Eliminating Limiting Beliefs With Mark McNally

Entrepreneurship is not simply about creating a grand business plan and sticking to it. In reality, a huge chunk of your energy and resources will be spent addressing failures and eliminating limiting beliefs. Mark McNally of Nobody Studios joins Ben Baker to discuss what it takes to strike the right balance between embracing the uncomfortable and feeling empowered. He explains the impact of getting out of your comfort zone, rolling up your sleeves, and facing your fears no matter what. Mark also talks about how a great leader must always have an unbreakable spirit, inspiring people around them to achieve the same mindset.

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Eliminating Limiting Beliefs With Mark McNally

[00:01:54] I want to get Mark McNally on the show. A few months ago, we had Barry O’Reilly, who is one of his partners on the show from Nobody Studios. We are going to talk to Mark about limiting beliefs and moving beyond them. Mark, welcome to the show.

[00:02:11] Thanks, Ben. I have been waiting for it. I’m excited.

[00:02:14] We are going to have a lot of fun. You and I had a good time. You are doing some amazing things. You are the consummate BHAG, the Big Hairy Audacious Goal, and those are the people I love. People who sit there and say, “Here’s what is. Here’s what’s possible. Here’s what might be possible. Let’s go for what might be possible and figure a way to make it happen.” Tell me your story because it’s a great one.

[00:02:42] I have been a serial entrepreneur my entire life. My parents will tell you that I was a precocious little kid at eight years old, telling them that, “I was going to be the next Bill Gates,” whatever the hell that meant to me back then. It means a lot different now. I grew up and was raised within two hours of the echo chamber of Silicon Valley, so I probably picked up some of that. I did the service thing first. I did six years in the Army Special Ops, and then I came out and was looking for my first chance to build a business.

Frankly, between us girls, it could have been a taco shop but I found a few people that had an idea in the back of a garage in Las Vegas that they thought they could connect buyers and suppliers in this new thing called the internet. I joined them, and I was employee 8 and grew it to 800 employees. I wrote the S-1, got it registered, and took it public on the NASDAQ in 1999.

I was living the dream. I had that multibillion-dollar IPO. I was telling seven-year-old Mark that he had it all figured out because he was smart. I built plenty of character, I assure you. When the market corrected itself and dot-com a few years later. I got hooked on this whole process of dreaming big, knowing that you can bring together the resources and the people, go after something that probably is irrational, and you have a decent chance of pulling it off. I have been doing it ever since.

There are fourteen startups where I have been a C-level or a Founder, another couple dozen where I was a small Angel or a mentor along the way. I have been in the startup world for a while. A couple of years ago, I was trying to figure out what the rest of my career in life was going to be. I was in that midlife moment where I was like, “I’m not going to keep stumbling into the next startup. What’s my purpose on this life or this planet?”

I decided that I had some strong inspirations about how startups could be different and how we could tackle this differently. If I got it right, I would be able to empower a new generation of folks that could tackle their dreams and point at things that are broken or need to be better in this world. They have a decent chance of pulling it off if I get my vehicle right.

We are called Nobody Studios for a reason. I knew that it had to be bigger than anyone’s personality. Therefore, we all have to check our egos at the door. If it got this right, we would attract some awesome people to the journey that would see what I saw and help me pull this off. That’s what has been happening for the last few years. I’m super humbled and grateful to be on this ride. I’m surrounded by people who have inspired me every single day to try to make this thing happen, empower people’s dreams, and make the world a better place.

[00:04:56] I love that because my big philosophy is that we are all stronger together. None of us are as great as all of us. Going back to your original conversation, there are two things that struck me. What is this with entrepreneurs and garages? Seriously, whether it’s HP or Apple, people sit there and start tinkering in their garage. What was it that they got people into their garage, rolling up their sleeves and being creative? Is it something that’s baked into the entrepreneurial DNA or what’s the story?

[00:05:33] It has something to do with like the raw 2x4s that you know something.

[00:05:37] Maybe all the tools on the wall in the garage bring inspiration or what?

[00:05:41] I started the garage. For me, it was provoked by the pandemic. Both of my kids were doing class all day long, and my wife had the home office, and the only place I could find a chance to work and have some quiet space was my garage. I moved my motorcycles out, put a logo on the back wall, and started doing calls for my garage. When I say the garage, it’s something that’s near and dear to our hearts as a studio because when you tell me you started in the garage, I know they are trying to build a business and value their business before they are trying to spend other people’s money.

