Jul 22, 2026 · 46 min · 10 segments
Tom Kershaw, SVP and CTO at BMI, shares how a career spanning telecom, ad tech, travel, and now music rights taught him to learn new industries fast and lead through transformation. He breaks down the…
Stephen KozaHost
This is the show for engineers and technical leaders in the trenches, the people building platforms, running cloud, scaling infrastructure, and figuring out what's next.
Every episode, I sit down with somebody who's actually doing the work to get the real story.
Totally different industries, different definitions of what engineering does and is for, but he's found some cool patterns across all of them.
He's the SVP and CTO at BMI, which is one of the largest performing rights organizations in the world.
They represent more than 1.5 million songwriters, composers, and 25 million different musical works.
Uh, it was the CTO at the Rubicon project, uh, which was an open source bidding framework that grew to cover hundreds of corporate members and contributing engineers, then CTO at Magnite.
And, uh, after that CPO and CTO at Travelport, where he led the engineering effort behind a big global platform replacing legacy reservation systems.
He leads the organization's technology modernization, AI strategy, and probably the most easy thing for me to explain, all the engineering behind how royalties get tracked and paid in the streaming world.
He has a degree from NYU, a master's from the London School of Economics, and I'm excited to chat with you.
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This is the show for engineers and technical leaders in the trenches, the people building platforms, running cloud, scaling infrastructure, and figuring out what's next.
Every episode, I sit down with somebody who's actually doing the work to get the real story.
Totally different industries, different definitions of what engineering does and is for, but he's found some cool patterns across all of them.
He's the SVP and CTO at BMI, which is one of the largest performing rights organizations in the world.
They represent more than 1.5 million songwriters, composers, and 25 million different musical works.
Uh, it was the CTO at the Rubicon project, uh, which was an open source bidding framework that grew to cover hundreds of corporate members and contributing engineers, then CTO at Magnite.
And, uh, after that CPO and CTO at Travelport, where he led the engineering effort behind a big global platform replacing legacy reservation systems.
He leads the organization's technology modernization, AI strategy, and probably the most easy thing for me to explain, all the engineering behind how royalties get tracked and paid in the streaming world.
He has a degree from NYU, a master's from the London School of Economics, and I'm excited to chat with you.