Tom LeNoble

Facebook employee #57, executive advisor, speaker, and coach

Tom LeNoble was employee number 57 at Facebook, hired out of Palm, the Palm Pilot and Treo company, back when it was still 'the Facebook' and lived only inside college networks. Older than almost everyone in the building, he became known as the 'adult in the room,' running the operational and human side of a company that was about to change the world. He interviewed with a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg over a Chinese restaurant, sat outside the controller's office where there were no phones because everything was done by email, and helped stand up some of the platform's earliest content-moderation policies, subpoena and law-enforcement processes, and its first relationships with suicide and child-safety hotlines. It gave him a rare, human view of both the promise and the hidden cost of building social media at scale.

Today Tom is a confidential advisor to founders, C-level executives, and nonprofit leaders, the CEO of the Academy for Coaching Excellence, which trains coaches around the world, and the founder of Opening Pathways Collective. Before Palm and Facebook he led customer service at MCI and ran customer service for Walmart.com. He is the five-award-winning author of My Life in Business Suits, Hospital Gowns, and High Heels, with a second book, My Life at Facebook, The Adult in the Room, on the way, and he hosts the podcast Opening Pathways. A metastatic cancer survivor of 14 years and a self-described philanthropist who has worked with underserved communities, youth in the arts, first-generation students, and women's causes, he speaks widely on resilience, the responsibility businesses have to protect their users, and how a deeply polarized world might find its way back to unity.