When people start building a business in their garage, it means they want to validate their work before trying to spend other people's money. Share on X

We were hyper-focused in the studio. My normal talk track is that there’s something to be said for maxing out your credit cards and borrowing money from grandma to make sure that you build a business that you want to pay for. When you have those stakes in the line, you build companies where you are like, “Is that button going to matter? Is that price point the right price point? Are people going to pay me?”

If Rich Uncle or some BC comes along and gives you $10 million, and you are starting, it’s easy to get that screwed up. It’s easy to start dreaming about what you could do, these monolithic roadmaps, and all these other things. None of those matters. When you are maxing out their credit cards, and you have to go to borrow money from grandma, you are like, “I better build up the business. We are going to click that button and pay for it.” That’s what builds the best businesses. I told people all along the way that Nobody Studio has unlimited resources in the bank. We are still going to be very frugal. We are going to keep people very accountable. It doesn’t matter what resources we have in the bank. The businesses are going to be built frugally, the same way it was in the garage.

[00:07:77] Do you think a lot of that came out of the philosophy for Special Ops where, “Make it happen with the tools that you have in front of you?” I’ve got friends of mine that have been Special Ops across the United States and around the world, and they are limited to the brain they have in their head and the tools they have with them. First of all, thank you for your service but also, do you think that mentality and day-to-day operations of having to make things work brings you into the mentality of, “We got to make this thing work the way it is. Not sit there and rely on that $10 million jumping in our pocket?”

[00:07:48] I do. I probably didn’t appreciate it as much until this journey. My hats off to people who have served in Special Forces teams and SEAL teams. That wasn’t me but I was in the Special Operations Command, and I got deployed with a Green-Gray team to Haiti for six months. I’ve appreciated it now, as I said, in a way that I didn’t before, which is that you are given missions that are impossible, and if you pull it off, great. If you don’t, great. If you pull it off and you fail, no one knows you.

It feels like a startup. I can look back at moments in my career in the Army. When I was in Haiti, I wanted to be on the radio program, and there was a certain moment when I had a budget and was paying radio programs to be on the show. I was talking about democracy, and then the UN was taking over, and the budget was gone.

I found out that most of the radio programs ran off a gas generator, and the UN didn’t care how much gas we spent, so I started filling out more J cans of gas. In the program, 10 gallons of gas, 5 gallons for my show, and 5 gallons for their own show. You find a way, and there’s a spirit there that is key to startups. It’s easy to find all the things that are wrong, things in your way, things that are going to make it impossible but there’s a different gear that someone has that says, “Great. That’s hard. How are we going to figure it out? How are we going to do it?”

LBL Mark McNally | Limiting Beliefs — Limiting Beliefs: It’s easy to find the wrong things in your way. But it is another thing altogether to figure out how to solve them.

[00:09:07] That’s a special skill. It’s a skill that, quite honestly, a lot of people don’t have. There’s this mystique of entrepreneurship that anybody can do, it’s easy, start with your side gig, and off you go, and within sixteen months, you are going to be a millionaire. It’s not the truth because if you look at the failure rate of organizations, a lot of it comes down to the fact that they don’t start with a plan. I want to talk to you about starting with a plan because you have an ambitious plan of 100 businesses in 5 years. Going back to my BHAG, the Big Hairy Audacious Goal, that’s a big hairy audacious goal.

[00:09:45] It is a BHAG and meant to be. It means a lot to us. People ask me all the time, “Why not 20?” I’ve got my CPA or attorney who is like, “Why not do 10 in the 5 years?” I get that. It’s a very rational thought process. It’s a conservative, safe thought process, and I get it. BHAGs are not meant to be safe and are not meant to feel comfortable. BHAGs are meant to make you recalculate everything. That is exactly what this is meant to be.

If I said we are going to do 18 companies in 10 years, you would be like, “That’s a lot but you could pull it off. You throw more people and money at it. I’m rooting for you, Mark,” but when I say 100 in 5 years, you automatically have to switch. It’s a forcing function. You go, “They are going to do something different,” and that’s exactly what I want my team will be thinking every day.

We are not going to do what we did previously in our career and try harder, throw more money or put more people at it. We have to invent a new way of thinking. “Is your instinct good? Go in that direction.” I use this analogy all the time. I’m a junior pilot but I’m a pilot. I fly in some of the most complex airspaces on the planet, the SALT Center in California. I will be honest, my instructor will kill me for this but I overthink how to get out of the airspace. As soon as I’m heading East and I’m over the desert, that’s when I do my flight plan because I know I’m going in that direction.

