More about Tom
Tom's Curriculum Vitae
Download a two page executive summary of my CV via the link below. More on LinkedIn.
How to evaluate the turnaround opportunity
Here is a recent article I posted on LinkedIn highlighting ten critical questions to ask investors
My Turning Point
What was the Turning Point in your Career? I'll take a minute and share mine...
My Evolution as a Leader
In the midst of the COVID pandemic, I was the focus in one of Scott Amyx's Innovation Series. He explores what has made me a successful leader which starts with my commitment to charities that assist the less fortunate and journey through Accenture, Oracle and Cognizant to Socure that assists the un-banked and under-banked at gaining access to financial service.
Empowering Great AI Leadership
In my first month on the job as CEO of Socure, I recognized the great talents of Socure SVP of Data Science, Pablo Abreu and encouraged him to create our Sigma Identity Fraud Product, which was a pivot away from creating an individual custom model for each client. We worked together on an additional pivot two years later to bring to market Sigma Synthetic Fraud.
Don't just skate to the puck
In hockey you practice your play, learn from last night's game so you can predict how your opponent will adjust tonight and then prescribe the right sequence of future plays to win continuously over a long season. In the business of analytics, start with the right data and analytics strategy, learn to describe what happened, learn to predict the next single event so you can ultimately have the ability to prescribe the future outcome across a broad sequence of events.
In the Palm of your hand
Data and analytics are important, but if you don't take care of the interface in your customer's hand, all the data science goes to waste.
SMAC (Social Mobile Analytics Cloud)
The sentiment of your customer, the interface in their hand, what you know about them and the platform you deliver upon must work seamlessly together.
Taking the back seat to a machine learning algorithm
The deep learning branch of artificial intelligence understands vast amounts of unstructured data in order to classify images, detect objects, recognize actions to understand a broader scene, understands speech, performs natural language processing and by measuring every action and response it can train its neural net model to do many of the repetitive tasks inside your enterprise. Where can your business take your hands off the steering wheel (or the keyboard) and let the deep learning algorithms improve your revenue growth while expanding your margins?
My Passions Outside of Work
STEM Education in public schools
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) are critical for our children to understand to be able to thrive in the future competitive workforce that will be dominated by artificial intelligence and robotics. I served on the Board of Directors of the Los Gatos Education Foundation for four years and two of those years was President of this local non profit. When you settle into a community as we have here in Los Gatos, you should give some of your time back.
Dream Big!
As a father of three daughters, I am proud that I can earn enough to ensure they can pursue their dreams both in the classroom and in extra curricular activities. Not all girls are so fortunate, so I serve on the National advisory Board of Dream Big! and personally raised over $35,000 as part of their Boston Marathon Team. Dream Big's mission is helping girls from low-income situations achieve their dreams by providing them with the basic items and fees necessary to enable them to participate in sports and physical activities that contribute to their health, education and overall well-being.
SOS Children's Villages
SOS Children's Villages is an amazing global organization that provides a safe environment for some of the poorest most disadvantaged children in 135 countries around the globe. They work with children, families, communities and states to prevent family breakdown and ensure that children's rights are met. If a child has lost parental care, or it is not in the child's best interests to remain in their family, then we work with community and state partners to provide the child with loving and supporting alternative care. I have done advisory work for SOS and financially supported the organization. One of the greatest experiences of my life was taking my eldest daughter to their orphanage in Haiti.
Traveling Globally
Not only have I lived in many countries outside my native United States and done business on six continents, I have added to this experience in my personal time adding visits to many wonderful destinations in the third world. I pride myself as an American that takes the time to learn a little about the local language and culture of where I am visiting whether it is for business or pleasure.
Skiing and Sailing
When not working or giving back to those less fortunate, my passions are skiing and sailing. On weekends in the wintertime, we will frequently drive as a family to Lake Tahoe. In the summertime, we try to get out on the ocean preferably on a mono hull sailboat.