About Mark
6/Mar 2015
Mark is a Product leader with pioneering work on the world’s largest Internet real-time event and web sites across software and hardware operations (the early forms of Software as a Service/Subscription), technical and field product management, as well as content and marketing disciplines. Mark’s focus is on agile people and software development along with system design and life cycle thinking: he can build, secure, scale, and manage teams, applications, and infrastructure to work together while nurturing their continuous improvement.
When sponsored to do undergraduate research, he first touched the classified Internet in 1991, graduated from Boston University with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, and then suffered Internet withdrawal. In 1993, he started his career by joining the first national, commercial Internet Service Provider (before the world wide web).
As a founding or senior web master at Netscape, Silicon Graphics, CNN, and News Corp., Mark was part of developing and growing some of the world’s earliest and largest web properties. He progressed to Netscape Developer Relations as a Technology Evangelist covering JavaScript and LDAP. One compliment, “Mark is an engineer who can speak,” captures his ability to relate and teach technical subjects to anyone.
During his twenty+ years in Silicon Valley, he was a co-founder or early team member of seven startups where he held management roles in engineering and operations: Passpoints, Convergence Media Group, Smart Destinations (acquired by Big Bus), LetsTalk, Kaazing, Pertino (acquired by Cradlepoint), and Calm.io (acquired by Nutanix). His career since then has been a mix of practitioner and industry leader across Developer Relations, Open Source, Technical Product Management, and Sales Engineering.
Mark’s leadership approach mixes agile software engineering, operations, and emotional intelligence. In retrospect, his career of constant learning and multidisciplinary practice is summarized and complimented by the umbrella term DevOps and its variants of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevSecOps, DataOps, et. al.
Mark’s home is wherever his spouse and dog are (our children graduated), but our traveling family currently resides in San Diego, California, USA.
Please review Mark’s career and endorsements on LinkedIn, follow @mlavi on GitHub & GitLab; and browse Mark’s badges, CNCF Community profile, & blog.