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Hey! I'm Tom Chain

I always knew I was too free spirited for the corporate world, even though I learned a lot and thrived in investment banking, private equity, and tech startups.

In 2021, I reached a breaking point. I could not keep playing a role I no longer believed in, so I quit my job and started making self-development videos on YouTube, learning everything from editing to scripting. I also dug deeper into philosophy, human psychology, and self-development.

That is when I discovered how much I love writing, reflecting, and using visuals to convey big ideas. My educational content soon led people to ask for coaching, so I added that to my offerings.

Teaching has always felt natural to me. I have an affinity for polymathy, and I believe one of the best ways to learn is by teaching. My passion is helping others improve their own lives, whether it is their skills, performance, lifestyle, or education.

I am still growing and building my dream brick by brick, and I am grateful for your presence and support.

This journey is just getting started, so now is the perfect time to jump onboard!

Tom Chain 🌊

Prison to Purpose | Justice Partnerships @ Beam

I went from medical school to prison. And from prison to leading a global social enterprise where I help empower overlooked communities with the skills to thrive in a tech-first world.

I care about human-first leadership, compassion without saviourism, and building things that last.

My journey shaped how I see the world and why I run Breakthrough. We deliver AI and digital skills to people on the margins: those written off by systems not built for them. Since taking over in late 2023, we’ve grown from a struggling social enterprise into a global initiative, partnering with the UN, IBM, and justice systems to train over 700 people across 40+ countries.

My focus is on AI diffusion — getting emerging tech into the hands of those who need it most. I’ve helped crypto startups raise millions, advised policymakers, and developed a curriculum delivered everywhere from UK prisons to East Africa.

If anything here resonates, feel free to reach out.

Sobanan N.

I’d not be running a 6-figure company today if it hadn’t been for the 360 days I spent in prison.

That year taught me almost everything I know about leadership today. 

Even if I didn’t know it at the time…

Here are the top 3 lessons that transformed me inside out as a leader:

(1) Lead without ego

If you never fail, you become arrogant and too attached to your sense of importance. 

Prison taught me that leadership is about making mistakes early, taking responsibility for them, and not letting ego dictate decisions that carry consequences for others. 

(2) Treat failure as a probability

Before prison, failure felt like a personal verdict. 

It said something permanent about me.

After prison, I started seeing it for what it is: a likely outcome in any real decision-making. 

(3) Build like you’ll have to rebuild

Losing everything teaches you to stop designing for best-case scenarios. 

You start building with the assumption that things will break, people will leave, plans will change, and you’ll have to adapt without drama. 

If those 12 months hadn’t happened, I’d probably still be leading the old way.

I wouldn’t wish prison on anyone, but without it, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

Sobanan Narenthiran

CEO of Breakthrough | From prison to global impact, I help everyone thrive and become AI-ready for the future economy

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I once discovered a colleague was paid £16,000 more than me.

It was in one of my earlier roles, where I was building the function and operating at a far more senior level than the person in question. 

On paper, the difference made no sense.

But the explanation was simple.

He knew how to play the game better than me.

Think battle royale, where everyone drops into the arena, scrambles for advantage, and whoever plays it best walks out with the win.

That's what it was.

That experience burned itself into my memory. 

Later, when I started running my own company, I made a deliberate decision to design a different kind of game.

More co-op than battle royale.

Where people understand the rules, see the whole board, and know that progress isn’t zero-sum. 

And where success came from building together, not outmanoeuvring each other.

In 2018, I walked out of prison with £46, a bin bag full of clothes, and nowhere clear to put my life next.

Today, I run a nearly seven-figure company working across 40+ countries, helping people the system overlooked build real capability in an AI-shaped world.

One thing you learn very quickly is this:

Leaving prison doesn’t mean you’re free…the barriers change shape.

– You still carry the stigma.
– You still face closed doors.
– You’re still expected to rebuild… without the tools to do it.

And now we’re entering a world where work, learning, and opportunity are being reshaped by technology.

Which raises a bigger question.

If someone is already excluded…what happens when the economy moves even further ahead without them?

This is what we’re exploring in a session I’m hosting tomorrow: “From Prison to Purpose: Redefining Rehabilitation through Technology.” 

We’ll get into the practical side of it:

– What actually helps people rebuild in 2026
– Where the current system still falls short
– And how AI, digital skills, and access to tools can either widen the gap… or close it

If you’ve got a complicated past, keep running into closed doors, and feel unsure about what direction your life is meant to take next, join us tomorrow.

