Episode 122 – Tom Fanelli

Introducing Tom Fanelli

Tom is the CEO of Convesio, a new managed WordPress platform. Tom lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and four kids. Originally from Fort Myers, Florida, he served in the army right out of high school. After serving in the army, Tom went on to music school and then started his tech career in agencies.

Show Notes

Website | Convesio

Twitter | @tfanelli

Linked In | tfanelli

Video Overview | Convesio Video

Preferred Pronouns | He/Him

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 122.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Tom Fanelli. Tom is the CEO of Convesio, a new managed WordPress platform. Tom lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and four kids. Originally from Fort Myers, Florida, he served in the army right out of high school. After serving in the army, Tom went on to music school and then started his tech career in agencies. Welcome, Tom. It’s great to have you on Hallway Chats.

Tom: Thank you, Tara, and thank you, Liam. Really great to be here.

Liam: We’re excited to meet you and get to know you. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please, Tom?

Tom: Yeah, sure. As you mentioned, it was really when I was in music school that I realized I was actually better at technology than I was the artistry of being a musician. And so I gravitated a lot towards computers and the application of computers and recording. I realized I was pretty good at it. Desktop publishing, Photoshop was still in its early days. I got some of those software packages, started playing around with it and I found myself working in a newspaper doing publishing of ads, scanning on drum scanners. I’m kind of dating myself here.

But eventually, that led to me becoming a freelancer. Then it led to me becoming an agency owner and grew that agency to like seven employees. Did that for seven or eight years, went through the dot-com first. I was building websites at that time using a product called Adobe PageMill, which was super early…I see your reaction, Tara. That was way before WordPress was around. Eventually, decided that I got burnout on the agency life a little bit, and then I went into work in a soft company.

I loved that because it married the ability for me to be technical and almost do some product type of stuff but also do marketing. And so I’m kind of one of these people where my superpower is. I’m a technical marketer. So I can code a web page, but I can also write really good copy. Really what wound up happening was I started my career in what I refer to as in house at these businesses.

Then after doing that for, gosh, I don’t know, maybe six or seven more years, I had a major pivot point in my life. And that was the opportunity to roll the dice on a startup in San Francisco. I relocated my family from Florida – I had two kids at the time – relocated them to the Bay Area, went to work for this startup. At the time, I don’t think I really realized the risk involved in that because I moved and relocated everything to come out here. As everyone knows, startups have a high rate of failure. So basically did that.

We got really fortunate. We had a great product and a great set of founders.