Tom started work in his fathers cobblers shop at the age of 12 (Ireland did not have the strongest child labour laws at that time). This left Tom with a life time love of workshops and also of earning his way in life.

A degree in Pure Mathematics later, specialising in the theory of artificial intelligence (which in the early 90s was purely theoretical) Tom was the first undergraduate in 154 years to give a lecture to the Mathematics Society of Trinity College Dublin.

Starting work life as a commercial programmer, Tom accidentally turned up a week early to his first job and was put on the technical architecture team instead and there he stayed! Several jobs later, Tom was reporting to the board of directors of Barclays Ireland, writing financial “smart systems” (what we would now call Rules Based Algorithms) to survey their entire banking system and was bored out of his mind.

He left to cycle across Europe… a dream he had had since his friend suggested it in a Dublin pub about a month previously. Returning from Istanbul the thought of going back to a desk was unbearable and instead, as a lifelong enthusiast and advocate for the power of the Internet, Tom started his own company to build websites. This grew to 15 people over 4 years and then ran slap bang into the Dot Com Bubble bursting.

During that time Tom asked himself, why build websites only for companies to talk to customers…why not for everyone to talk to everyone. Many-to-many websites were still a long off twinkle in Zuckerberg’s eye, such a site just didn’t exist. So Tom built it with his team and it grew wildly to over a million and a half Irish users a day. 60 Million posts and while Tom sold his stake in 2015 it remains one of Ireland’s largest community sites. www.boards.ie along with its spin off classified ads site: www.adverts.ie

Fresh from this success, Tom retired, got bored, built a mobile games company, and produced two successful games. Retired again, got bored again and returned to his first love and built a company based on artificial intelligence. www.mlprograms.com was born in 2018 and then sold in 2019 to the UK’s largest insurance software house. Tom served three years as CEO, two years as CTO and remains as a consultant with them at the time of writing.