Black Angels Miami talks with Mark Kingdon, Founder of Quixotic Ventures. Mark is a 3 time tech CEO and angel investor in companies like Twitter, Offerup and TheRealReal.
After graduating from Wharton with an MBA, Mark went into strategy consulting where he spent more than a decade with a top firm helping companies get online. Then he packaged up what he'd learned and joined a storied internet incubator called Idealab (Google it) to help build new companies.
The dot-com bubble burst so he went on to become CEO of a NASDAQ listed company called Organic that built websites for leading ecommerce brands like Bloomingdales and helped major brands like Jeep market themselves online. He took the company private then sold it to Omnicom. While there, he sought to bring innovation to his clients through startups and discovered many at their earliest stages such as MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and others.
He was fortunate enough to invest in Twitter and that was the beginning of his angel investing career. Mark went on to run Second Life the (online virtual world) and when his triplet daughters were born, he made early-stage investing his full-time gig. He's invested in great Unicorns like Twitter, Fab.com (which ultimately failed after achieving unicorn status), OfferUp and TheRealReal and dozens of other companies. Mark is an avid gardener and collects specimen plants and likes to think he has a mini botanical garden for a backyard.