Tom is Vice President for Sales, Marketing and Services, Taiwan and Hong Kong for World Family English. He also leads certain special projects at the request of the company leadership. Before joining World Family in August 2017, Tom was based in Shanghai as Regional Director, Education, Asia for Macmillan Education, a part of Springer Nature. In this role he restructured a broad regional portfolio away from mature markets and towards high growth opportunities in China and South East Asia.
Tom has twenty years of entrepreneurial and business leadership experience at the intersection of technology and education. He has deep understanding of APAC markets, having lived and worked in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China. He holds an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Warwick University, an MBA from the UK’s Cranfield School of Management (where he won the Odgers prize) and a Masters in Global Diplomacy from the University of London, SOAS. He speaks Mandarin, Japanese and some Korean.
In the early 2000’s Tom cofounded and was later CFO of an online learning startup that received more than $1m in funding to create IPTV and broadband-delivered early learning content to Asian markets. This business grew into Studycat, a profitable, leading independent developer of early learning apps for English and other languages for iOS and Android. Studycat’s apps have been featured on Apple Store devices and on Google Play and downloaded eleven million times. Tom moved from entrepreneurship into educational publishing for Oxford University Press, where he became Asia Regional Director for Oxford’s Global Business Development team, based in Hong Kong, with a remit to license the Press’s lexical and educational content to technology partners.
Tom is also an advisory board member of the independent app developer Studycat and a Mentor at Chinaccelerator, the SOS Ventures Shanghai and Taipei accelerator program.
Favorite quote: “Paths should be laid where people walk, instead of walking where paths are laid-” from John Barth, The End of the Road.