Thomas Manuel Varsavsky stage debut

I have four children First I had two girls and then two boys. My kids ages range from 17 to 1.   Thomas Manuel Varsavsky is my third child, he turned 13 in July.  To me he´s still a very young child. But, as you can see in the picture, Tom has found a new calling. To speak at tech conferences. In the picture, taken by Morten Lund, you see Tom at the speaker´s dinner at SIME in Copenhagen.

How did this happen? Well Ola Ahlvarsson my dear friend and occasional mentor to Tom (Ola was world champion of Kick Boxing and Karate and has given Tom some training in martial arts) asked me for permission to invite Tom to be a speaker in the session “Digital Natives”. My problem was that I could not accompany Tom, because I had a Fon board meeting on the very same date and at the exact time that Tom was going to speak. When I recommended to Tom to leave this for another time he so much to go alone that –with the approval of Patricia Aisemberg, my ex wife–, we agreed that Tom was going to fly to Copenhagen alone from Madrid and attend the whole conference and, on top of that, to have his own session to speak in front of hundreds of techies about his passion for games.

At this point my readers probably think that I nurture my children to be tech entrepreneurs, but that´s not the case. I am giving a similar education to all my kids and only Tom showed tremendous interest in technology.  This probably happened as a result for the typical interest that boys his age have in game consoles and PC Gaming. But in the case of Tom this went further and he attended summer camp at Stanford University learning to program Javascript. I was able to do this in the summer as I needed to be close to my investors at Fon including Sequoia, Ebay and Google and Stanford is placed right in the middle of all three.  To me what´s great about Tom is that he is interested in the three key aspects of gaming which are playing the games themselves, learning about the technologies that make them possible and even learning about the business models behind each game.

Is it a coincidence that there are families of actors, or doctors? Probably not. We teach our children what we know. In my case my father was a tough act to follow and I did not become a Harvard PhD in Astrophysics. But I did get from my dad his passion for science and technology and so did my son. Way to go Tom, you rock!