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Media Centre: In the News
Whiz kid shuns wealth for charity work. Fed up with the dotcom business, B.C. boy genius turns his hand to helping the needy Author: Doug Ward | Publisher: Vancouver Sun Date: 13 November, 2004 VANCOUVER - When Tom Williams was 13 years old, growing up in Victoria, he would phone the chief executive officer of computer giant Apple Computer most mornings before leaving for school. Williams would leave a message with a secretary, saying that he wanted a job. That CEO, John Sculley, was eventually fired, but he didn't forget the persistence of the kid from Victoria. One day the phone rang and the boy ran up the stairs to answer. It was Sculley. Young Tom asked him to join the advisory board of the computer software company he was operating out of his bedroom. 
The former Apple CEO agreed and offered Tom some work at a computer firm he'd joined in California. The Victoria
boy flew down, did some work for Sculley's firm, and was quickly recruited by Apple. A year later, at age 14,
Williams was earning $80,000 a year and living in Silicon Valley.
He was the ultimate computer whiz, a brash kid way younger than the other prodigies revolutionizing the booming tech sector. He was a Grade 8 drop-out trying to fit in by picking up the tab at business lunches with greying executives older than his father. He'd flip through his collection of business cards from computer company CEOs and Apple executives just like other kids his age delighted in their baseball cards. He rode the late '90s Internet bubble, designing interactive websites and analysing business plans for venture capital billionaires. The Kid has since down-shifted. Now 25, he lives in an apartment off south Granville Street in Vancouver with pop singer Jessie Farrell. No more 18-hour work days. No more living in Manhattan hotels. No more flying home every weekend from New York to hang with friends. No more annual salaries in the mid-six figures. These days Williams is using his business skills, evangelical charisma and whiz-kid persona to develop a new online marketplace for charitable giving. Williams has put tens of thousands of dollars of his own money into creating Plenteus Technologies, an Internet company designed to link non-profit charities with potential donors. He has left the flashy world of new media/high-tech capitalism for the sedate, old-school world of non-profits. Former colleagues in the business world are shaking their heads. They turned him down when he asked them to invest in his project. They think he's gone soft in the head. If there was an epiphanic moment for Williams' career shift, it came shortly after his return to Vancouver two years ago from Los Angeles. "A friend of mine, who lived here, asked me: 'What are you passionate about?'," he says. Williams couldn't answer the question and realized that over the years he'd lost touch with the idealism that had shaped his pre-teen, pre-Apple years when he would volunteer at a local Victoria bird sanctuary or fire off letters to McDonald's about their environmentally damaging styrofoam cups. The loss of innocence had been punctuated by one business deal he made with a Toronto-based software company while working for Knowledge Universe, the venture capital fund financed by junk-bond king Michael Milken and Oracle Corporation founder Larry Elison. "We had reached an equitable deal, but that wasn't good enough for the people I worked for. And so promises were broken and instead of saying that 'I'm not comfortable with this,' I proceeded. But I knew it was wrong," he says. The incident accelerated his disenchantment with his business career. "I had gone to the pinnacle of the venture capital world, but it had shocked me. Depressed me. In the pursuit of money, influence and power, I had lost sight of that child's passion," Williams says. "So for me there was a yearning to return to that childhood, to that innocence." Williams was tired of "creating an unnecessary demand for products" and he no longer wanted to be "famous for being famous" as a whiz kid. He thought he might find some passion by getting involved with a few local non-profits in Vancouver. He was searching for some meaning that he never felt working at Apple, where he'd helped pioneer the interactive music industry. Or at MultiActive Technologies in Vancouver where he headed a team developing educational games for the World Wide Web. Or at Fortune 500 companies including News Corp and Intel, where his job was to predict which new start-ups would thrive and which would fail. Or as an analyst for a Los Angeles-based venture capital firm owned by Ellison and Milken. So Williams began searching for non-profits with which to work, but found there was no directory of charities -- no easy way to locate non-profits and find out what they were about. Once he isolated the problem, Williams began searching for a solution and that pursuit led to the creation of Plenteus Technologies. The idea was to provide an online registry of charitable nonprofit organizations; to set up a start-up that would kick-start people's generosity. Williams looked for investors for Plenteus but got the cold shoulder. Eventually, two friends agreed to contribute, and with their money and his own, Williams spent $100,000 to start the website. Williams said he pays seven staff an average of $2,000 a month, adding that the Plenteus employees are under no illusions about the start-up making them rich. Plenteus takes seven-per-cent of all donations -- an amount that Williams believes should make the company sustainable within 18 months to two years. Williams said his company's take is less than the 11 per cent charged by the United Way and less than the 26-per-cent average cost charged to charities by most fund-raising agencies. Williams estimates that Plenteus will need about $750,000 to cover annual costs. To reach this figure -- based on the seven-per-cent service charge -- Plenteus will need to raise $10 million annually in donations. "The question is whether this is all bulls--t? Only time will tell," says Williams. Williams said that over 100 non-profits have registered so far, but that the list of participants won't appear on the website www.plenteus.com until Dec. 5. At that point donors can use the website to search for specific charities or causes and donate online. The Plenteus site also provides a link to another Williams website called www.givemeaning.com, a holiday gift certificate initiative. The GiveMeaning™ program, which becomes active Sunday in time for Christmas, allows people to purchase charitable certificates online and give them to others as redeemable donations to charities of the recipient's choice. "I think it's a brilliant idea. I think it will make the pie larger," says Stephanie Nicolls, a marketing consultant and prominent volunteer fundraiser in Vancouver. Nicolls says she doesn't think the Plenteus initiatives will "cannibalize" existing charitable fundraising. "I think it will add to the number of givers who are out there in a way that is that is easy to understand and hassle free," she says. Mike McKnight, president of the United Way of the Lower Mainland, says he hasn't heard of Plenteus, but that "any mechanism that provides donors with information on charities is a good thing. It's critically important to the charity sector." Bill Turner, CEO of the Victoria-based Land Conservancy, has placed his non-profit on the Plenteus site. He thinks Williams' www.givemeaning.com program will introduce charitable giving to a younger generation. "The concept is a brilliant idea...this idea of giving people a charitable credit that they can choose to direct to a charity of their choice. And it gives the charity funding that otherwise wouldn't be available to them," he says. It all seems pie-in-the sky, but Williams has never been one to limit his imagination. As a boy, he would lose himself in the creation of grand structures out of Lego. When he bought a chocolate bar at the corner store, he would convince the store to throw in a few packs of Kool-Aid. Tom would then sell the Kool-Aid and the revenue would be used to buy more chocolate bars. At age 11, he operated his first computer and soon became its master. He would sit in front of the terminal with an array of computer books at his side, and program his own games. By age 12 he had started his own software company, Desert Island Software, which led him to start phoning Apple. His subsequent career brought him into contact, as a teen, with some of the titans of the '90s business world-- Sculley, Milken, Ellison and News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch. Williams said that he could have acquired greater personal wealth and then later used his fortune to do good, but he no longer wanted to put off what he wanted to do. "I'd thought: 'Why not try to become rich like a George Soros or Warren Buffett and then give it away.' But everything in my life has been about tomorrow. And now I think: 'Why not now?'."
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