Alumni Tech Entrepreneurs for the Common Good

Technologically minded alumni duo Liam Collins (CA’13) and Thomas Doylend (NE’22) are venturing into the future with a startup company, Human Centered Tech (HCT). Small but versatile, the company offers a fresh alternative to the big tech companies that innovate without regard for the good, true, or beautiful.

When he was in high school, Mr. Collins did not envision attending Thomas Aquinas College. He eschewed the liberal arts to pursue an undergraduate degree in physics. “I learned a lot of great things and met a lot of great people,” he says. “But I realized that I wanted to study philosophy and think about what was at the heart of things. So, I joined the TAC Class of 2013.”

After graduating from the College, he earned a degree in aerospace engineering from Wichita State University, then accepted what appeared to be a dream job as an engineer on a naval base for the U.S. Department of Defense. However, he soon found himself disappointed. “I was relatively unimpressed by the culture of innovation I found there,” he acknowledges. “I knew I wasn’t being challenged in the ways I had hoped.”

When he met Mr. Doylend — who had just graduated as a member of the College’s first class on its newly opened New England campus — the two connected over a shared love of technology. They quickly became aware of a gap in the industry, one that was excluding man from his own innovations just as quickly as he made them.

Together, the two founded Human Centered Tech, a technological development company aimed at building technology to help mankind thrive. “There’s a need for people who can understand the technological landscape and the internet, but who also can think broadly and philosophically about it,” Mr. Collins says. “As far as I know, there are no other companies at this time that are specifically focused on bridging that gap.”

In working with HCT, Mr. Doylend finds himself relying on an oft-cited benefit of liberal education: the ability to pick up skills quickly in any field. “I have often been asked in interviews, ‘We can hire you or we can hire a computer science grad from Waterloo. Why should we pick you?’” he says. “My answer is that I probably know less about the technology that you use, but I can learn it faster than any Waterloo grad. The pitch TAC students can make is ‘Look, I am really good at taking a huge text or system that I don’t understand and breaking it down because I have to discuss it in class tomorrow.’”

Because of this focus on the ability to learn skills rather than simply maintain them, HCT is remarkably diverse in its services. The company has completed and consulted on a variety of projects since its inception, including commodities trading and market-analysis platforms, as well as hardware engineering for pipe-repair robots. Currently, it is working on an offline data server and an AI-enabled high school football coach’s assistant, in partnership with fellow alumnus Joshua Brittain (’15), among other projects. “I have learned how to do a lot of things on the job, and I have found that, if you commit to doing things often enough, you will find that you actually can do them,” says Mr. Doylend.

Adds Mr. Collins, “We do electrical, we do software, we do mechanical. Our ultimate goal is to get ownership of technology back into the hands of the people who make and use it.”

That can-do attitude has landed HCT numerous projects already, and the company is just getting started. “We aim to grow as fast as possible. We are planning to add several more engineers to our team soon,” Mr. Collins says. “We want people to look at us and say, ‘These guys are doing it the right way, and that’s why we want to join their network.’”