Tom Counsell

Tom builds engineering teams and the products they ship. 15+ years across AI, fintech, travel tech, and e-commerce, including CTO roles at multiple startups. Three exits, $3.5M+ raised. Right now he's building Valor, an open-source AI developer that ships its own code.

The short version: Tom co-founded an e-commerce platform in Morocco's Sahara desert while in the Peace Corps, trained local leaders to run it, then spent the next decade leading engineering at places like Agoda (Booking Holdings, 40M+ MAU) and Bumble Inc (NASDAQ: BMBL) while serving as CTO at multiple startups in between. Along the way he founded a startup incubator in Prague that took no equity from its members, led a team of PhDs building ML-powered trading tools, and designed caching systems that process 70GB/min of real-time data.

The longer version is that every role taught him something different about building under pressure. At Anou, he learned you can design software for people who can't read if you do the research. At Agoda, he learned that pitching a bold idea to executives is the easy part; building the team to execute it is the real work. At Official, he learned you can rebuild an entire engineering org inside a public company without missing a sprint, if you hire right and communicate clearly. At Simplenight, he learned that the difference between accurate pricing and stale pricing is measured in milliseconds.

Tom believes in building things that outlast you, open-sourcing what you can, and hiring people who are better than you. He challenges the status quo, he's the first to admit when he's wrong, and nothing is more valuable than integrity throughout.

Tom's Rules for Business:

1. Challenge the status quo and initiate new experiments
2. Quietly lead by setting an example
3. Promote an environment of open curiosity and fun
4. Be first to admit being wrong or making a mistake
5. Never back down from a challenge
6. Take responsibility and make difficult decisions when others don't want to
7. Ask for help all the time
8. Give help to everyone who asks
9. First work smarter, then work harder
10. To see a problem and stay quiet is to become part of the problem
11. With failure, learn and never repeat
12. Nothing is more valuable than your integrity

If you're a founder building something ambitious and need a technical leader who's done it before: connect on LinkedIn and send a message.