Douglas Donald Troxel was raised on a farm near Lake City, Iowa. Kindergarten through third grade, were at a one-room country school with one other in the class. He attended Iowa State University with a major in mathematics and minor in physics. In 1966, as a senior, he crossed over to the college of Engineering to take a Fortran course and immediately chose programming (called Data Processing then) as a career.
His first job was Programmer/Analyst at Consumer's Power Company in Jackson, Michigan where he learned COBOL, Assembler and the newly emerging IBM product called C.I.C.S. In 1973, he went to Detroit Edison as a contract programmer. In 1975, he packed up his family and moved to San Francisco. If it didn't fit in the Ryder truck, it was left on the lawn.
After various contract programming stints, he formed SERENA Consulting in 1980 for a gig at Bank of America where he continued writing a product called COMPAREX for the mainframe world. It quickly became an industry standard and financed the company growth without using venture capital. Then, returning to B of A, he began building Change Man with other like-minded software developers whom he hired.
In 1997, after being CEO, Chairman and primary developer, he hired a new management team to drive the business, now renamed SERENA Software. He took the company public on the Nasdaq in 1999 as SRNA. The congressional reaction to Enron, among others, called the Sarbanes-Oxley laws proved onerous to abide for a small company and he looked to go private. SERENA had thousands of mainframe customers and over 100K (seat) licenses for Windows and Unix products. 98 of the Fortune 100 rely on SERENA's products and services. It was and still is the leader in the I.T. Change Governance niche competing against IBM, Computer Associates and Compuware.
In 2001, he retired to Kona Hawaii. In 2006, Silver Lake Partners assisted in taking SERENA private leaving about 20% of the company stock for Mr. Troxel. He now serves as a director to the Board and consults with the developers for product strategy.
In 2008, he married his Kona neighbor Deborah and they bought a house in Montecito where Deb grew up. They now split their time between Kona, Santa Barbara and SFO for SERENA functions. He is also President of the family foundation Change Happens and enjoys pursuing life long interests in physics, astronomy and politics.