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March 7, 2023
Tom Kiernan was my friend.
He was also my business partner for the past twenty years.
A lot of people called him "Tommy" - but I always knew him as Tom.
In early December Tom became ill, and he died six weeks later - at the way-too-young age of 58 - from a disease that is equal parts cruel and aggressive.
I first met Tom in 1995 when he came to work at Online Resources - a small company that I had joined the previous year.
At the time, the company had invented a telephone with a small LCD screen that could be used to pay bills and do your banking via dial up connections. Management was looking for ways to expand usage, so we built a version that worked with touch tone phones and then started work on a version for PCs.
When I returned from an AmEx conference about the Internet in the Spring of 1995 I went to the CEO and said we really need to get on this Internet thing and argued that it was going to be big and made business sense for us.
He was not completely convinced but told me that if I could find someone - already employed by the company- that could create a web-based version of our online banking application I could try.
I had met Tom at a few of the company Happy Hours and we shared a common interest - beer!
We also shared an interest in the Internet and Tom helped me set up a couple of travel related web sites.
When I asked him if he could build a web version of the company's banking app he said "Sure, why not".
And that is how our 28-year friendship began.
We were able to complete the first version in a few months and were actually paying bills over the Internet - via the company's ATM network connection - before the banks even realized you could do that.
That Fall, Tom and I attended an Online Banking developer's conference hosted by Microsoft at their Bellevue, WA campus.
Since it was still the early days of the Internet, there were less than 100 developers at the conference and the highlight for many of those Microsoft fanboys was when Bill Gates showed up at Happy Hour and picked up the tab.
While the fanboys crowded around Gates, Tom remained at the end of the bar sipping on some Ale - probably made from Byzantine Hops discovered in the tomb of a knight from the Crusades.
When I asked him about why he was just sitting there instead of trying to meet Gates, he paused, looked at me and said "..don't get me wrong, I appreciate the gesture, but after all the bugs I have found and reported in their software, picking up my beer tab is the least he could do."
Tom was not impressed by celebrity.
Tom also did not suffer fools gladly.
He was able to spot knuckleheads quickly and had little time for them - or their knuckleheadedness.
He hated conference calls (...and Zoom meetings later) because there would inevitably be at least one knucklehead on the call. On more than one occasion he would remind me "...you know, every minute I am on that call discussing how it should work - is one minute less for me actually making it work."
In 1996 a group of us from Online Resources were invited to a meeting with AOL.
At the time AOL was at the height of their popularity and was still carpet-bombing America's mailboxes with CDs to try to get more people to sign up for their service.
The meeting was about online banking and we convinced Tom to go along in case there were any technical questions.
This took some convincing because in his mind Tom was being asked to visit the "Valley of the Hipsters".
He did not like Hipsters.
Sure enough, when we arrive at AOL's headquarters, the first thing they do is take us to the company's fancy schmancy employee Coffee Bar - with 75 types of Cappuccino or Espresso.
Next, they take us to a conference room with a clear Lucite table with dozens of broken AOL CD's embedded in the Lucite.
These guys were at the top of their game and they knew it.
The subject of the meeting was to discuss AOL's new Financial Portal where banks could purchase a coveted spot for $500K per year to become a Gold member and be featured prominently. They were also expected to build online banking services using AOL's proprietary technology.
For $250K banks could be featured less prominently - and for $150K they could be featured even less prominently.
AOL had recently added a browser to their formerly closed environment and at one point when the AOL team asked if there were any questions, Tom uncharacteristically piped up noted that with a browser, their users could bypass the Financial Portal and go directly to their bank's website and do all their banking there. He even showed them how to navigate to one of our customer bank websites and logged in to show them what was already available via the Internet.
The AOL folks' smiles turned upside down.
Soon after our visit, AOL started promoting web-based solutions more prominently.
Coincidence - or did Tom show them the way out of the proprietary desert?
In 1999, I left Online Resources to join a small Travel Startup that was building an Internet-based booking application that would allow travel agencies to offer online booking for flights, hotels, and rental cars via their websites.
Tom had left a year earlier and was working for a company in the financial services market.
As the dot.com bubble was beginning to grow, the Travel Startup wanted to get a piece of the action. Unfortunately, up to that point they had outsourced all their development and needed to build an in-house team if they were ever going to cash in on one those Internet IPOs.
Over beers one afternoon at the Old Brogue Pub, I convinced Tom to join the Travel Startup to build a development group.
For office space, we moved into a mostly empty office building in Reston, VA and scavenged furniture - with the landlord's approval - from a company that had recently moved out and left a lot of furniture behind in the basement.
