A lot has changed under Tom’s two decades of leadership at CMEA Capital beginning from CMEA’s inception as a $40 million fund called “Chemicals and Materials Enterprise Associates.” As its name implies, CMEA’s early focus was to invest in startup enterprises that commercialized new applications of specialty chemicals and materials technologies. The biggest changes at CMEA are that the firm, now known as CMEA Capital, now has $1.2 billion under management and operates across a diverse spectrum of industries.

But many things have not changed at CMEA, such as its strategy of backing world-class leaders who understand that great companies are built on excellence in every dimension of the business, ranging from the best ideas to the very best people and investors.

Today, Tom heads the firm’s Energy and Materials team, where he is on the lookout for entrepreneurs with a passion to change the world. “If it can’t make a difference to bettering the lives of people today and in future generations,” Tom says, “an investment is not worth doing.” He believes it’s okay to wait things out for the very best investment in the markets you want to serve. Leveraging his many years of experience, he now knows when a company has the right combination for potential success – a breakthrough idea, a growing demand and the right people to make it happen.

Tom also admires simplicity. “People try to make the process complex, and it really is not” he says. “The more complex the process, the more likely it will fail.”

Tom, who is a registered patent attorney, honed his early-stage investment skills at the Battelle Development Corporation, and then at Exxon in the 1970’s, where he headed the investment group focused on new materials technologies for emerging industries in semiconductors and high performance composites. Tom founded CMEA Capital with New Enterprise Associates in 1989 after having previously cofounded his own startup, Microwave Technology, Inc., in 1983.

Tom’s successful early-stage investments at CMEA Capital include Aclara Biosciences (which merged with Monogram Biosciences,) Flextronics, Entropic Communications, Silicon Spice (acquired by BRCM), and Symyx Technologies.

Because Tom was at Exxon during the 1973 energy crisis, he saw, in 2000 at CMEA Capital, that the growing concern of climate considerations, geopolitics, rising energy demands and advancements in the field of material science made an emerging market for clean energy imminent. He expanded CMEA’s focus to include investments in “clean” energy. His special interest in clean energy involved leveraging CMEA’s unique expertise in combinatorial synthesis of new materials which was the basis for successful investments of CMEA Capital at Maxygen and Symyx Technologies. Early stage investments by CMEA Capital in Codexis, Cnano, Draths, Intermolecular, and Wildcat soon followed.

Tom believes his background and experience in the technology sector give him a unique perspective with which he can give back to the community. He serves on a number of boards of non profit institutions including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; That Man May See; UC San Diego’s Dean’s Leadership Council, The Division of Biological Sciences; and The Energy, Security, Innovation and Sustainability (ESIS) Initiative Steering Committee of the Council on Competitiveness, in Washington D.C.