Brian Thomas
Brian Thomas is an adjunct professor in the management and entrepreneurship department in the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. Throughout life he has been drawn to the vocation of teaching and mentoring. He was the son of a teacher and benefited greatly from the tutelage of others. In college he signed up to be a teaching assistant in the department of economics, in banking he raised his hand to be the analyst staffer and in business he stepped up to curate a custom leadership development program. Teaching BUSN 70: Contemporary Business Issues is a logical progression of this narrative arc.
Brian was a long-serving executive at Equinix, a data infrastructure company that provides real estate, power and network services which underpin the digital world. Over the course of fourteen years, he had the unique privilege of working directly for the CFO, COO, CEO and Executive Chairman on matters relating to Finance, Strategy, Culture and Sustainability. The management team he was part of grew revenues from $200 million to $5 billion, the stock price from $30 to $450, employees from 500 to 8,000 and renewables' share of energy consumption from 25% to 95%.
Prior to Equinix, Brian was an investment banker with Citi in London, Singapore, New York and San Francisco. During his nine years, he advised clients in the Technology, Health Care and Consumer Products sectors on a range of M&A and capital markets transactions. These included the sale of A.L.I. Tech. to McKesson, the IPO of SignalSoft, the acquisition of PowerBar by Nestle, the high yield bond offering of Tony Roma’s, the joint venture between Oetker and Kart Foods and the divestment of Unico by Intel.
Brian’s academic pursuits were in international economics, with a focus on market and trade-oriented development policies. He earned an M.Phil. in the Economics and Politics of Development from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. in Economics and Politics from Willamette University. He funded his education through a combination of scholarships, research grants, teaching assistantships and resident directorships.
At his core, Brian is a product of the colonial influence in India. He was born into a Syrian Christian and Portuguese Catholic family from Kerala and raised in old South Bombay. He was educated at a British Anglican institution, Cathedral and John Connon School, where he received an Indian School Certificate and engaged in a range of athletic, cultural and service activities.