Our experience at the Travel Startup was at times positive and helpful - in that it helped us gain experience working with the reservations networks that powered the online travel world - and our future products.
It was less positive when we learned in early 2001 that the CEO's longtime assistant had apparently embezzled more than $350K of investor's money and the company could not continue.
The CEO - due to a lack of experience in shutting down a company - just stopped coming to the office. He gave us artwork instead of our promised bonuses and that was it.
Or was it?
From our experience at the Travel Startup Tom and I had discussed the limitations of the technology we were working on and thought there was a better way to serve that market if we could have started over and built something from scratch.
So, we decided to do just that, and build our own travel management platform.
Fortunately for us, the utilities - including Internet access - at the Reston office continued to work - and since no one had officially told us to move out, we continued coming to the office each day to work on our own technology.
I guess technically we were "squatters" - and I was sure that someone was going to come by our office suite each day to kick us out - but we had no place else to go so we stayed for several months and built the initial version of our own platform for what would become TravelServer Software.
After several months, a building manager did stop by and noticed us an asked us what we were doing there?
We told him - we were writing code. He told us we would have to leave.
So, the next day I called my accountant and friend Jorge, who had recently taken office space in Sterling, VA and asked if he had a spare office Tom and I could rent.
He did, so we moved - and in 2003 officially started TravelServer Software.
Over the next 20 years Tom and I navigated the company through a variety of issues not uncommon to a two-person company. We had good times and other times that were suboptimal. Through it all we persevered.
Our software worked best in vertical markets that had special needs because we had developed it from the ground up to meet a wide range of customer requirements.
At one point it was being used by almost 50 airports around the country to allow travelers to book directly from the airport website. We also had versions for Federal and State governments and members of the military.
That last version was the version we were most proud of because each year it powered thousands of soldiers booking their trips home for the holidays as part of a holiday leave program at several large military bases.
During our time in the Sterling office an Irish Pub, O'Faolains opened in the adjacent shopping center and Tom and I became regular patrons and got to know the owner and staff.
On more than one occasion, our late lunch would extend into early Happy Hour as we discussed how we would solve any number of technical challenges.
One night after a few pints, we even decided that if we ever started another company we would call it Happy Hour Technologies with the tag line - creative software engineering daily 4-7PM. The website lives on - www.HappyHourTechnologies.com
At one point, all of the Pub's business files were encrypted by ransomware that an employee had unwittingly downloaded.
After trying for several days to get their data back they were ready to pay the ransom, but Tom said he thought he could recover the data by using some obscure hidden feature of the OS that most people have never heard of.
And he did it! He recovered all of their data. They were so grateful they picked up our tab for that afternoon.
That was my first glimpse of Tom's willingness to give back to the community.
Over the next several years he would volunteer to play Santa each year at the annual Pub Christmas Party.
He would also get involved with the local Lion's Club and help them each year during their fundraising ventures.
He had a big heart and would try to help whenever he saw someone who needed assistance.
Over the past few years, even pre-pandemic, Tom worked remotely from his home on the hill in Haymarket, Va. We would communicate daily - mostly via Slack or text or the occasional phone call when something needed a deep dive.
As demand for our software ebbed and flowed, we would take on custom development projects that Tom would work on for a certain number of hours per week.
Most recently, at the height of the Crypto market, we took a gig modifying our software to allow travelers to pay with cryptocurrencies.
Our thinking was that if we could give the folks holding crypto a way to spend it on something like travel - instead of just drugs, Teslas or porn - it might help move the market and maybe some rich Crypto-bro might offer us a bunch of money for our cool technology.
Didn't happen.
One of our customers approached me in November about a new project that we were supposed to start in January.
Tom was excited about the new opportunity, and we were about to start working on the design specs when he became ill.
At first, we were hoping that his memory loss and confusion would be a temporary condition and that he would soon be back to the old Tom we all loved and cared about.
Unfortunately, his illness morphed into something far more sinister and deadly - something called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD).
And now Tom is gone - and he is missed by so many.
This past weekend I returned to Virginia for an Irish Wake to celebrate Tom's life.
I was blown away by the number of people who showed up..
Knowing Tom, I am sure that he would have been embarrassed by the spectacle - and curious why there was a sprinkling of Hipsters in attendance - but appreciative of the outpouring, nonetheless.
I will try to keep Tom's memory alive by celebrating the way he lived his life - he had a big heart, he was a loyal friend, he loved his dogs, and he gave back to the community.
Tom was one of the Good Guys.
Tom Kiernan was my friend.
