Mark ScifresFounder

United States - Champaign, Illinois

I love being an Entrepreneur and I come from a family of entrepreneurs and engineers. I grew up near Palo Alto, California. My Father worked at Xerox PARC and, as a child, I got to meet my future heroes at Xerox PARC picnics, and at tours of the Xerox PARC labs in the 1970’s and 1980s. I got to play with laser diodes I discovered how science and creativity worked hand in hand. I was hooked for life. I worked at Lockheed Martin on the ARPA network while a student Gunn High School. As a freshman in engineering I had the idea to network dormitories on the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana campus in 1990. It took two+ years for my first project, and we built Pavlov Media while studying for an engineering degree (first Dormitory network live August 1994). The company was named Distributed Management Information Systems, inc. at the time. It incorporated in 1996.

Some of my heroes are Steve Jobs, John Wooden, Donald Scifres, Robert Metcalfe, Benjamin Franklin, Guy Kawasaki, John Pierpont Morgan Sr., Warren Lyford DeLano and Michael Dell. All of them taught me directly or through study that you must have faith in yourself and your ideas to change the world, however you must also have people working with you to grow a team and a business. This is fundamentally the difference between an entrepreneur and a team which is entrepreneurial. The words do NOT mean the same thing. Entrepreneurs without an entrepreneurial team tend to fail.

I have envisioned a version of Internet and connectivity between people that has been on my mind since I was 10 years old, and I am still refining and executing this vision. I hope to see as much of it come to light as I can. I believe that Fiber Optics infrastructure is the first residential utility that is NOT limited by mechanical properties, it’s limits are our imagination, low-cost electro-optical components, and our economic models. All other infrastructures required bigger physical pipes for water, gas, or thicker electrical cords for energy. Because it is so different, we must think about monetization in new and better ways vs. traditional utilities. The mission continues…