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The Presidents' Forum
May 6, 2003

Mark Walsh
Managing Partner

Ruxton Associates, LLC

Speaker Biography:
Mark is Managing Partner at Ruxton Associates, LLC, a private investment entity.

Mark recently joined Chairman Terry McAuliffe at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) as their Chief Technology Advisor. The full-time voluntary position placed him in the forefront of Terry’s goal of reshaping the Democratic Party’s efforts to more effectively communicate with their base, their prospects and their internal constituencies. The goal was to reach out to core and fringe voters using interactive techniques and tactics, and to help bring Terry’s vision of a more nimble DNC to fruition.

Mark has distinguished himself by being “ahead of the curve” on a number of social changes over his business career. After leaving Harvard Business School with an MBA in 1980, he worked for a number of years at Home Box Office in New York as head of new business development for the HBO and Cinemax brands. In 1986 he joined the then-fledgling “online information” industry, as VP and General Manager of CUC International’s online group. CUC was the leader in 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.

He joined AOL in early 1995 and realized the early 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. In mid 1997, he joined VerticalNet Inc, as the CEO, taking the company public in early 1999; the first publicly traded B2B (business to business) Internet company. He became chairman in late 2000.

After the 2000 election, Mark concluded that the next arena that the internet’s impact would be most dramatically felt would be politics, so he began to work with the DNC and helped create and became Chairman of their Technology Capital Campaign. The goal was to create a new “OS”, or operating system for how politics works and how voters interact with the Democratic Party. Compelled by Terry McAuliffe’s vision of a new Democratic Party, he agreed to join the effort full time in early 2002.

Mark is on the board of Blackboard, Inc., and educational software and tools company, Day Corporation, a publicly traded content management tools company, Union College in Schenectady NY. (his alma mater), and the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he is on their 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.

He is currently the Chairman of Impulse Radio, a software and services company in the growing field of Digital Radio. The company services a number of Broadcast Radio stations and hardware/receiver manufacturers.

Mark serves or has served as a board member and/or Chair of the Software and Information Industry Association, the Information Industry Association, the President’s Advisory Group of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Standard for Internet Commerce. In 2000, Mark was named one of Business Week's e.biz 25, and that same year was named by Upside Magazine to the Elite 100, the hundred most influential people in technology. He 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.

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