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12|The Gatherer
www.wrays.com.au| 13
Thomas Thurston
Managing Director of WR Hambrecht
Ventures and Founder and CEO of Growth
Science
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
University and the ongoing
pressure to be innovative
in the current business
environment.
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.