Michigan-based SafeWhistle is proud to announce Thomas Coke, the current Chief Marketing Officer of Argonomo, as President as SafeWhistle. SafeWhistle was founded in 2017 by Jay Patel as an an encrypted and anonymous whistleblowing solution, designed to address various industry standards he’d seen as CEO of electronics manufacturer AmTech. While SafeWhistle has been utilized by several companies it has not been fully released to the market until now.
Coke, who has previous experience as CEO of CampusStarter as well as being a part of two other startups that have reached exit, has been tabbed for his experience with sales and marketing, as well as leadership and management experience. Also, as an attorney, he has seen the rise whistleblower activity and the need for companies, governments and institutions of higher education to have a better response to whistleblower situations. “Companies have told us that they need a better way to discover, manage and react to these situations, and SafeWhistle is the perfect tool to achieve that,” says Coke.
Patel is happy to continue on as the founder of SafeWhistle, while focusing the bulk of his time on AmTech. “We remain a minority-owned and -built startup, but we are glad to have Thomas on driving the growth of the company,” said Patel. “We know this is a real solution for a wide variety of industries and companies, and are excited to take it to market.” Patel has been working closely with Coke to formulate the plan for 2019 as SafeWhistle sets ambitious goals focused around sales and marketing now that the development has been finalized. “Thomas is a bulldog, and he has shown the skills and tenacity to take SafeWhistle where it needs to go.”
Argonomo provided the bulk of the development, via CTO Bryan Culver, who will stay on as the CTO of SafeWhistle, as well as support from Doron York, the COO of Argonomo who will be supporting Coke’s efforts moving forward. “We are excited to have Thomas leading the charge, as he has a track record of success and has shown his ability to set a plan and execute on that plan,” said York. “With him at the helm SafeWhistle should grow quickly and scale to where it needs to be.”
SafeWhistle is currently being used by a number of companies, and has several large organizations currently in the pipeline. By creating an encrypted environment for the reporting and communication and whistleblower complaints that are permanently stored it has been an asset to the companies using the system as well as the whistleblowers themselves. Pricing for the product can be found on the website, and companies can customize the product based upon how many administrators they will need and the number of employees they have.
Coke is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He as a BA in Economics from Kalamazoo College and a JD from the Michigan State University College of Law. He has worked for the startups VerifyValid (acquired by Deluxe), CrowdFundConnect (acquired in part by MJIC) and was the founder and CEO of CampusStarter (merged with Hubbub), and has experience as a VP of Sales and Marketing and as a CMO. He can be reached at thomas@safewhistle.com.