Do not simply do your previous plans again and just throw more money at it. You have to invent a new way of thinking. Share on X

I overthink, “What’s going on with the weather, traffic patterns, and what’s the best time to get off the ground? I want to get out of this airspace.” There are 18 different complex airspaces and 2 military airspaces but in 20 minutes, I’m over Palm Springs. There’s nothing to do but think about your flight planning, and I’m going in that direction. I’m trying to teach people to think that way overall in company creation. When you say 100 companies in 5 years, you need that thinking, “Go that way. We will learn on the way.”

[00:11:31] It fails fast, learns, and adapts very quickly. I look at it and go, “How do you bring other people along on that journey?” It’s a change of mentality. It’s a shift in thinking and their comfort zone. I’m comfortable with that. I’m all in. I’m all in rolling up these sleeves. You sit there and say, “If this doesn’t work, then we go left. If this doesn’t work, we go right. If this doesn’t work, we go over, under or through it. We will find a way but it may not be the original way that we thought it was. We are going to make this thing happen.” How do you get people to drink that mother’s milk because that’s a DNA that a lot of people don’t have?

[00:12:13] I wish I had the PhD in the answer. We are always trying to teach and make sure we speak this way to our own team. Even though this is my DNA and ethos, therefore, it’s the studio’s. Sometimes I will walk into a meeting virtually that maybe I hadn’t been to a 2, 3 or 4 weeks, and I can see the thinking looks a lot like the 1980s. Sometimes I’ve got to be that disruptor. It’s a constant process. It also comes down to we got to know each other through Sejal. Sejal and I are talking about this. It’s about teaching the culture as well.

People say, “I want to be part of this studio.” You want to indoctrinate them on the front end. “Get ready and grab your desk. You are going to be uncomfortable.” As you said, they come to it with a different background but as long as you can teach people, “This is what you are signing up for,” then I do believe people want to be stretched that way.

I don’t always want to be a disruptor and be in the role of stretching people but I see that I play that role sometimes. It’s fun to watch people get out of their own boxes. I can think of a few people in the organization that joined us a few years ago, and they said, “I don’t even know what I bring to the table but I’m going to clean the bathrooms and mop the floors,” and that’s exactly how I got part of my startup that went public.

They had that mentality, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to know but I’m going to learn it here.” I look at them, and these people are rock stars. They have completely blossomed in a few years. I believe if you want to learn and evolve, then we are going to stretch you in this organization. We are very fortunate that so many people have become rock stars. It’s a proud moment to say. I can give that person these people projects, challenges, and things that before would only be on my plate, Barry’s plate or a few people, and now they’ve risen to the occasion. It’s a proud moment to watch how they’ve grown.

[00:14:27] I want to take that and expand upon that because there are two things that I’m thinking about. One is a culture of teaching people to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, and the second is empowerment. 1 of the 2 is not going to do it. You could get people being uncomfortable but if they don’t feel that they have the ability to run with the ball themselves, they are not going to.

You start with a cadre. You don’t start with a 50, 100 or 1,000-person company. You start with five and enable those people to expand the culture out and bring new people to the table that have a similar mentality and onboard them. How are you building that culture of being uncomfortable and empowering these people to sit there and say, “This is the goal. How you get there is up to you?”

[00:15:19] It’s something that we are trying to get better at every day in terms of our language and how we empower people. I tend to remind people that I don’t want to be involved in everything.

[00:15:28] That’s a healthy start.

[00:15:29] There are certain things I’m good at, and I love to be a part of. You call your 100 friends, I’m probably, the top 2 or 3 that be in that particular room in that meeting but for the most part, I don’t have value in a lot of things. What I remind people, though, is that you don’t get to come to the table with a 60% answer. If you come to a table that 60% answer, you force me to do what I’ve done my entire career, which is dive in and solves it.

If you come to the table with an 85% answer like grenade range, I’m going to go, “Good enough. Maybe I will make it 92% or 75% if I dive in. You are in the grenade range. Go,” but it’s rising the bar to say, “Don’t default to Mark has the answer, and smart, and has all his experience. Don’t default to Barry’s got it.” You have to own it. If you want to have that leeway you described, then show up to the table earning it.

