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Editor-in-Chief Doug Mohney interviews another of the extraordinary, far-sighted individuals whose efforts have made possible today’s IP communications industry.

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 Sun-based 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.