Tommy Antonino

I'm a builder and operator who became a lawyer. I grew up in Atlanta, got hooked on business and startups early, and studied at Georgia Tech — first a business degree, later a master's in analytics. My first job out of school was selling an “AI-before-AI” natural-language analytics platform into the Fortune 1000, where I learned the go-to-market motion from the business side: what sales teams actually need from legal, and how deal velocity turns into revenue.

Then I co-founded and ran a production company for about five years. I came in as the producer and business side and figured out the role from scratch — full P&L, profitable in year one, 10x profit growth in year two, leading crews of 20–30. A producer, it turns out, is a lot like a commercial lawyer: a finite budget, a room full of people with competing ideas, and a job that's really about synthesizing them, working within constraints, and getting to “yes, and here's how” instead of “no.”

I went to law school at the University of Chicago for a JD/MBA because I wanted a craft I could keep getting better at — and I landed at Kirkland & Ellis, where I now run commercial and M&A workstreams on deals from $20M to well over $4B. I draft and negotiate the technology agreements that sit at the center of these deals, serve as a principal point of contact for portfolio-company clients, and build the templates and playbooks that make the next deal move faster.

What I'm after now is to bring all of that in-house at a frontier AI lab as commercial counsel. I'm all in on AI — I use it every day and build real things with it, including this site. My analytics background means I can sit with product and engineering as a peer, not just translate for them. And I care about doing this work in a way that's low-ego, high-trust, and genuinely useful to the business.