Akin to the way he lives his life, 28-year old Tom Hall rose to the top in record time, becoming Crowd Academy’s first ever Cadet Graduate and Certified Crowd Machine Developer, in a mere 51 hours! Not a surprise really, Tom has rapidly excelled his entire life. Originally from Milan, Italy, Tom moved to the UK as a child, where he was awarded a scholarship at the Westminster Cathedral Choir School at the wee age of eight years, playing both piano and flute.
While Tom set off on a career in accounting, he taught himself how to code in his spare time. The manual requirements inherent in the accounting profession led him to seek methods by which machines could handle these formulaic tasks. Alongside his career, Tom pushed himself for more knowledge, teaching himself how to build iphone apps, web apps, databases, trading algorithms, and more recently, DApps for distributed web technologies. Pushing himself even further, in his spare time, Tom can be found scaling mountains around the world; having climbed peaks in the UK, US, and Peru.
Tom, a self-described “creative” and “risk taker” has always aimed to keep his knowledge broad and relevant recognizing that technology moves so fast that there isn’t always time to learn everything. Tom was introduced to Crowd Academy while attending the Oxford Blockchain Strategy Programme in 2018, where he met Crowd Machine CEO, Craig Sproule. Despite his skepticism of “zero-code”platforms, over a pint in a pub with Craig, Tom made the decision to give Crowd Academy a go.
After jumping into Crowd Academy, Tom “quickly saw how simple Crowd Machine approach to development was,” and this inspired him to get through the content quickly so he could start experimenting with the platform. Tom describes the process as, “empowering, revolutionary and liberating.”
Tom realizes that “every business relies on technology and businesses with the greatest tech, have the greatest advantage.” And today, “those who have a good idea can create new market monopolies by creating apps. Apps have already democratized public access to global scale invention and innovation, but brought with them a high threshold for technical literacy and huge resource requirements for development and maintenance.” However, “Crowd Machine removes these final barriers, by allowing anyone, to design and implement an app idea with minimal technical difficulty, and importantly, without having to worry about spending years learning to write code.”
With his ever-expanding skill set, Tom plans on revolutionizing the way that accounting mechanism works, and redefining how companies demonstrate accountability. “I came out of Crowd Academy feeling confident enough to start work on my project; and have since built three core integrations for my application with relative ease, in less than an hour.” The project uses blockchain and distributed web technology to solve a fundamental problem in accounting while delivering additional benefits to the businesses. Tom summarizes his “Lorem” project by saying, “we are challenging an outdated system and developing a better method which incorporates new technologies that automate financial reporting and provide new tools able to accurately measure performance, providing a new level of assurance and fraud prevention.” Tom originally envisioned using traditional coding methods which would require an initial influx of outside funding. “Crowd Machine has offered a new path. We are now building the system ourselves, and plan on becoming profitable, before seeking external funding to grow our business.”
On to Mount Everest!
