The Long Way Around
Tim Kippen ('89, Engineering Technology) took eight years to finish a four-year degree, ran up credit card debt to keep a startup alive, and helped build a company whose products have saved thousands of lives. Over 35 years later, he and his wife are giving $1 million back to the college that helped start it all—and he’s putting it towards where he knows it will matter most.
It was December 1998, and they were sure they had it.
Tim Kippen and his co-founders, Mike Beckage (‘87, engineering technology) and Steve Pruitt, at their then-nascent company Diversified Technical Systems (DTS), had spent months building a crash data recorder to Chrysler's exact specification—the document was as thick as the Bible. They had demoed it at the plant. The engineers loved it. The purchase order was essentially waiting to be signed.
But changes were underway at Chrysler. By November 1998, Daimler-Benz, a German company and now Mercedes-Benz, had completed their acquisition of Chrysler and a directive came down from the top: use the same German product as we do in Stuttgart. What would’ve been a major business breakthrough for DTS disappeared in an instant.
"We took a very long Christmas break," Kippen said.
What happened next is, in some ways, the whole story of Tim Kippen and the company he co-founded. Pruitt and their head of marketing went on a world tour. They spent four weeks on the road, showing the product to anyone willing to watch a demo. Less than two years later, General Motors placed an order far larger than the Chrysler opportunity.
"The only failure is really walking away. Everything else is just learning," Kippen said.
It's the mantra that carried him through an eight-year undergraduate degree, a side project that nearly broke him financially, and over 35 years building DTS into a global leader in data recording for crash testing, aerospace, and military blast environments.
It's also the philosophy behind a $1 million gift he and his wife, Ileana Frometa Grillo, recently made to the College of Engineering.
The Kid Who Couldn't Put Things Back Together
Tim Kippen grew up in the Inland Empire, San Bernardino and Yucaipa, in a house where his engineering interests were encouraged by both parents. His mother started as a secretary, went back to school in her thirties and eventually became a systems analyst writing FORTRAN code for TRW. His father worked nights running a printing press at Aerospace Corporation and repeated a consistent message: become an engineer and you will always have a job.
Kippen didn't need much convincing. As a kid, his instinct when confronted with any piece of technology was to take it apart.
"Even if it was working, I might disassemble it," he said. "I didn't always know how to get it back together, but that was okay."
He built stereo equipment and wired car speakers, captured by the mystery of how sound traveled through a wire. "When you're that young," he said, "that's just magic."
Eight Years Later, a Four-Year Degree
He graduated high school with solid grades but didn't go straight to Cal Poly Pomona. He was deep into martial arts (and even ran a school on behalf of his instructor), traveling and simply living. He describes it plainly as "a lot of life experience stuff."
In between his adventures and following his interests, he started at San Bernardino Valley College (SBVC). Then he got sick, took a semester off, and completed a quarter at Cal State San Bernardino while he waited on an acceptance letter. He ultimately was accepted to Cal Poly Pomona as a physics major because by that point his grades weren't strong enough for engineering. Eventually, he transferred into the engineering technology program where he could finally settle in while balancing school with the demands of real-life. He worked constantly to support himself, married young and found himself divorced from his first wife 18 months later.
Finally, by 1989, a full eight years later, he graduated with a degree in engineering technology.
"I signed on for too much," he said. "At any given moment, you were either disappointing yourself, your teachers or someone at home."
Except the one quarter when he didn’t work, his final quarter was the only time he got straight A’s.
Three Engineers Walk into a Bar
Kippen met Mike Beckage ('87, engineering technology) in a material science class at Cal Poly Pomona in the fall 1986. They were cut from the same cloth—engineering technology students who believed that if you hadn't built something and tested it, you didn't really know if it worked. They became fast friends and within a few months Kippen joined Beckage at Mobility Systems & Equipment, working at their crash-test lab in Mira Loma. There they met Steve Pruitt, a mechanical engineer with a gift for business who had come on as an intern and moved into management with unusual speed.
After work, they’d occasionally meet at the Bull and Mouth bar at UC Riverside to talk about starting a business together. Between the three of them, they felt they had everything needed to create real products end-to-end. Tim knew digital hardware, firmware and software; Mike was an electronics designer and guru of all things analog; and Steve was a mechanical engineer with software experience and the business instincts to close a sale. DTS soon became a real business, albeit in a small garage loft, and for the first five years it was more of a side hustle for the trio. But that would soon change.
