Advisory Board

Thomas J. Frey

Thomas J. Frey is the Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute, currently Google’s top-rated futurist speaker, a celebrity speaker, and IBM’s Most Award-Winning Engineer. He works closely with his Board of Visionaries to develop original research studies, which enables him to speak on unusual topics, translating trends into unique opportunities. He is author of Communicating with the Future and senior futurist at the NSA.

Tom is based in Westminster, Colorado at the DaVinci Institute, which he founded. He works to develop original research studies in areas not normally addressed by futurists and has predicted the end of traditional colleges and printed books, but not the library.

Over the past decade, Tom has built an enormous following around the world based on his ability to develop accurate visions of the future and describe the opportunities ahead. Having started seventeen businesses himself and assisting on the development of hundreds more, the understanding he brings to his audiences is a rare blend of reality-based thinking coupled with a clear-headed visualization of the world ahead.

Before launching the DaVinci Institute, Tom spent 15 years at IBM as an engineer and designer where he received over 270 awards, more than any other IBM engineer. He is also a past member of the Triple Nine Society, a high I.Q. society with over 99.9 percentile. He is a serial entrepreneur and has personally launched 17 different startups in his 13 year career as an entrepreneur. About half of these companies are still in existence.

Tom was the Innovations Editor for The Futurist for more than 16 years, where he had the weekly column on the future posted on The Futurist Blog, was speaker at the global conferences, and writer for the print edition of The Futurist. While there he was also Contributing Writer for Morning Calm, the In-Flight Magazine for Korean Airlines, between 2007 and 2009. Currently he is also the Editor of the Impact Lab, an online emerging technology blog which was recently rated by Popular Science Magazine as one of the “top five science blogs in the known universe”.

For more than 9 years, Tom was also a Columnist for ColoradoBiz Magazine, where he had a personal column online and was a writer for the print edition.

His keynote talks on futurist topics have captivated people ranging from high level government officials to executives in Fortune 500 companies including NASA, Disney, IBM, the Federal Reserve Bank, TED, AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, Visa, Frito-Lay, Toshiba, Dow Chemical, KPMG, Siemens, Rockwell, Wired Magazine, Caterpillar, PepsiCo, Deloitte & Touche, Hunter Douglas, Amgen, Capital One, National Association of Federal Credit Unions, Korean Broadcast System, Bell Canada, American Chemical Society, Times of India, Leaders in Dubai, and many more.

Because of his work inspiring inventors and other revolutionary thinkers, the Boulder Daily Camera has referred to him as the “Father of Invention”. The Denver Post and Seattle Post Intelligencer have referred to him as the “Dean of Futurists”

Tom has been featured in thousands of articles for both national and international publications including New York Times, Huffington Post, Times of India, USA Today, US News and World Report, Popular Science, The Futurist Magazine, Forbes, Fast Company, World Economic Forum, Times of Israel, Mashable, Bangkok Post, National Geographics, ColoradoBiz Magazine, Rocky Mountain News, and many more. He currently writes a weekly Future Trend Report newsletter and a weekly column for the Futurist Speaker Blog.

Tom has been also a columnist for the Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, and Boulder County Business Report. He is also the author of the books Communicating with the Future and Epiphany Z.

Tom earned his Bachelor’s degree of Arts in Technical Business Strategy and in Ergonomic Design from Loretto Heights University in 1984. In 1972, he went to South Dakota State University where he studied Engineering for two years.

Read Q&A with Tom at BitDegree. Watch Tom presenting DaVinci Institute and talking about future at BrooksInternational in 2008. Watch his TEDxUChicago Talk about Communicating with the Future and 2 Billion Jobs to Disappear by 2030!

Read his article on the Rise in Specialized Education. Read quotes by Tom at BrainyQuote. Watch his video Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Yet Exist, The Future of Payments, 33 Predictions for 2030, and The First Trillionaires.

Visit his LinkedIn profile, personal homepage, and company webpage. Follow and read his articles on LinkedIn. Follow him on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. View his eSpeakers and a-speaker profiles.