Editor’s Note: We’re presenting Q&As with the team behind Accelerate.withgoogle.com, which is made up of many 20%ers across the company. Google’s 20% Time policy has led to some of the company’s most successful products, such as AdSense and Gmail. Here’s our first installment. 

Tom White, Senior Editor at Accelerate.withgoogle.com, is a native New Yorker who attended Regis High School in Manhattan. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2014 as a Hesburgh-Yusko Scholar with a Bachelor of Arts in the Program of Liberal Studies and Italian. While at Notre Dame, Tom delivered a TEDx Talk about his life with Tourette Syndrome, played Right Wing for Notre Dame’s Club Hockey Team, and completed a thesis on Machiavelli's The Prince. Upon graduation, Tom joined Grand Central Tech in New York as Director of Community. Before joining Google’s Ann Arbor office in 2015, he co-founded a startup, Glyph Messaging. At Google, Tom works in Chicago as Product Strategy Lead, Senior Editor, and Research Associate across different business units. As part of the Meet Our Editors series, I sat down with Tom to learn about his experience working on the Accelerate with Google team.

What made you want to be a part of Accelerate with Google?

Accelerate with Google is a platform whose mission truly resonates with me. Dedicated to jumpstarting different groups’ participation in the digital economy, Accelerate with Google promotes different voices, backgrounds, and perspectives. My own struggle with a neurological disorder makes this work truly personal. The written word allows me to lend my distinctive viewpoint to this narrative and to showcase a diversity of thought and experiences. In my opinion, such conversation and dialogue sparks the creation of new ideas.

What do the concepts of product and business inclusion mean to you?

They both refer to practices that help ensure that you capture each and every perspective, viewpoint, accessibility, need, et cetera so that you can reach the most people in the most seamless and comprehensive way. Not only is it the right thing to do morally, it’s also good business. The more people that you reach, the larger your market size; the larger your market size, the more revenue you can make; the more revenue you make, the more good you can do for your employees, your customers, and society. It really does make sense from a business perspective, because you touch many more potential customers if you meet them where they are, as opposed to designing for one particular group or majority.

What is your favorite part about working on the Accelerate with Google team?

The same as my favorite part about working at Google overall: the people. My teammates are dynamic, passionate, and driven. With limited resources, our small editorial team produces a sterling, top-notch product that galvanizes others to participate in challenging, divergent conversations on how business should be done, why it should be done, and for whom it should be done.