Tom Hammond

About Tom Hammond

I’ve always had the entrepreneurial sickness as I call it where I’m never fully satisfied with things - always wanting to change, optimize and improve. Over the years I’ve had numerous failed startups - at least five but I may have lost count. Once I started a company with a single co-founder where we both spent 6 hours coding that bought and sold online auto sales leads via API, on launch we started making $600/year in passive profit on pace for $18m+ ARR which eventually ended up failing due to issues with Experian. Not too bad for 6 hours of work- It gave me a taste for the power of entrepreneurship and the opportunity to scale tech based ventures. Since then I\'ve never looked back. My first successful startup was TheoremReach where upon struggling to find a technical cofounder I taught myself to code and built everything myself. We then bootstrapped the company to eight figures in revenue with very healthy EBIT profits and obscenely high revenue/employee and hit #116 on the Inc I learned a lot of lessons here like the importance of vision, core values and how all amazing things are done by finding the best people in the world, giving them whatever they need and then getting out of their way. This eventually led me to helping a lot of games, some small to some of the biggest and most well known in the world optimize and improve their monetization. As often happens in gaming, this expanded quickly to game and economy design, liveops, retention optimization, etc. These days I’m focused on the game operations space with UserWise. In the world of games as a service there is a tremendous amount of operational complexity that requires extremely sophisticated software that the top publishers spend years and tens of millions building. Even still most of the tools built suck and take way too much time and effort to use because game devs don’t want to make tools, they want to make games. We’re changing all that with the world’s first liveops engine. Lastly, I’ve started to dabble in small check angel investing and advising free to play game startups as a very hands on, strategic investor. I look to invest in the best teams in the world creating f2p games in pre-seed rounds. I’m the host of the Mastering Retention podcast - http://masteringretention.com. If you make games, give it a listen. There are some incredible guests from the biggest game companies of the world sharing awesome insights. And join the community of game creators looking to level up their skills on the free learning platform UserWise Academy - https://userwise.io/academy

Experience

1. Co-founder and CEO

   Userwise

   Feb 2020 — Present · US

Education

• Penn State University

  Bachelor's degree, Marketing

  1995 — 2000

• Penn State University

  Master of Public Administration (MPA), Human Resources Management/Personnel Administration, General

  2011 — 2013