The Gatherer Volume 3

Thomas Thurston Managing Director of WR Hambrecht Ventures and Founder and CEO of Growth Science University and the ongoing pressure to be innovative in the current business environment. In our recent Pioneer podcast interview Wrays’ CEO, Frank Hurley spoke with Thomas Thurston, Managing Director of WR Hambrecht Ventures and Founder and CEO of Growth Science about his experience working alongside Professor Clay Christensen at Harvard

Frank: Thomas, you worked alongside professor Clay Christensen at Harvard, who’s one of the experts on disruption theory I understand. What was that like? Thomas: Obviously Christensen’s extremely smart and well credentialed but I think one of the things that surprised me, or delighted me the most working with Christensen, is that he’s one of the most humble, down to earth people you’ll ever meet. You’d have no idea who you were talking to if you were sitting next to him on the bus. He’s much more interested in asking questions than he is about talking, which is can be rare for a Harvard professor. Frank: Is he practical or more abstract? Does he apply his stuff? Thomas: He often gets accused of being too theoretical, but I find that he’s got a much deeper appreciation for operations than most people think. He actually started a ceramic high performance start up, before he became a professor. It was quite successful and went public. He knows what it’s like to run a business, and the stress of trying to generate revenue. Where a lot of professors don’t have that background. I think he gets accused of being theoretical, and in reality I think he’s a lot more practical than most of his peers. Because he’s become so famous and well known, I think people sometimes lump him in as a guru. When they put him in this category of people and he gets accused sometimes in academia of being too much flash and maybe the inference is not enough substance. I think what’s interesting is, he’s actually just a really good scientist, and although he’s become famous, when you look at his work he really has a deep appreciation for the scientific method and what quality research looks like. He follows it very closely. I think a lot of people have taken his ideas and sort of bastardized them in other ways. His work that he’s done directly is quite powerful. I think in hindsight, the biggest takeaway from working with Christensen was probably just shoving the scientific method into my DNA. In other words, he really does explicitly demand that you go through all the steps, all the statistical tests and all the control tests. He really teaches you what that is and why that’s important. I never would have expected that that would have been the biggest takeaway from working with him. I think ten years later, that’s the one thing that’s shaped everything I’ve achieved since then.

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