Don’t be lazy. Don’t show up and say, “I’m 65%. What should I do next, Mark?” You are making me do work. Say, “This is what I should do. I want to do this. Say yes,” then I can give you some tweaking and the green light, and you go. It’s a very fine line. There’s a difference between playing it safe and being ready to be on edge and stick your neck out.

[00:16:36] I love that because now, I run a consultancy, so I bring people as I need them. When I had 30 staff, the deal was you could come to my office anytime you wanted with a problem but you had to have two answers. You had to come in and say, “Here’s the problem. Here are two different ways that we can solve it.” I was far more interested in thinking about how you are thinking about the problem than the answers that you came to yourself.

Ninety-five percent of the time, I said, “Run with it. Take number B. Go for it. You may want to think about this and this. Go for it.” Every once in a while, you take a look and say, “Neither one of those is going to work. How about this?” If you empower people and enable them to come to you with answers, then you are not the gatekeeper and not having to solve every single problem, and it allows you to run faster and better.

[00:17:24] It’s also training people on how we need to operate as an organization. I’ve got some very high-performing experienced executives who we have been bringing in the last few months. I got on a call. They were like, “I want you to review the eighteen emails I sent you.” I’m like, “There’s zero chance I’ve read those emails.”

[00:17:41] It’s not just their eighteen emails. It’s the other 150 people that sent you 20 emails.

[00:17:47] It’s having them appreciate. I’m not the best at communicating this but I’m like, “You have to understand that I’m on fourteen hours of phone calls every day.” Everybody gives me two hours of homework. Do the math. Don’t tell me I sent you the email. We have this precious time to talk. You need to say, “I have made these choices. This is what I think is right. Unless you have an injection, I’m doing X, Y, Z, A, B, and Z. This contract I’m about to sign is fourteen pages. I did send it to you but I’m going to ask you to read it. There’s this one paragraph I want your eyes on. Pull it up.”

You have to know how to interact. It’s teaching people how to make me better, and it’s teaching me how to make them better or more effective. Otherwise, people are like, “I sent you 45 emails, and you didn’t respond yet.” That’s on you. What do you think I’m doing every day? It’s teaching each other how to operate so that it can be super effective.

Empowerment is don’t fill email full of emails. My inbox shouldn’t be full of emails. You should be taking the time that we have to be effective. “Where do you need input? Where do you need pushback? Where do you need debate?” That’s where I want to be spending my time. Whereas my experience, me pulling up an email and commenting on something is not the best use of my time. I empower people. I don’t want to overthink. If you’ve looked at a contract, I trust you, and just tell me where you want my input. If there’s a clause you don’t like, let’s debate it. It’s bringing that out of people.

[00:19:02] It’s about building leaders at all levels. It’s not having an organization of followers. It’s having an organization that thinks like entrepreneurs that want to sit there and say, “I own this little piece of the pie. I’m responsible for it. It’s my responsibility to make sure that this is a go or no-go. I need to keep Mark in the loop to make sure that what I’m doing is not going to throw a monkey wrencher or a grenade into a larger plan.”

That’s a cultural shift for a lot of individuals who are used to sitting there going, “Mark, is that okay? Mark, can I get in there five minutes of your time?” As you said, there’s only one of you. You can only do so much, and you need to have people around you that think on a very strategic level and are confident in themselves enough to be able to act accordingly. How do you, as a gut wrench, bring those people into the business when you don’t know how they are going to act or react?

[00:20:03] When I was part of a company that went public and saw gazillions of dollars created overnight, and then I saw that a couple of years later that the money was going away, fortunately, I learned a lot about people. Some things you never wanted to know about them but I learned a lot. I tend to be more focused on people’s character, their intestinal fortitude, and their integrity than I am on their resumes. That tends to be where I focus anyway like, “How’s this person going to be when the chips are down?”

To answer your question, if I’m getting the right people to the journey because of that, they are bringing a certain caliber, and I’m trying to be direct with people and say like, “This is what I need. This is what you are capable of. This is what I need you to do. This is how you have value. Bring me 85% answers.” There are certain things I can’t help myself. I love to go rathole on certain things. I’m passionate about certain things, and you will know when to call me on those things.

If there are a lot of things that are just rubber stamps, like, “Yes, go.” Bring them to me in that fashion. In fact, most of that stuff is going to be off my plate anyway. Bring me the things that, in five minutes or less, you can say, “This is the thought process I went through. Here’s how I got to the conclusion I got. This is what is the best answer. This is what I’m going to do if you don’t respond, and I’m going to go.”

