Born 1964 Thomas Power studied business, finance and marketing at Croydon College between 1982 and 1986. During this time he assembled the first Apple hard disks for Symbiotic Computer Systems, organised driver receipts for The AA on an ICL dual tape drive PC and acted as an Account Executive for Ekins, Bailey & Wood Advertising and Design introducing their first Tandon PC. Also in 1983 Thomas started his first direct marketing business, Control Marketing, with Greg Spafford and Mike Raybone.

In 1986 he joined Lord Sugar at Amstrad as a Product Manager and launched the first PC on television the PC1512 which went onto to become the UK market leader with 40% market share overtaking IBM. In June 1987 Thomas warned Lord Sugar of a young man called Michael Dell from PCs Ltd. Alan took no notice.

In 1988 Thomas started his second business Dealer Marketing Services (DMS) acting as a Call Centre and Database Manager for Amstrad, Compaq and HP. In 1992 DMS was acquired by Detroit based Urban Science where Thomas stayed until 1996 acting as VP Marketing. Thomas had three children during this time.

In 1994 Thomas was introduced to the Internet by Ajaz Ahmed of AKQA fame and fell in love with the Internet. While at Urban Science, Thomas introduced the world’s first real-time internet auction to Mercedes-Benz for the sale of luxury used cars. The auction system sold for £2m in 1995. In 1996 Thomas joined TDS Group as Managing Director and took the UK rights to Trade’ex the first ecommerce platform later acquired by Ariba in 1999 for over $2bn. TDS set up the first ecommerce marketplace for BT called BT Trading Places. In 1998 Thomas took the UK rights for Commerce One and introduced the first e-procurement platform to BT called BT Marketsite.