.png){kind=logo}
Support RJ
Donor Recognition
TOMMY GAESSLER ’16: WISE AND GENEROUS BEYOND HIS YEARS
It’s unusual for a promising graduate of Regis Jesuit High School to postpone or forgo college to gain a skill, but Tommy Gaessler ’16 is a rare case indeed. His decision to enroll in a six-month coding boot camp at Galvanize in Denver to learn software engineering has helped him “zoom” ahead of most people his age and find personal and professional success.
At just 28 years old, Gaessler has recently been promoted to senior product manager at Zoom. The ubiquitous platform recruited him away from his first job as a software developer at Apostrophe, Inc., a startup in the health tech space whose founders he met through an RJ Connect event. As just the third employee at Apostrophe, he was immediately whisked along with the founders into a three-month intensive residence at Techstars in Boulder, the incubator that helps entrepreneurs refine their business model and gain access to capital and mentorship. For all he learned there, Gaessler likened it to business school.
“I’ve been sprinting since graduation,” he said of his career trajectory so far. “I had a full-time job before my friends were home for winter break, and I haven’t had summers off.” While he was often the youngest person in the room when he started, he has caught up quickly. He brought a unique combination of social and business savvy from his father, a startup entrepreneur, and faith and empathy modeled by his mother, who is now an ordained pastor. And, he says, “RJ taught me how to lead.”
Today, Tommy and his wife Katie own a home and have a newborn, Charlotte, who they love to dress in a pink RJ onesie. He’s already giving back to the RJ community, where he and his brother Michael Gaessler ‘18 overlapped for two years. He plays in The Rudy Cup Golf Tournament, raises his paddle at the LARK Dinner-Auction, and returns to campus to mentor students through RJ Connect. For two years during COVID, he helped RJ run the LARK event over Zoom, breaking prior fundraising records.
But the most mature act of generosity for such a young family is that Tommy and Katie are thinking far enough ahead that they’ve included RJ in their estate plan. Through that decision, they became one of some 138 members of the school’s St. John Francis Regis Legacy Society.
“I love giving back to Regis because that’s my community. Because I didn’t have a college experience, most of my best friends are from there,” said Gaessler. “The brotherhood is real.” He not only visits campus for career fairs and RJ Connect events, but he also hosts RJ seniors on Zoom for Shadow Days, showing them what it’s like to work not only in engineering, but also in sales, marketing, design, and accounting. Zoom has hired a few alums since Gaessler joined six years ago as a software engineer.
Looking back at his time at RJ, Tommy recalls choosing the school for the comfort he felt from his first visit and the opportunity to play baseball beginning in his first year. But an ironic and perhaps lucky break came in the form of not one but two broken arms, one playing baseball and the other skiing. By the middle of his junior year, he decided to leave baseball behind and explore other extracurricular interests before he graduated. Among the many options, he found his way to RJ Media and Adam Dawkins ‘98, where he learned about broadcasting, photography and filmmaking. Immediately, he saw the bigger picture, even though his years at RJ pre-dated the Science & Innovation Center.
“Everything we created had to live on a platform so it could be viewed and shared,” he said. While Gaessler won a national prize for a portfolio of eight photographs, he was even more fascinated by the creative infrastructure that connected his work to the world.
Gaessler says that while his career is lucrative, he also wants to have a positive impact on the world. For example, he’s now an angel investor in Campus Guardian Angel, a company that is able to deploy drones to protect a school’s interior and perimeter, or respond in real time during a threat. He recently organized a demonstration on the RJ campus.
He said, “Because of our education at Regis, where the spirituality and religious aspects are really important, a lot of people want their work to matter. So I tell them, you can take your skills to a company that will care about you and is doing great things. If you’re an engineer, you can build anything. You can bring your expertise and your values, and also be well compensated. And that allows you to give back.”
Main-Visitor Entrance
Regis Jesuit High School
Mail-Delivery Address
Regis Jesuit High School admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, athletic and other school-administered programs.