There are other times you are going to say, “I’ve decided this 80% but this one thing I know you are going to have an opinion on. I need your focus, Mark.” Walk me through it for ten minutes. You get all my feedback and you say, “Here’s an answer. Go.” It’s teaching people how to work with each other. I’m super easy. I don’t want to be involved in most things. I want to empower people. I want to see their brilliance. I want them to be 100 times better than I am and their respective areas but there is a process of learning from each other. We all have to invest in that.

[00:21:44] How do you teach leaders how to be better leaders in that particular case? Here’s the scenario. You are direct. You know what you want and need. You are able to articulate it within that small cadre of people that you are dealing with but as you grow from 5 to 25 to 125 to whatever number of people, you are not going to be responsible for everybody, and not everybody is going to be coming to you. They are going to be coming to other people.

How do you teach them how to expect the same from the people that they are hiring as you expect from them? That’s a very specific culture and leadership style. Unless you can build people that have that same quality, you are going to get a breakdown because they are going to get choked up, and they are not going to be able to do what they need to do.

[00:22:34] That’s so insightful. You are right. It’s one of the reasons why I recruited Sejal Thakker when I was still in the garage. She’s like, “You have two people and a dog. Why are you hiring a cultural officer?” I told her, “It’s because we are going to be 1,000 or 10,000 people. Most of the people will not have the chance to have the interaction with me that I would like to have with them like the interaction I have now with my core cadre.”

The only thing that’s going to be the glue that keeps us together is culture. To answer your question, we will bring in leaders who are going to think differently than I do. We are going to have leaders of a different background than I do but if you have an overwriting culture, that is Nobody Studios and the people who got subscribed to Nobody Studios will demand that experience.

It almost forces leaders to act within those lanes. It’s not like the old days when you could be 1984 IBM. You are the sub-sales team of something that no one knows what’s going on. We are our culture. Nobody Studio fuses our culture and what you stand for. Somebody comes to the table and says, “I want to work with this company.” Even if they get underneath an executive that’s different from me, they are still going to demand the Nobody Studio’s culture.

If they don’t receive that, it’s going to be obvious and evident. That is my answer. I believe that we make people conform to what we stand for and try to accomplish here in our overall vibe. There’s no corner in the room where someone gets to be a dictator and do their own thing. We stand for something.

[00:23:57] On your homepage, there’s a video that talks about the philosophy of Nobody Studios. In two minutes or less, it encapsulates a lot of your vision. Being able to tell that story effectively as you grow is what will enable you to either succeed or fail. The more that we can onboard that 3rd, 4th, and 5th generation of employees and be able to bring them into the culture in the way that they understand the original brand story, where you have been, where you are, and where you are going, and without that it will breakdown.

[00:24:36] You are a student pointing that out because it’s something that I’ve also realized. We’ve had 3 or 4 people that have come into the organization in the last few months that came through a different channel. It wasn’t a friend of Mark. I didn’t recruit them, and they are actively involved in a project. I wouldn’t say it was by design but we decided I was going to talk to them because I had influence or had a certain idea about the project.

In interacting with them, I came up with what you said. I’m like, “I need to make it on my calendar for 15 to 30 minutes.” No matter what, even if someone has been here for 6 months or 3 months, I need to reach out and touch them as long as I possibly can. Maybe I’m not going to be their key leader or they are not my direct report but if I can find a way to touch them for 15 to 30 minutes on their first 3 to 6 months, that needs to be a priority on my calendar because I can see the impact I have, in those 15 to 30 minutes. I can see how I stretch and empower them and how I hand off the brand story, as you said.

It’s important. That’s what’s going to make this studio what I believe it’s going to be. There’s no way to make it a machine. It’s always going to be us. It’s always going to be our people, soul, vision, ideas, and passions. It’s always going to be that. If we succeed 10 to 15 years from now, people are going to say, “In the first three months, Mark called me, and I had an amazing conversation. He stretched my ideas and vision of what I was going to do here,” and maybe that leads to something that makes the studio 10% better, and that’s critical.

As I replicate myself, there’ll be other people that have that same impact and power in different ways and do the same thing. It’s critical. We are not making a machine. There are parts of what we are trying to do that have to be systematic, and we have to think about how to make this a program at the same time. As I’ve said, “We are people. We have passions. We have experience and knowledge. That’s all being translated into something that’s going to make this world a better place.” You can never get too far away from that.

