Tom Pincince was born on December 1, 1963, in Pasadena, Calif. As a child, Pincince was ahead of the curve, taking high school algebra in the third grade. His higher education path proved to be a bit more unique. Pincince started out as a pre-med student at Brown University, but he didn’t pass organic chemistry, a requirement to move forward. While pondering his future, he built sets for an alternative theatre in Providence and enjoyed the work so much he considered transferring to the Rhode Island School of Design to major in architecture.

Instead, he remained at Brown and changed his major to neuroscience. His thesis project examined brain injury treatment and studied how a mouse’s whiskers transmit information to its brain. His work is still being used by his professor as a teaching and research aid.

He went on to MIT’s graduate program in brain and cognitive science, where he studied Alzheimer’s disease and other memory disorders. Although he found the work to be quite interesting, Pincince wasn’t sure if he wanted to end up as a college professor–but he was interested in the potential of his Macintosh.

Out of graduate school, Pincince talked his way into a job at voice technology pioneer Kurzweil Technologies, convincing the company he could write C despite having no experience in the language. He taught himself C at night, learning just enough fast enough to be able to port the company’s Sunbased optical character-reading software to the Mac.

Kurzweil, owned by Xerox, exposed him to the tensions between the entrepreneurial and corporate worlds. Pincince preferred the former to the later and left Kurzweil to take a series of jobs at Boston-area high-tech companies, gaining technical and managerial experience that helped him land a position at Forrester Research as an industry analyst in the mid-1990s. As director of Forrester Research’s Network Strategy Service, he focused on the commercial use of the Internet, and defined the market for corporate intranets and the possibilities of private data services over the public Internet.

Tired of watching other people make money from his ideas, he left Forrester to start New Oak Communications, a pioneering vendor of virtual private networking (VPN) switches that was acquired in 1998 by Bay Networks (now Nortel Networks), to create the Contivity Extranet Switch product family.

Leaving Nortel, he took some time off and started Brix Networks in July 1999. Today, Pincince is still at Brix, and the company is a growing and widely acknowledged global leader in providing solutions that allow carriers, service providers, cable companies, and large enterprises to guarantee the successful launch and ongoing, profitable operation of various IP-based services, including voice (VoIP), video (IPTV, VoD), and data (Internet).

Pincince is a member of the Massachusetts Network Communications Council’s Board of Directors, the Museum of Science Boston’s Board of Directors, and he was selected as a finalist for Ernst & Young’s 2003 New England Entrepreneur of the Year Award. He is married and has a daughter and a son.

Mohney: I’ve always heard stories about people bluffing their way into jobs as programmers without any previous experience, but you actually did it! And working in C at Kurzweil Technologies no less! How did you manage that feat?