A great idea can
come from anywhere
It is not about the clothes you wear. It is not about how eloquently you talk. If there is gold in what you have, it is lying somewhere beyond dressing, beyond appearance, beyond enunciation, beyond language.
A great idea can come from a village or from the most sophisticated university, from the most affluent family or from someone on the street. What matters is the ability to see it, the methods to scale it, and how it is perceived. TOM was built for the last of those, and built to be honest about it.
The same words, a different voice
Identical pitch scripts were narrated by men and by women. Sixty-eight percent of listeners chose the male voice. Attractive men scored higher still. The content never changed.
Brooks, Huang, Kearney & Murray, PNAS, 2014.
The accent over the idea
Founders with a non-native accent were 23% less likely to be funded in real competitions, and it wasn't because they were harder to understand. It was a judgement about "political skill", which is really a judgement about the person.
Huang, Frideger & Pearce, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2013.
The polish that gets funded, then fails
Across more than a thousand accelerator pitch videos, teams that looked happier and sounded more enthusiastic were up to a third more likely to be funded, and then did worse on follow-on funding and survival. Investors paid for the polish, and the polish didn't predict how those companies went on to do.
Hu & Ma, Journal of Finance, 2025.
Coaching the form without the substance
In a randomised trial, pitch training added the standard elements and did nothing to experienced investors' scores; with inexperienced judges it made scores worse. Experienced investors can tell when the structure is there and the substance isn't.
Clingingsmith & Shane, Management Science, 2018.
Who actually builds the fastest-growing companies
The average age of the founders of the fastest-growing 0.1% of new American firms is forty-five. Experience in the specific industry is the strongest predictor, ahead of youth or pedigree.
Azoulay, Jones, Kim & Miranda, AER: Insights, 2020.
Where they come from
More than half of the American companies worth a billion dollars or more have at least one immigrant founder.
National Foundation for American Policy, 2022.
It reads what you said. Your face, voice, accent, confidence and ums don't come into it. It asks whether there's a claim, an image, evidence next to the claim, an ask the room permits and an ending that opens a door, and it tells you what would have disqualified you before anyone weighed anything. Anyone can get these right, whether or not they enjoy speaking in public.
What TOM can claim
TOM can claim that polish is a poor stand-in for substance, that investors pay too much for it, and that reading only the words shuts out the routes the best-documented biases travel through.
What TOM will not claim
TOM does not claim to predict funding. Investors are swayed by things TOM leaves out on purpose, and good substance is needed but is not enough on its own. It does not claim to be perfectly fair to someone writing in a second language, because text still carries syntax; TOM scores what is proposed rather than the prose. And it does not claim that good ideas come up equally often everywhere, because nobody has been able to measure that.
What TOM will never do
TOM will never score a person, keep a leaderboard, compare you with anyone except your own last attempt, or let anyone use the number to screen people for a programme, a job or a cheque.