When Mobility Systems imploded in the early-1990s, its former engineers started a new crash testing company called Karco. They needed custom crash-test equipment and knew exactly who to call. The contract and the time commitment to do this right was large enough that Beckage and Pruitt quit their jobs on the spot. Kippen followed six months later.
The early years of DTS were lean in the specific way that startup years are lean when there's no safety net. Some months no one took home a salary while working 60-hour weeks. Kippen was running up debt to pay the bills. "It was just a lot of personal risk," he said. "I'd come home to talk to Ileana and feel really bad. But she was always super supportive.
“Our initial offering was underwhelming, so we decided to create and promote a new product at the annual SAE trade show in Detroit.”
When they still didn't have enough money to rent a booth, Pruitt designed and built one out of aluminum and shipped it to the show. The product was, Kippen acknowledges, "mostly working," but showed well enough to entice Chrysler when they stopped by their hand-built booth. The rest, almost, was history.
After the Chrysler deal fell through, General Motors became their anchor client in the late 1990s and 2000s, eventually placing orders so large that DTS kept a calibration technician embedded in a GM building full-time. The halo effect brought others. By the time DTS fielded 48,000 helmet sensors in Iraq and Afghanistan to track traumatic brain injuries among soldiers, the company had grown from a garage loft in Long Beach to a 50,000-square-foot facility. The kid who couldn't put things back together had helped build something that saved lives.
Life in Thirds
Kippen retired at the end of 2022. He had thought for a long time about what to do with this new phase in life.
"I only recently heard the phrase ‘You learn, you earn, you return’ and that sums up a life in thirds pretty well," he said.
Kippen is in his third act. What “giving back” would look like took almost two years to figure out.
"My whole life had been built around fulfilling responsibilities to other people," he said. "I didn't want to just throw myself into something new without being sure I was passionate about it. Because I knew that once I signed up for something, I'd feel responsible to do it right."
His friendship and admiration for Beckage and the Engineering Alumni Hall of Fame induction in 2025 brought him back to the College of Engineering. He joined the Dean's Leadership Board, signed up as a mentor for students, and started looking at resumes with the trained eyes of someone who has hired many fresh graduates for DTS. What he noticed: the resumes without a real project looked thin.
"When I saw a real project on there, something we could actually talk about," he said, "those just felt so much stronger."
Kippen began thinking about a large contribution—something that would go specifically to support student project work.
Soon after, a LinkedIn post by Eric Schmidt about a forthcoming initiative called the Bronco Student Design Lab stopped Kippen mid-scroll. He sent an email that day to Andrew Ketsdever, dean for the College of Engineering, inquiring about the initiative and how he might contribute. Soon after, a first-year computer science student named Jackson Wu reached out through the university's mentoring platform, PeopleGrove.
Wu had written an advocacy paper comparing makerspaces across California universities, and he wanted to make the case for a dedicated space managed by the College of Engineering. In a meeting with Kippen and Beckage, Wu made a point that reframed everything: getting equipment was the easy part. What never got funded was everything after. When machines break, and there's no budget to fix them, they sit there tagged out-of-service. Furthermore, the paid staff go home at five, closing any opportunity for students to work late into the night.
"It's often easier to raise money to build something. The maintenance side—the extended hours, the upkeep—that's typically underfunded or not funded at all. I thought, perhaps I can be the first here at CPP," Kippen said.
The Timothy J. Kippen and Ileana Frometa Grillo Endowment provides the college with $1 million to establish the Beyond Bronco Student Design Lab Endowment. It’ll be the first of its kind dedicated to support operations in the new College of Engineering's Bronco Student Design Lab makerspace. That includes student lab technicians, extended hours, and materials for clubs and competition teams. Over time, it converts into a permanent maintenance endowment, generating returns to sustain the lab indefinitely.
For Kippen, it comes back to the same feedback loop that defined his career: design, test, fail, learn, iterate. "That's where the real deep learning happens," he said. "That's also what companies want when they're hiring. It's one thing to have the courses. It's totally another thing to have done real engineering."
He spent 35 years proving that. Now he's making sure the college’s labs stay open late into the night for students to discover that for themselves.