Tom Halpin · Philadelphia
Software, wine, and a habit of learning.
I'm Tom — founder of The Waitlist and former VP of Technology & Product at Wine Access. A wine expert turned technologist — two decades at the intersection of the two.
About
Technology is my second career. My first was wine — I spent years as a wine educator and expert behind the counter of wine shops, learning the trade bottle by bottle. In my thirties I went back to school for a bachelor's in technology at Villanova, then turned it into a seventeen-year career building software — most of it at Wine Access, where I grew from front-line technical support to VP of Technology & Product.
I like problems where deep domain knowledge and good engineering meet. At Wine Access that meant a temperature-aware logistics program that protected wine in transit, an early LLM experiment (with Chicago Booth & YPO) that wrote marketing emails well enough to tie our human writers, and a recommendation engine that paired the right bottle to the right person. AWS invited me to present the work in their "A Perfect Pairing" webinar.
Today I'm the founder of The Waitlist — a QR-code waitlist that texts people when it's their turn, no app to download. I'm still endlessly curious — I just finished Wharton's CTO program, and I'm slowly teaching myself Vietnamese. The throughline, in work and in the cellar: stay curious, taste everything.
Track record
What I care about
Technology
Pragmatic, durable systems — and the teams that ship them. AWS-native, product-minded.
Wine
Twenty years in the trade and a serious cellar. Always hunting the next pour worth remembering.
Learning
Endlessly curious — a Wharton CTO Program grad and an A2 Vietnamese student.
Experience
Education & recognition
Wharton Executive Education, 2026
"A Perfect Pairing": scaling Wine Access 400% and cutting costs 50% with ML on AWS