About Tom

Blockchain and Decentralized Ledger Advocate

Tom Trowbridge is an entrepreneur and business builder; he is a co-founder of Fluence Labs, and Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) where he was President from Inception. He is a board member of Stronghold Digital Mining (NASDAQ: SDIG), and is an investor in leading DePIN projects and crypto funds. Tom is an advocate for decentralized systems and distributed ledger/blockchain technology and believes these open source tools provide the best opportunity to build fairer, more transparent, and higher-functioning societies, government, and business ecosystems. He is passionate about driving education regarding blockchain, Bitcoin and the great promise of distributed systems.

The technology to disrupt monopolies, fight corruption and strengthen democratic governance

Tom believes that open source, decentralized networks and blockchains are the best technologies to drive interoperability and innovation; combating corruption, giving everyone a voice, and providing more trustworthy governance. Tom believes that implementing these technologies will make our systems more efficient, transparent and innovative, enabling us to address the challenges of entrenched monopolies, reduced accountability, unrepresentative governance and climate change.

Co-founding Fluence Labs

Fluence powers the Cloudless internet with a decentralized computing platform. The Fluence DePIN platform frees computation from centralized cloud providers by offering natively decentralized, low cost, and verifiable compute. Fluence makes applications faster to build, easier to integrate, and more secure, allowing developers to focus on improving user features.

Fluence Labs was seeded by 1kx, and its Series A round was led by Multicoin with participation from other top-tier web3 investors, angels, and projects such as Protocol Labs and Arweave.

Building Hedera Hashgraph

Tom built and led Hedera as president from inception. Hedera is the only enterprise grade public ledger designed for and governed by enterprises and suitable for mission critical applications. Tom drove the business from concept to mainnet launch with a $6 billion valuation, a global team in eight countries, over 500 companies building and testing the network and a groundbreaking corporate governance council. He led the structuring, formation and recruitment of the initial governing council of Fortune 100 global companies including Google, LG, IBM, Deutsche Telekom, Nomura, DLA Piper and Tata, ran the $124mm fundraise including a $20mm crowd sale, initiated discussions with three US regulatory bodies, led the listing process with top global exchanges and was the principal public face of the firm, speaking at over twenty conferences.

Tom’s History Building Technology

Tom has a BA from Yale University and an MBA from Columbia University with honors (Beta Gamma Sigma). He has been advising technology companies since 1996 when he started his career as an investment banker in the telecom group of Bear, Stearns & Co. He began investing in early stage companies in 1998 as a member of the Private Equity and Venture Capital firm, Alta Communications. Over four years he executed ten deals in technology, telecom and media and served on multiple boards. Tom spent nearly four years at Goldman Sachs and left to build businesses; first at Atticus Capital and then at Lombard Odier. Before joining Hedera, Tom started and ran the New York office for UK-based Odey Asset Management.

Today

Tom is focused on launching Fluence and driving both adoption and awareness of the DePIN sector (decentralized physical infrastructure networks), and its importance in the next wave of internet innovation. He is a regular speaker at conferences, a frequent guest on podcasts and has authored numerous thought leadership pieces.