Where are economic value and social impact migrating, and how can we create more of both?

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01 / ABOUT

The world is shaped by dependencies we rarely see.

A company can make an extraordinary product and still fail because a critical supplier can’t keep up. A breakthrough technology can arrive years too early because scientists in a seemingly unrelated field can’t get the enzyme they need. Billions can be spent improving healthcare while the thing holding back progress sits somewhere almost nobody is looking.

What makes this interesting is that the bottleneck rarely stays put. Technologies mature. Capacity catches up. Regulations change. One problem disappears and another becomes important.

Money follows these changes. Something that was once ordinary can become scarce, difficult and suddenly valuable. Profits move with it.

The same is true when the objective isn’t financial. Improving people’s lives or the planet can depend on finding a bottleneck buried somewhere in a much larger system.

The difficult part is knowing where to look.

Thomas Thurston explores how economic value and social impact are created and move through the world. Using data science, he uncovers the unexpected dependencies that shape technology, markets and society.

He began his career at Intel, asking why some new businesses survive while others don’t. He found that the strongest predictors often weren’t inside the companies themselves, but in the systems around them and how each company fit within those systems. That observation led to a research collaboration with Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School, where he helped develop quantitative methods for understanding disruptive innovation. It has guided his work ever since.

Today, Thomas is Chief Technologist at Ducera Partners, an investment bank that has advised on more than $900 billion in transactions. He runs Growth Science Ventures, where his team manages corporate venture capital funds for S&P 500 companies while conducting foundational data science research into the forces that shape markets, technology and society. He is also a Partner at WR Hambrecht + Co., whose venture capital history includes early financings of Apple, Amazon, Google and Nvidia.

Thomas Thurston explores how economic value and social impact are created and move through the world. Using data science, he uncovers the unexpected dependencies that shape markets, technology and society. His work spans investing, innovation, philanthropy and public policy, but the underlying question has remained the same: what are the hidden forces that determine how complex systems actually behave?

He began at Intel, asking why some new businesses survive while others don’t. He pioneered the use of quantitative, data-driven methods for predicting the commercial outcomes of emerging innovations. He found that the strongest predictors often weren’t inside the companies themselves, but in the systems around them and how each company fit within those systems. That observation led to a research collaboration with Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School, where he helped develop quantitative methods for understanding disruptive innovation.

Today, Thomas is Chief Technologist at Ducera Partners, where he applies this work to mergers, acquisitions and corporate strategy. He runs Growth Science Ventures, where his team manages corporate venture capital funds for S&P 500 companies while conducting foundational data science research into the forces that shape markets, technology and society. He is also a Partner at WR Hambrecht + Co., whose venture capital history includes early financings of Apple, Amazon, Google and Nvidia.

Thomas explores how economic value and social impact are created and move through the world. Using data science, he uncovers the unexpected dependencies that shape technology, markets and society. He is Chief Technologist at Ducera Partners, runs Growth Science Ventures and is a Partner at WR Hambrecht + Co.

02 / ROLES

Ducera Partners

Growth Science Ventures

WR Hambrecht & Co

Chief Technologist

Founder, Managing Partner

Partner, Chief Technology Officer

03 / FEATURED IN

04 / CONTACT