Thomas Marban

Hey, It's Thomas Marban!

Another entrepreneur on the Internet. (っಠ‿ಠ)っ

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About

My mission is to preserve the foundational principles of the Web, bridging business with a hands-on approach to design and tech. I have extensive experience in the tech and media sectors, launching, selling, and failing in a range of startup endeavors.

I co-founded celum.com in the '90s, leading to its buyout in the mid-2000s. I then co-created Twidroyd, the very first Android Twitter app that scaled to millions of users.
I created Popurls, a Webby Award-winning Web 2.0 news aggregator, which spawned an entire generation of news delivery formats and to this day has inspired thousands of sites across all industries. Both were acquired by Idealab around 2010.
I launched the first dedicated read-it-later service and a real-time news search engine, both of which were acquired in 2014.
I worked with Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly on the CoolTools relaunch, and joined the founding team of three Idealab companies, one of which went public in 2023.

Most recently, I launched BizToc with an investment from Mark Cuban.
I also serve as an advisor to media startups, currently working with Prorata alongside Bill Gross, Silverside within the Serviceplan Group, and on a skunkworks project for the European Union.

I've had my share of setbacks with ventures like blogging platforms, social marketplaces, monetizing newsletters, a sports nutrition business, a fashion deal aggregator, a corporate PR tool, an AI education startup, among many others that didn't turn out as hoped.

I'm a recognized expert in news aggregation and contributor to OpenBB — the open-source Bloomberg terminal.
I'm occasionally available for consulting.

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EU JAPAN USA