why we started this business

McWhorter Technologies has been a dream of owner Lee McWhorter since he was "knee-high to a grasshopper". His love of technology sprouted from the original Pong video game system his parents bought the family for their TV and grew to fruition with the Commodore VIC-20 computer he received as a sophomore in high school. He taught himself how to program in BASIC and technology became a central part of his life. In college, he was exposed to the Internet and was completely fascinated by its potential.

After obtaining his MBA, he started his own business and technical consulting firm. Two years later, he moved to New Orleans and began teaching computer information systems (CIS) at the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University. It was at Tulane where his interest in web development really blossomed as he began to use the technology to support his classes and build websites for private clients. Two years later, he was presented with a dual opportunity. He was presented with an offer to design a training certification program for a database company in Austin, Texas.

Additionally, he was offered the opportunity to continue teaching at Tulane via the Internet. He accepted both and taught Tulane's first online, fully accredited course for Tulane's University College. Beyond his ten years with Tulane, both onsite and online, he has also taught for other universities and institutions including Midwestern State University and ITT. He has taught courses in a wide ranges of areas including business, economics and computer technologies, programming and security.

Next, he was recruited during the Dot Com days to help launch the U.S. operations of a Swiss web-based education company as their Vice President of Operations. He built custom education programs for companies such as Volkswagon and Stamps.com. At the end of the Dot Com era, he and the nucleus of his team joined Persidea, Inc., a marketing communications company where he became the COO / EVP and headed all technical and production operations. Under his direction, Persidea was consistently ranked highly for ten years in the Austin Business Journal's Book of Lists for web designers / developers. During his tenure, he and his team developed websites and web-based training programs for Dell, Motorola, and Austin Relocation Guide, as well as hundreds of other businesses large and small.

As technology evolved, he and his team began to offer new services such as digital publishing, mobile application development and IT support and security. When Persidea closed its doors in late 2010, Lee decided to realize his long standing dream of launching McWhorter Technologies. Nearly all of Persidea's technical clients chose to be initial launch clients for his new venture and remain clients to this day, filling him with pride and gratitude.

With over three decades of experience, Lee has established himself as a highly sought-after professional whose roles have ranged from the server room to the boardroom. He has served as an instructor for numerous universities, commercial trainers, and nonprofits, helping others master everything from foundational networking to complex cybersecurity systems.

Over the last few years, Lee has gone completely down the AI rabbit hole. Working with countless frontier and open-source models, building his own agents, and trying out all the related tools he can find has led to many new engagements. He was part of the NIST AI Pentest Challenge in 2023-2024, successfully beating every model presented to him. On the commercial side, he has helped set up a dozen plus Claude Code AI Agent development team for one client and helped others with such projects as secure and private RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) system to gain the value of ground AI systems without having to share client data with the big tech providers. He is an advocate for open-source and locally deployed AI solutions and hopes this wave of technology will benefit everyone more equally than the last.

His commitment to education is equally profound. He has served as a CompTIA Train the Trainer for several worldwide certification courses, including PenTest+, CASP+, and Linux+, among many others. His expertise has been featured in numerous speaking engagements with CompTIA online, at their Partner Conferences, and other notable venues. In 2023, he had the distinct honor of traveling to Singapore to teach OSINT to Interpol Asia at their training conference alongside his long-time partner, Sanda Stibbards of Camelot Investigations.

He is excited about seeing the technology advances of the next few decades and looks forward to helping his clients get the most benefit from the best technologies available now and in the future.