Register here: https://luma.com/9ph1r62l

I deleted ChatGPT and it’s made me 10x more productive

For months, I was using AI the way most people do:

Open ChatGPT → ask a question → remind it who/what/why → get a paragraph I still had to work around.

Repeat 20 times a day.

It looked productive, but I still had to:

– Explain the same context over and over
– Copy-paste between tools and tabs
– Fix formatting, build lists, fill forms, reply to DMs myself

Switching to Claude Cowork changed that completely. 

It plugs directly into my workflow, so I don’t have to:

– Babysit it through every tiny task
– Stop what I’m doing to hunt for data or fill in yet another form
– Manually clear my inbox or DMs of simple, repeatable replies

Instead, I can point it at the outcome I want and it does the legwork: research, list-building, form-filling, first-draft comms.

I never really planned to walk away from ChatGPT.

But Jasmine (our Head of Marketing) had been pushing me to try Claude Cowork for weeks…so I thought “Fine, what could go wrong?”

7 days later, I can say I have switched sides completely (for good)

What side are you on: Team ChatGPT or Team Claude?

Today, AI is being wired into every classroom, clinic and city hall while only a few teams in Silicon Valley decide how it works.

That gap is where things quietly go wrong.

Because right now, the people building AI are not the people who need it most.

– The access isn't equal.
– The training isn't reaching everyone.
– The design decisions aren't being made with everyone in mind.

And the people who never had a seat at the table are the ones who end up living with the consequences when it goes wrong.

This is the part that keeps me up at night.

Tomorrow I’m sitting down with Laman Ibrahimova, who leads the ASAN AI Hub in Azerbaijan, for a live session called “Building AI Futures That Work For Everyone, Everywhere: Inclusive AI Development in Action” to talk about how we close that gap in practice and build AI that genuinely serves the public.

If you work in tech, policy, or civic innovation and believe AI should include everyone, I’d love for you to join us.
–
Register here: https://luma.com/97e6i55x

Someone called me an “uncle” on TikTok.

I was mindlessly scrolling when I came across a video discussing AI and work. I added a short, thoughtful reply, and almost immediately someone responded

“Uncle, you’re not wrong.”

I laughed. 

Partly because it was funny. 

Partly because it confirmed what I already suspected: I’m not exactly the target demographic on that app.

But I kept reading the thread.

And what I saw surprised me more than the comment did.

19- and 20-year-olds were debating about AI, the job market, and what skills are actually worth learning in the comment section.

It forced me to update my view of what TikTok is for a lot of young people.

This also creates a problem for institutions and governments.

We keep talking about “upskilling the next generation” while designing everything around the same classrooms, certificates, and linear pathways.

Meanwhile, a huge amount of real learning is already happening elsewhere, in environments we don’t take seriously.

With all the dreadful things happening around the world…

Here’s a little positivity to brighten your feeds.

In 2018, when I walked out of prison and spoke openly about running my own business, I was told, over and over, “That’s not possible.”

Today, I not only run a business but also help other people start their own.

I remember reading ‘It Couldn’t Be Done’ by Edgar Albert Guest after leaving prison and coming back to it whenever I was told something couldn’t be done.

Yesterday, I shared it with my team.

It felt like a full-circle moment.

P.S. What’s something you’ve achieved that others once told you wasn’t possible?

This is the most unconventional skill I look for before hiring, and it has a 100% success rate 

(source: me).

How someone thinks.

To understand that, I look out for these two signals in pre-hiring interviews.

1) How someone processes unfamiliar ideas

I’ll introduce a thought like, “A tree is worth more dead than alive.” 

I’m not interested in whether they agree or not; I simply want to observe how they pause, what questions they ask, and whether they try to understand the incentives behind it. 

2) Whether they take action without permission

I ask a simple question: “what do you actually do with your days?” 

And then listen for signs of self-directed effort. 

Building something. 

Learning a new skill. 

Exploring an idea. 

Testing a theory. 

People who do this tend to adapt faster when conditions change, because they’re already used to moving without a playbook.

CVs tell you what someone has done in a controlled environment. They say very little about how someone will behave when the environment shifts.

And in 2026, environments will keep shifting.

The people who do well are those who think clearly under uncertainty, act without waiting for permission, and continue learning as the rules evolve.

The #1 reason most AI rollouts fail in 2026

They’re emotionally incompatible with the people expected to use them.

We’re at near-100% AI adoption at Breakthrough. 

Here are the 3 principles behind it:

(1) Show, don’t argue

Skip the debate and pick one real workflow and show how it’s faster and easier with AI on their own work.

