Summary
 
Mark is a serial tech entrepreneur, impact investor, and thought leader on sustainability data and climate risk metrics. His prior startups — in media and technology — were acquired by Dow Jones, Cisco, Exodus Communications, Primedia and Broderbund.

Modern Financial Science
 
Mark first became intrigued by portfolio management in 1998, while attending Stanford’s Executive Program in Financial Management. Particularly inspiring was Nobel laureate William F. Sharpe, a lecturer in the program and one of the principal developers of Modern Portfolio Theory.

Financial Markets

Mark understands how real world financial markets work, particularly foreign exchange, the world’s largest. His fascination with trading dates from the mid-1980s when he spent five years working with foreign exchange traders in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Zurich and Paris as a part of a software venture, which he co-founded, to develop real-time analytic tools for spot, forward and options trading.

Private Equity and Digital Technology

As a co-founder of two other technology companies prior to Macroclimate and Geofinancial Analytics, Mark is familiar with private equity markets, the transition from private equity to microcap stocks through the IPO process, and managing concentrated stock holdings post-IPO or acquisition. In addition, his expertise in technology — particularly software development and trading systems — informs the firm’s digital platform and algorithmic rebalancing approach.

Climate Risk Research and Solutions

Mark serves as Chair of the External Advisory Board of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment (IonE) — one of the top climate science research centers — and is a member of the Dimensional Sustainability Council. The Dimensional Sustainability Funds Council is a group of consultants and wealth managers whose input is solicited by Dimensional when it comes to decisions regarding how to appropriately incorporate sustainability factors into their fund strategies. He is co-author — with Dimensional and other members of the Council — of The Evolution of Sustainability Investing.

Together with colleagues at Macroclimate, IonE and the climate data division of Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS-Ethix), he is co-author of A Geofinancial Engineering Initiative: Using Real Time Environmental Data from Satellites to Move Financial Markets and Improve Climate Outcomes (Journal of Environmental Investing, September 2017, pdf) and Can geofinancial engineering get us out of hot water? (Physics World, September 25, 2017). Mark serves as CEO of Geofinancial Analytics, Inc., which was launched in 2018 to commercialize these ideas.

From 2010 through 2015, Mark also served as Managing Director of Vision Prize, a polling platform for capturing scientific meta-knowledge on climate risks and solutions. The research program — which informs our investment strategy and analytic tools — operated in collaboration with the UK’s Institute of Physics (IOP Publishing), and was affiliated with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

Education and Mentoring

Mark holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, M.A. in communication research from the University of Minnesota, NASD Series 65 (Investment Advisor) certification, and is a graduate of Stanford University’s Executive Program in Financial Management. From 1995 through 2008, he served as a mentor in the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Venture & Management Background

Dow Jones & Co. (then publisher of the Wall Street Journal) acquired Mark’s first company — FX Development — in 1989. FX Development provided innovative online financial trading software to investment and commercial banks worldwide, and is now owned by Refinitiv (formerly Thomson Reuters). He was a co-founder of the company and, prior to acquisition, served as chief operating officer and a member of the board of directors.
Mark’s second company, Cohesive Technology, was one of the first commercial providers of Internet services and network security software. Exodus Communications acquired Cohesive’s services group in 1999; Cisco Systems acquired its software group, which Mark led, in 1997. He was a co-founder of the company and prior to acquisition, also served as executive vice president and a member of the board of directors.