and Software development. The only thing better than the company has been the wonderful Printware people. I am blessed and now sport a little less hair!
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Chris Santomassimo: I’m Chris Santomassimo, your host today, and I’m really excited to introduce Tim Murphy. Tim and I met recently, and if you want to talk about a plug-and-play guest on the podcast, Tim fits that bill, for sure. He is the president of Printware LLC, which is headquartered in Eagan, Minnesota. Welcome to the podcast, Tim.
Tim Murphy: Thank you very much, Chris. Really enjoy it, and glad you found us.
Chris Santomassimo: Yeah, I mean, you’re not that hard to find, especially given what I think is really interesting about you and the company in particular is how you’ve really evolved over the years. It’s like you’ve surfed the ocean of print to go from the offset side all the way to inkjet and everything else in between. And you’ve also got some terrific products, a brand new headquarters, all of those good things.
I’d really like to kick it over to you to talk about you and your background, which I think is super interesting, and then tell us about Printware.
Tim Murphy: For those viewers that can’t see me, I lost my hair somewhere around the transition to computer to plate probably in the early 2000s. But we’re a small manufacturer here based in Eagan, Minnesota, the Twin Cities of Minnesota.
We were founded by a number of gentlemen from kind of the tech area of those days—the 3M, the Honeywell, the Unisys world. And they started and they said, “You know what, we can build the greatest product in the world. This print industry is huge. We’ll solve some real problems.” And they began a little privately held company. And I was fortunate enough to graduate with a computer science degree and they picked me after a little while to get in on the ground floor—and I’ve been here ever since.
It’s been a lot of fun riding with a small company that manufactures things. It’s always fun to try to deliver a product that can make a difference in customers’ lives. And I knew early on in my career that it wasn’t the technology, it was always kind of the applications. And it was really fun to get out and to meet people. So it’s been a lot of fun. And here we are in 2025. And I’m alive, there’s a lot more grandkids around. [laughter]
Chris Santomassimo: Absolutely. Talk a little bit about what you did in the early days and how you’ve taken opportunities as the market has changed and evolved and gone along with the market rather than some companies who have found themselves in a bad place when they stick with the old technology and don’t recognize that the market does change.
Tim Murphy: We’ve had kind of a front row seat to a number of changes that printers are going through and I think The Think Factory and podcasts like this really help people kind of put things in perspective.
Chris Santomassimo: What are some of these trends? What are some of these things that are really important?
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