I first met Tom six years ago. We didn't talk much about work at the time, but I could tell straight away he was intelligent and thoughtful. The kind of person you file away knowing you'll cross paths again on something that matters.
Six years later, I get a text from him: "Did your headhunter just hit me up?" We laughed and then talked for two hours on the phone about Watt.
Most companies build their leadership team in the wrong order. After PMF, they hire sales first. We did the opposite. We hired a Head of Growth before scaling sales because two things determine whether a company makes it: pace of innovation and quality of pipeline. Everything else sorts itself out. Innovation shows up in consumption data. Pipeline shows up in cost per qualified opportunity. If those two curves point the right direction week over week, you have a solid company.
The bar for the role was high. We needed someone who could build pipeline as a system, not just run plays from a playbook. Someone who could create a brand for a deep tech AI company out of Nashville, Tennessee and make us a market of one through category creation.
Watt is building something truly novel, but we realized early on that if we didn't get our brand and message to the same level as our product, we'd never impact as many builders as we could. We needed someone who could package the story as well as we built the technology.
The final dealbreaker for me: our Head of Growth had to write code. The future of growth is agentic. The marketers who can build will outpace the ones who can't, and it's not close. Tom onboarded to a dev environment on day one, before he'd officially started, sitting alongside our engineers.
We talked to a lot of people. Only one rose to the top.
Tom is that rare GTM leader who combines first-principles strategy, the ability to analyze a situation both quantitatively and qualitatively, and world-class taste. He has a track record of delivering impact and leading people. All of that in one person is not common.
What Tom will be focused on
As Head of Growth, Tom leads brand, marketing, and the GTM motion as we scale from category creation to category leadership.
That means owning the top of the funnel end-to-end: the brand story, the content engine, the demand generation system, and the pipeline that feeds sales. Since joining, he's already rebuilt our brand from the ground up — new positioning, new visual identity, new content cadence, new operating rhythm with our brand strategist and design partner. Substance at speed, not substance or speed.
What's next is bigger: building the category around Signal Engineering, scaling our pipeline engine as we approach Series A, and arming every builder in the agentic era with the signals they need to compete.
Glad you finally took the call, buddy. Let's go.