A Union alumnus, entrepreneur and venture capitalist who realized early
the potential of online applications – and led the nation's first publicly
traded business-to-business Internet company – will deliver the opening address
at the Summit in Tech Valley on Monday, April 28.
Mark
Walsh '76, managing partner at private investment entity Ruxton Associates in
Washington and a trustee of the College, will present “From Phoenix to Ashes to
Phoenix: The Power of Technology Cycles” at the Summit's opening luncheon.
A crowd of over 400 CEOs, presidents and senior-level executives from
the region's technology, business, academic and government communities is
expected to attend the event, Monday and Tuesday at the Marriott Hotel on Wolf
Road in Albany.
“Mark Walsh is a pioneer who understood the enormous implications of
the Internet and online technology long before the dot-com explosion,” said Ann
Wendth, senior vice president of the Albany-Colonie Regional Chamber of
Commerce and the Summit's lead organizer. “His knowledge and expertise provide a superb foundation
to look at the explosive growth of technology at the same time the Tech Valley region is poised to enter a new era.”
Walsh
joined AOL in 1995 and sensed the potential of the Internet to affect how
businesses bought and sold from each other. He created and ran AOL Enterprise,
the business-to-business division of AOL. Then, in mid-1997, he joined
VerticalNet Inc. as the CEO, taking the company public in early 1999 – in the
process, becoming the first publicly traded business-to-business Internet company.
He became chairman in late 2000.
After
leaving Harvard Business School with an MBA in 1980, Walsh worked for a number
of years at Home Box Office in New York in new business development for the HBO and
Cinemax brands. In 1986, he joined the then-fledgling “online information”
industry as vice president and general manager of CUC International's online
group. CUC offered interactive shopping, travel and automotive information and
transaction services. He continued his leadership role in the collision of
interactive services and consumer markets by becoming president of Information
Kinetics, a venture-backed online employment and career services company, then
became president of GEnie, the online service owned by GE, before joining AOL. He
is vice chairman of VSGi, a video conferencing systems management company.
Walsh
is on the board of Blackboard Inc., an educational software and tools company;
Day Corporation, a publicly traded content management tools company; and the
Philadelphia Orchestra, where he is on the digital rights subcommittee. He was an advisory board member for the New
York Times Digital Company, and has served on the board of a number of Internet
startups and privately funded technology companies. Directly out of college,
Mark was an anchorman and news director for a CBS-TV affiliate station in West Virginia.
Walsh
serves, or has served, as a board member and/or chair of the Software and
Information Industry Association, the Interactive Services Association, the
President's Advisory Group of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Standard for
Internet Commerce. In 2000, he was named
one of Business Week's “e.biz 25,” and that same year was named by Upside
Magazine to the “Elite 100” – the one hundred most influential people in
technology. Walsh has been interviewed
or quoted in a wide variety of national and international publications, and has
appeared on a number of national and global business television programs.
For further details on the Summit, visit www.techvalley.org.