Mark Walsh

Mark Walsh is a member of BPC’s Board of Directors. He is the managing director of Ruxton Ventures, LLC—a seed-venture capital fund he created in 2002. From late 2015 through 2017, Walsh served in the Obama administration as head of the Office of Investment and Innovation for the U.S. Small Business Administration. He previously was the executive chairman of Homesnap.com, a Revolution Ventures investment.

Walsh’s career has revolved around technology entrepreneurship and non-profit leadership. He was president of GEnie, General Electric’s online service, and a senior vice president and corporate officer of AOL. While at AOL, Walsh created and ran AOL Enterprise, its business-to-business division.

In 1997, he joined VerticalNet, a business-to-business portal provider, as its CEO. Under Walsh’s leadership, VerticalNet went public on the NASDAQ in 1999. Walsh was also the co-founder and CEO of GeniusRocket, a provider of crowd-sourced advertising media.

Over the last 15 years, Walsh has served as a board member for many public and private corporations. In the non-profit arena, he has served as chair of the board of trustees of his alma mater, Union College; chair of the advisory board at the University of Maryland’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship; and founding chair of the New Leaders Council, a major leadership training institution for young progressive talent.

Walsh also served as the first chief technology advisor to the Democratic National Committee in 2001 and 2002, and as the head of internet strategy for the John Kerry for President campaign in 2004. From 2005 until 2015, he co-hosted a weekly political talk show on Sirius/XM satellite radio. In 2003, Walsh was the founding CEO of Air America Radio.

Walsh started his business career in television, as anchorman and news director of a CBS-TV affiliate, and as new business development director for HBO in New York.  He has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Union College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.