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» VISIT US ONLINE @ DSNEWS.COM 71 PROFILES IN LEADERSHIP: TIM MORSE COVER STORY SUCCESS PROFILE INDUSTRY INSIGHT It took Tim Morse several months to buy his newest home, a statement that would sound utterly unremarkable if Morse were not the guy in charge of making homebuying as simple as filling out a few forms and closing the deal from the convenience of your phone. As the new CEO of Ten-X, formerly known as Auction.com, Morse leads a company poised to rewrite the process of buying and selling property online. And having just spent the same agonizing, frustrating, left-in-the-dark months on end that everyone who tries to buy a house spends, he's extra motivated to streamline the process and the time frame between finding a home and calling it home. If anyone can help a company ‒‒ not to mention a long-overdue idea ‒‒ through such a Digital Age paradigm shift, Morse would be a good person to bet on. He grew up in Rhode Island in the 1980s, the son of a textile company CFO, fascinated by heady talk of the future as imagined by Apple and other forward-looking tech companies of the day. In lieu of joining the Red Sox (because, let's face it, he grew up in the shadow of Fenway Park and his boyhood simmered with dreams of sending a few over the Green Monster), Morse went to Boston College to get his bachelor's in finance and operations and strategic management. He still talks about the opportunities BC gave him to learn and grow that put him on the path to the first major step of his career at GE. For 15 years, Morse worked in various divisions around the company, including its Plastics and Appliances divisions, and at GE Capital in North America, Europe, and Asia. He later became general manager of business development for GE Plastics and closed out his time there as its chief financial officer. "GE was a great background for so much," Morse says. "I was able to absorb all the wonderful strengths of the company ‒‒ it's attention to culture, strategic thinking, operations. It was amazing." After leaving GE, Morse became the CFO of Altera (now part of Intel) and the "pioneer in programmable logic solutions." In 2009, he became the CFO of Yahoo! Inc., where for the fourth quarter of 2011, he served as interim CEO before returning to his position as CFO. In 2012, he left Yahoo! and joined AdapTV (now part of AOL), before becoming CFO at Auction.com in 2013. He also has been a member of the Board of Directors of the online marketplace Alibaba. Last May, Auction.com, in the midst of rebranding itself as the preeminent online platform for buying and selling real property (as opposed to only dealing in distressed and foreclosed properties), named Morse its new CEO and then became Ten-X. roughout his many positions, Morse found an increasing love for what the companies were doing with technology. "I love these online marketplace models," he says. "ey're changing how we work, how we sell, how we buy. Bringing that kind of power to people is awesome." Power to the people. Underlying everything Morse wants to do now that he's got the floor at Ten-X, putting the future in the hands of people is the guiding principle. "We all want to make an impact with something that's important," he says. "We're looking to create that kind of difference."