Tom Chavez: "Leading by example"

Tom Chavez is the co-founder and General Partner at super{set} , a company studio headquartered in San Francisco. Previously he was the co-founder and CEO of Rapt , which was a media monetization company acquired by Microsoft and Krux , which was a data management platform acquired by Salesforce. In total, Tom has produced over $1B in investor returns. Tom has BAs in computer science and philosophy from Harvard and a PhD in engineering from Stanford University. Tom traces his lineage to Northern Mexico, Spain, and to the area of New Mexico going all the way back to when it was New Spain. His grandfather used to say about their family, “they didn’t cross no border, the border crossed them.”

Tom’s parents met in La Espora, New Mexico. At the time it was a community of mostly undocumented Mexican immigrants. Tom’s mom was the youngest of 11 and grew up without electricity or running water. And once they were able to move to a slightly nicer house, the city built a sewage treatment plant in their backyard. When she and Tom’s father married, she said that she wanted to have 10 children and all 10 of them were going to go to Harvard. They didn’t have 10 children, but they did have 5, and all 5 of them graduated from Harvard. Tom was the third sibling. While his parents didn’t make a lot of money, they were very focused on education. Both of his parents worked at Sandia National Labs - Tom’s Dad was a draftsman and his mom was a secretary. One day they came home, and they told them that they needed to learn how to use computers. This was in the 70s, and while his parents didn’t exactly know what the computers were and did, they did know that the important people at the lab did important work on them. Shortly after that, Tom’s eldest brother, Marty , started taking programming classes at the local community college.

Being poor and having a large family meant that the family had to be brutally focused around what was important. And for their mom, it was graduating from Harvard. Their parents sent all five kids to the Albuquerque Academy on partial scholarship - it was the best school in the area. And when Marty got into Harvard, the family only had enough money for Tom’s dad to fly to Boston to drop him off. Which is all he did - they landed, took the subway into town, he helped take the bags up to street, and then descended back into the subway to fly back. Marty still remembers that before he left, his dad gave him the last $20 he had in his wallet. Tom’s parents used to tell their kids that because they were Mexican, they were going to have to work twice as hard in order to get half as much - and the only way to create more of a level playing field was with education. Tom’s mom did not like playing the victim card and felt that if latinos cared as much about education as they do about women and their cars, they would be better off. Tom and Marty did a great interview at the super{set} offices - I highly recommend it .

Like his two older brothers, Tom got into Harvard where he studied Philosophy and Computer Science. After Harvard, he went off to Stanford to get a PhD in Economics and Engineering Systems. After Stanford he worked for Sun Microsystems developing pricing algorithms and strategies for their products. This was during the dot-com boom and Sun was growing incredibly fast. Tom had the idea that he could take his algorithms and offer the services to other companies, which is when he started the company that would become Rapt. Sun was an early customer, as was Cisco and many of the other enterprise technology companies. Initially, they boot-strapped the business but after 2 years, they raised some venture capital a few months before the Nasdaq hit the top and the dot-com bubble burst. This gave them enough time to, as Business Insider put it, "make one of the top ten business pivots in startup history." They were able to take their price optimization models and use them for online advertising yield management. While the bubble had burst and many internet companies had gone out of business, online advertising was experiencing secular growth. So the need for Rapt’s services grew year over year. In 2008, right after Microsoft acquired Aquantive, a holding group for digital advertising technology and services, they acquired Rapt for $180M to help differentiate its offerings.

Tom stayed at Microsoft for a year and a half, and right as the global economy was crawling out of the Global Financial crisis, Tom left to start Krux, another marketing and adtech platform which was acquired by Salesforce in 2016 .

Most recently, along with his previous co-founder from Krux, Tom launched a data and AI startup studio.? Where they hatch up ideas, experiment, and launch transformative companies. Tom is able to test ideas and then fund their growth and put in place leadership from the network of people he’s worked with.

Last year, Tom penned an article for Huffington Post and it he mentioned a story about how one of his bosses, early in his career, was told that they needed to increase diversity in his group. It occurred to him then that because of his education, and his skin complexion, his boss just assumed he was white. His boss told him that he just thought he was “vaguely - mediterranean.” This comment is important. Hispanics come from over 21 different countries (22, if you consider that New Mexico was New Spain), and like the US, these countries received immigrants from all over the world. So Hispanics come in all shapes, shades and sizes. And as Tom said, his brother Marty was darker than him, his other brother was blond and he was somewhere in-between.?

Tom has used his success to help others. Along with his sister and wife, they started the Chavez Family Foundation which invests at the intersection of immigration, education and entrepreneurship.