(2) Align with incentives and values

Different functions optimise for different things: Sales for pipeline and quota, Ops for stability, Finance for accuracy and control.

Show them exactly how AI moves what they care about.

(3) Take your ego out of the rollout

When you can see the upside, it’s tempting to push harder. That impatience only creates resistance you’ll pay for later.

If you’re serious about getting AI adopted across your company, stop treating it as a tooling problem…

…and start solving it as a behavioural one.

“The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders” is a restaurant in Japan where people living with dementia work as servers, and getting the wrong order is part of the experience.

It reflects a deeper cultural commitment to empathy and care in Japan, where people with dementia are not shamed for making mistakes, but encouraged to continue finding meaning through work and participation.

It made me reflect on how much of our modern life is organised around narrow ideas of competence, productivity, and control…

When those begin to slip, people are often pushed to the margins. 

This restaurant has designed the environment around a marginalised group of individuals, rather than demanding that people perform flawlessly in order to belong.

It is beautiful and heartwarming because we will all age one day, and we will all need patience and grace in return.

If a society can make room for that, the future is not as dark as it seems.

I was 21 when I was put in a cell surrounded by people convicted of serious crimes.

I remember the first morning like it was yesterday.

Sweaty palms, a pounding chest, a stomach twisted in on itself.

I was terrified.

But falling apart wasn’t an option.

So I built a toolkit. 

A few habits that helped me stay calm when everything around me felt unstable.

Years later, I still use the same toolkit as a founder when stress won’t let my mind switch off.

(1) Breathe before you think. 

When you’re panicking, your mind becomes a wild horse. Focusing on the breath slows it down and brings you back into your body before you react.

(2) Move the stress out of your body. 

Running, walking, press-ups. 

Even dancing when no one’s watching. 

Anything that reminds your body that it isn’t trapped forever in the same state.

(3) Narrow the horizon to the next hour. 

When everything feels heavy, stop trying to solve your whole future. Focus on what needs to happen in the next sixty minutes.

Those three practices helped a scared 21-year-old survive a place he had no business being in.

And they still help me now, as a founder, when the problems are different, but the pressure is familiar.

“Humans are living a lie.”

That’s what NASA astronaut Ron Garan said after spending 178 days in space.

Looking down at Earth, he described a moment where the stories we tell ourselves stopped making sense. 

From space, there is no “us versus them.”

There is one shared planet, one interconnected system, and everyone depends on it.

But back on Earth, we lose that perspective.

We start making decisions around abstract concepts like borders, ideology, religion, and policies. 

These structures are meant to help us manage complexity, but they often do the opposite. 

They create distance, and we stop asking “who is affected by this decision, and in what way?”

The way back is first principles.

The truths that remain true no matter what flag you fly or what side you’re on.

No baby is born bad.

Half the world lives on less than $7 a day.

Every human wants good health, safety, and a life filled with love.

Behind every statistic is someone’s child, someone’s parent, someone’s family.

When leaders, institutions, and systems hold these truths close, decisions don’t just become more rational…

…they stop being made at the expense of human suffering.

Most founders I meet believe their company exists for one purpose: making profit.

That belief is wrong, and in the age of AI, it’s becoming dangerous.

For years, this has been the default way companies are built.

Optimise revenue. 
Scale fast. 
Deal with consequences later, if at all.

That approach used to feel manageable because the impact was limited. 

Today, it isn’t.

AI is now shaping outcomes at scale by design. 

Tools built by a small number of people are deployed across hiring systems, education platforms, financial decisions, and content distribution, affecting millions of lives at once. 

Small and medium-sized businesses are already part of this reality. 

They decide how profits are used, which trade-offs are acceptable, and which harms are tolerated as the cost of growth…

AI removes the illusion that those choices are neutral.

When the systems you build can reshape lives at scale, being unclear about purpose isn’t passive. 

It’s a choice you make.

The BBC, the UK's most trusted public broadcaster, just mass-enrolled the entire country into an AI school.

They ran Panorama specials, bite-sized guides for teenagers, deep dives into robotics across TV, radio, and online, all in one week.

Which means doing nothing is no longer a neutral position. 

It’s a choice with a cost.

That’s exactly why we’re running a short employer briefing next week: “AI-Ready Talent: What Employers Need to Know in 2026.”

It’s a 30-minute session for employers who know they need AI capability in their teams but are wary of the cost, compliance risk, and uncertainty that comes with hiring in a fast-moving market.

In the session, we’ll break down:

– What “AI-ready” actually means in real roles today
– Why traditional hiring signals are becoming unreliable
– The AI skills gap affecting SMEs right now
– Low-risk ways to bring proven AI capability into your organisation

The goal is simple:

To help employers understand how to bring AI capability into their teams without overhauling their workforce or taking on unnecessary risk.

