June 2009
Tom Rielly
Biography
Tom Rielly is Community Director at TED Conferences where he is responsible for TED’s audience, including membership, fellowship, and book club programs. He also serves on TED’s executive team. Rielly is also TED’s acclaimed resident satirist, performing his unique summaries of the speakers at many TEDs.
Rielly may be best known as founder and former CEO of PlanetOut, the leading gay and lesbian Internet company which accomplished three firsts: first venture investment in, first corporate financing of, and first IPO of a company serving the gay market. He also held senior sales and marketing positions at technology startups such as Acronym Media, Farallon Computing, Voyager, SuperMac Technology.
Rielly has served as Executive Producer of two films, an experimental feature about lesbian romance and the Golden Gate bridge as a suicide icon called The Joy of Life, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and Moving Windmills, a short documentary film about William Kamkwamba, a promising young Malawian social entrepreneur.
Moving Windmills was awarded the Pangea Day world film festival’s North American Filmmaker’s Award from Participant Productions, producers of An Inconvenient Truth, Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, and Charlie Wilson’s War. It also received an award from the Seven Fund and has been selected for several film festivals including Without Borders in Rome
He is now executive producing and directing a full-length documentary based on Moving Windmills. His photographs of Kamkwamba and his family have appeared in major newspapers, museums and on websites around the world. He writes occasionally for I.D. Magazine and other publications and websites. With Karen Wickre, he contributed to Out in All Directions: A Gay and Lesbian Almanac (Warner Books).
Rielly has founded or co-founded four NGO’s: most recently Moving Windmills to work on projects in Africa (Executive Director, 2008-), Digital Queers (1990-1995), a seminal gay and lesbian rights group in Silicon Valley, New Media Centers (1992-) and the Yale Macintosh Users’ Group (1984-).
Rielly’s interests include gadgets mentoring, filmmaking, photography, politics, lesbian and gay civil rights, comedy, public speaking, traveling and most recently rural economic development in Africa, particularly in Malawi. As a teen actor, he had a small role in the feature film My Bodyguard (1980).