Tom West
I live and breathe entrepreneurship, building startups and studying why certain venture creation systems work… or don’t.
Two decades across startups, institutional capital, and applied research in entrepreneurship.
About Me
I build companies, study how venture creation works, and invest where the two overlap. I’ve been doing some version of this for more than 25 years.
Background
I started my first company in college, an automated document processing business for legal formations. I ran it for six years and exited through an equity sale. After that I spent time consulting internationally before settling in Indonesia, where I’ve been based for the last 18 years.
In 2013 I founded Island Media, a digital agency that grew to 50+ people working across brand, strategy, product development and digital marketing. Island Media was acquired by Juicebox, an award-winning Australian digital agency and product development shop in 2023.
Along the way, I managed the growth fund at Intergen Limited, making institutional investments into early stage digital asset infrastructure. This experience shapes my framing of the venture studio model: as a portfolio of compound real options that systematically derisks individual ventures through stage-gate validation and a scale/fail fast protocol.
Current work
In 2023, I stumbled onto Max Pog’s first venture studio research piece on LinkedIn and it made me curious about what actually makes certain venture creation models work better than others. That led me to participate in the BVSR’24 project and to produce an independent quantitative study on venture studio success correlates, now in revision for journal publication. These findings were interesting enough, and counter-intuitive enough, that I’m now writing a book about them.
I’m building a venture studio of my own, intently informed by the research findings. The studio uses AI to compress the early stages of company creation so the model can be tested at a pace and cost that wasn’t possible a few years ago.
Education
CFA Charter, CFA Institute
MBA, Finance, University of London
Executive Program in AI Business Strategy, Johns Hopkins University
Upcoming
Cambridge Venture Builder Symposium, April 30, 2026. Presenting research on what distinguishes venture studios that produce exits from those that don’t.