Because one thing is becoming clear.

AI literacy isn’t staying inside the tech department anymore.

The question is whether organisations will build that capability deliberately…

or get dragged into it reactively.

If you're an employer thinking about this right now, feel free to join us.

Register here: https://luma.com/h11a4u4y

Social media paved the way for AI.

In 2004, social was a side project tossed to the curious intern.

By 2010, it was “important”, so companies hired Heads of Social to chase followers and impressions.

By 2020, it became a core function, powering teams across Sales, Ops, HR, and Comms…turning their work into stories and campaigns.

AI is in a similar place today.

Everyone knows they “need AI,” but very few know how to wire it into the organisation.

So they post for a Head of AI or a machine learning specialist…

…when what they actually need is someone like the early social media managers, who could walk team to team and turn new capability into daily behaviour.

That’s an “AI Adoption Manager”.

Our Bootcamp graduates in Breakthrough fit perfectly into this role. 

They know how to:

– Use tools like Claude and ChatGPT to ship real work under pressure
– Turn messy workflows into clear, automatable steps
– Work with sceptical teams using curiosity

If you’re trying to move from “we should use AI” to “this is simply how we work now”, tools alone won’t get you there.

You need the right people in the building.

There is a new trend of “youth retirement homes” emerging for burnt-out Gen Z.

Malaysia recently opened one in Gopeng, and within a few weeks, it was fully booked.

I personally like the idea, but it also points to a harder reality: young workers in their early 20s are exhausted far earlier than they were ever meant to be.

Today, through technology, automation, and AI, one person can produce the output of two or three people within traditional full-time hours.

As these tools have arrived, the bar for productivity hasn’t dropped. It’s risen.

As a result, young people are working harder than any generation before them, not necessarily in hours, but in intensity.

Add to that a world where we’re constantly stimulated, constantly switched on, and constantly expected to be available just to participate in the digital economy.

That level of sustained intensity comes at a cost.

Whatever is happening in the world today feels eerily similar to the stories our childhood shows were trying to tell us.

A small group holds power.

A system benefits a few while everyone else lives with the consequences.

Most people sense something is wrong long before they can name it.

In One Piece, it was corrupted governments and rigged hierarchies.

In Power Rangers, it was ordinary people standing together against something larger than themselves.

In almost every story, the message was the same: systems don’t change on their own. People change them.

But as adults, many of us drift into a different way of thinking.

Why me? 
Why should I get involved? 
Why now?

And over time, it starts to feel safer to sit on the fence. 

Psychology has a name for this: learned helplessness.

Today, those stories we enjoyed as kids read differently, as they are stark reminders of a harsh reality.

Change never comes from perfect heroes or flawless systems. It always comes from ordinary people choosing to act together, even when the system tells them it’s pointless.

P.S: If Vogue can mess up and publish a cover of Ariana Grande having 6 fingers, why not me?

Opting out of learning AI is unethical.

Everyone knows AI data centres come with real environmental costs. 

But the data centres don’t disappear because you refuse to use AI.

They just get built for someone else’s agenda.

That’s what happened with social media.

A few greedy, self-interested players treated it like a weapon and a growth machine.

The people who cared about truth, civic health, and outcomes mostly rejected it. 

Years later, we’re living inside the consequences of that vacuum.

We should not repeat the same mistake with AI.

If the only people who understand the technology are the ones using it to extract, manipulate, and consolidate power, then “opting out” becomes a moral surrender.

Learn it.

Then use that leverage to build cleaner alternatives, push for constraints, and redirect where it goes.

That’s how you change a system you didn’t choose.

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
– Marcus Aurelius

Often, the obstacle isn’t the problem.

It’s just the next piece of information.

It’s the story we attach to it that makes the difference.

I learned that in prison.

When the judge delivered the sentence and the door shut on the future I thought I was entitled to, I had two choices.

I could count every day, watch the clock, and make time feel slower, or I could surrender to the environment and become present inside it.

I chose the second and stopped living in the story of what I didn’t have.

Instead, I focused on what I did have: time, attention, and the ability to choose what I did with my mind.

That shift didn’t make my situation any easier.

But it did give me the courage to separate the story in my head from the reality in front of me.

Sometimes your mind constructs a narrative that tricks you into inaction.

It sounds responsible, feels rational, and buys you comfort.

But it also keeps you exactly where you are.

taplio

The Battle

Tom Chain 🌊

Sobanan N.

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