About Tom Beckenham

I am a founder at heart. I love to bring ideas to life, to solve big problems, and build huge customer bases of business that love what we do. I started out in creative industries and bring creativity to everything I do. As a teenager, I thought I was going be a film maker, or artist. Leaving school, I was lucky enough to be accepted into the College Of Fine Arts in Sydney. This gave me access to all sorts of resources and I specialised in character animation. By the time I was in my 3rd year, I was hijacking the universities network overnight to render large scale animations, and building rudimentary AI characters into platform games. This kicked off my career in software engineering. I started out developing graphics algorithms, and plugins, then worked up to building and running teams for Adstream. I knew, though, that always wanted to build businesses. I started my first one in 2007 when I moved to London. Specle became known as the "Google of Ad Specs" as we developed the worlds first open database of advertising specifications - enabling agencies and creatives to easily prepare and deliver ads to all sorts of publications. We struck deals with The Guardian, News UK, and then Condé Nast and Economist where we operated global ad portals for all print and mobile advertising. Specle is now used by 1000s of businesses all over the world. Comma was developed out of a passion for efficiency. After exiting Specle, I ran global operations at an international marketing consultancy, overseeing financial operations across 5 global entities in Europe, US, Brazil, and China. Billing, and payments of anything larger than £1,000 is still a painful process - as most don't want to use cards for large amounts. I started Comma to make the payments process for large amounts as simple as paying by card. As I have been getting businesses off the ground, I am also working with TopTal, contracting on international projects, as a senior front end engineer. There is nothing in the world quite like the TopTal network and I am proud to be a part of it. That's me. Thanks for reading :) Please get in touch if you think I can be of help.