[00:26:24] The more that we can bring humanity into our businesses, the more impactful we become, and the more people will rally around the cause, the vision, and the goals. When we look at our company as something that is merely a process or procedure and becomes bureaucratic, it tends to break down very quickly.

I applaud you for that. It will be curious to watch the vision and hopefully be part of it and to be able to sit there and say, “How do you take this company and turn it into an enterprise where people are begging to be part of the team?” Turn it into the next Google, where 1,000 people sign up for 10 positions because they believe in the vision, culture, and ideas behind the company.

I want to ask you one last question. What is the one thing you would want to tell people when they are starting up an organization? What are the things that you want them to focus on, enabling them to succeed? There are so many businesses that fail and get trapped, as you said, in that $10 million first round of VCs and then blow up. How do we help people succeed from the ground level and build the processes they need to be successful as they grow?

[00:27:48] I’ve got lots of go-to but the one thing I always go to is to tell your story. I can almost tell you that 90% of the people I see fail. I can go back and say, “How often did you tell your story? You had this idea. How often did you tell it?” “I was waiting for the mockups. I was trying to get the roadmap or deck right.” “No. Screw you. How often did you tell the story?” I believe that’s the simplest dumbest advice I can give people but most of us don’t do it.

I can go back in my career and think of times that I was trying to get this monolithic. “I’m not going to call that person until I have this perfect roadmap and I have this prototype and this and that. I’m not going to call that customer until I have this right.” We screwed this up, so I’ve simplified it in my advice. “How often do you tell your story?”

I told the Nobody Studio story 250 times in my garage. That’s what became Nobody Studios, and 42 people said, “This is cool,” 18 said, “I want to invest,” and 8 said, “I want to be a part of this.” What made me better in that process was that I understood what I was trying to say. You have to be willing to screw up. “What is my passion? Why does this matter? Why are we doing this?” As soon as I honed in on that, my story hasn’t changed in a few years but you have to tell your story. My number one advice to anybody with any idea is, “Tell me how many times you are able to tell your story this week. How many times did you tell your story today?” That will be a direct correlation to your success or failure.

Tell your story to others. It is a direct correlation to your success or failure. Share on X

[00:29:14] As a person who lives and dies by storytelling, you are speaking my language. That story will change and evolve as you grow but the basic premise and ideals of that story will remain the same. That’s extremely powerful. Mark, what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you or Nobody Studios?

[00:29:32] I’m an open book, so Mark and Nobody Studios, reach out to me anytime. Ping me on LinkedIn. The studio is pretty open. We love the interaction, and people reach out. We love ideas and dialogue.

[00:29:44] It’s NobodyStudios.com.

[00:29:47] Yes, sir.

[00:29:48] Here’s the last question I ask everybody before I let them out the door. When you leave a meeting, you get in your car and drive away. What’s the one thing you want people to think about you when you are not in the room?

[00:30:00] I give my wife credit for this answer. I have heard that question before. People would walk away and say, “She was 100% present. Even though she is who she is and has what she has, when I was with her, she focused on me. She was 100% engaged and invested in me.” I would hope that, over time, more people say that about me. As they engage and we interact, they would feel that way about their time with me.

[00:30:27] Mark, I value our time together. Thank you for your thoughts and wisdom. Thanks for building something that is a big hairy audacious goal that I hope you get all the way there and beyond.

About Mark McNally

Mark McNally is a serial entrepreneur with a broad base of expertise in scaling companies from rapid startup through multinational establishment. In other words, he’s an expert at ﬂying planes while building them; in fact, he’s even a licensed pilot!

A passionate product and marketing strategist, Mark is one of the original innovators within the e-commerce space. His ﬁrst startup went public on the NASDAQ at the age of 24, reaching a ~$4 billion market cap as the 3rd most successful IPO of the year.

Mark’s many successes are attributable to a visionary gift for seeing what does not yet exist, and manifesting it into the physical. This keen sense of sight does not just apply to company creation. He has a sharp eye for spotting talent; an ability to perceive people’s strengths, character, and potential, as well as how to align their passions.

Mark’s love of helping people solve problems is ampliﬁed by his ability to leverage a powerful network of strategic partnerships capable of accelerating the growth of each and every venture. The folks in his circle – whether friends, colleagues, or both – are apt to describe him as one of the most generous, caring, and open-minded people they’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.

14 startups and $5 billion in exits later, Mark has embarked on his magnum opus as the Chief Nobody @ Nobody Studios. His venture studio has a mission of building 100 companies in 5 years – making it the adventure of a lifetime.

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