Mark brings decades of experience building products, teams, and businesses to his role with Madrona, having transitioned from his most recent role as CEO of Tableau in late 2022. In his time helping to build great products and teams, Mark has had the fortune of working on areas ranging from computational biophysics, large-scale database systems, middleware for enterprises, and cloud infrastructure to travel, expense solutions, and data analytics. At Madrona, he focuses on evaluating new investments and advising portfolio companies and their leaders. Mark is passionate about how software, particularly software’s ability to utilize data, will revolutionize and enhance every aspect of human endeavors in the years to come.
Journey to Madrona
Mark most recently served as president at CEO of Tableau. He joined Tableau as EVP of product development in May of 2018, about a year before Tableau’s acquisition by Salesforce. As EVP, he led the global engineering and product teams, and under his leadership, both teams helped the company broaden and deepen its industry-leading analytics platform to support customers globally while leading the company through the turbulent acquisition integration process during a pandemic.
Prior to Tableau, Mark was the chief technology officer at Concur for four and a half years, where he was responsible for all aspects of product development and for hosting operations for their SaaS services. After Concur’s acquisition by SAP, Mark also served as the CTO for SAP Cloud Business Group.
Mark spent 17 years as vice president and architect at Oracle, working primarily in the middleware product groups, which grew from a nascent business to a $6 billion business. Before Oracle, Mark worked at the database company Informix and helped to build E9-1-1 products for AT&T. Mark has also served as a board member at the data integration company Talend and has advised various startups throughout his career.
Lessons learned
- Trust and empathy are what enable people to follow a leader. Conditions will change, and situations will get hard. People will follow leaders who they can trust and that understand what the team is up against in the challenges that come their way.
- Make it safe to talk about what goes wrong. If you can’t talk about your challenges and failures as easily as you celebrate your successes, then you are incentivized not to bring up the topics that need attention to get fixed. Things will always go wrong — leadership is always finding a path forward no matter what goes wrong, not pretending like everything always goes to plan.
- There are a million small steps in any long journey. If you look at any large task at the beginning, it will seem undoable. It’s always hard to imagine how you get to the top of the mountain from the base. But if you start putting one foot in front of the other, it’s amazing where you can get!
When he’s not in the office…
Mark loves to run, hike, and enjoy the magnificent outdoor life that the Pacific Northwest has to offer. His wife, Baochun, has also had a career in technology, working for Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft. Together they have two children, one in college and one about to start high school.
Noteworthy
Mark ran development for the two largest software acquisitions in the history of Seattle — the $8 billion acquisition of Concur by SAP in 2014 and the $16 billion acquisition of Tableau by Salesforce in 2019. Mark currently serves on the board of directors for CircleCI, the leading continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform. Mark holds a bachelor’s in general engineering and a master’s in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.