Today we’d like to introduce you to Mark Hopkins.
Mark, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Absolutely! I got started early as a young teen in an East Texas mom and pop dial-up internet shop in the 90s. It was a good case of great timing since it was an organization that wound up becoming the internet division of Cox Communications. During my time there I got the hands-on chance to put together what was the nation’s second cable modem market.
Afterward, I got the chance to work in a number of great companies in the Dallas area, including Apple, Nokia, and IBM until the dot-com crash in the early 00’s.
For the next several years I worked alternatively in consulting and in various startups, where I got to cut my teeth on emerging trends in both New Media and ecommerce.
I had spent most of my tech career vocationally blogging (sometimes around current events, and sometimes just as a personal diarist). Around 2006-ish, I decided I had enough working for a living and wanted to take a run at being a journalist. Not long into my foray there, I broke the story that Google was working on a phone on my personal blog and podcast, which put my by-line in the spotlight. Not long after, I got a call from Pete Cashmore at Mashable, who invited me to join his growing team as his sixth full-time hire.
I worked with Mashable for about a year until I got a call from John Furrier, a New Media luminary who was cooking up his next media startup and asked me to join him as co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. I helped him and Dave Vellante grow the organization from a simple blog and wiki to a full-fledged broadcast, news and analyst organization over the better part of a decade.
In 2015, a group of us who were part of the early team at SiliconANGLE decided to move on to our next venture, Roger Wilco. What began as a video production group ended up spawning and partnering with several different independent ventures, including the now well-known Something Simple Services (a marketing and content firm), Dallas startup community bedrock Barista Ventures (a software development organization) and Roger Wilco (an EmTech consultancy focusing on cognitive and blockchain services).
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It’s absolutely been a wild ride. The path to success is never a straight line, and I’ve rebooted my career several times along the way.
Like I said, I started out as a developer and network technologist. After the dot-com bust, I spent a great deal of time trading on my knowledge as a generalist and a consultant. Then I felt the inexorable urge to create and found myself starting over again as a journalist and reporter.
Whenever my interest waned in that department, I found myself back in familiar territory as a startup specialist, but this time with a wide breadth of experience, and quite a bit more comfortable at the helm of the organizations I advised and led than when I was much younger.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Roger Wilco – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Roger Wilco has significantly pared down the activities it’s engaged in starting in mid-2017. We’re focused almost exclusively on consulting and frequently loan ourselves out as fractional COOs and CTOs to other startups. What sets us apart from others is our deep domain expertise in the areas of cognitive computing and blockchain.
During my time at SiliconANGLE, specifically in about 2011, I discovered Bitcoin. It very quickly became one of my beats and my calling card. This wasn’t particularly useful professionally until about May of 2017 when the price began of Bitcoin to rise meteorically, and suddenly our expertise at Roger Wilco became a much-sought-after commodity.
Aside from our work in blockchain, we’re one of the few consultancies that can claim significant victories in both blockchain and cognitive consulting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2oHnh4uWrk).
Our team also was involved in implementing and architecting blockchain solutions well before the crypto-rush of 2017, and lead the first ERC-20 based coin offerings in the DFW metroplex for one of our client companies.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
I’m very much a buoy in the water when it comes to tech. I love to see where the currents of change take me. As such, I have no major changes planned for the immediate future, but that’s never the case; big changes tend to find me.
I am working on a number of very large projects that will hopefully yield results very soon. I’ve been working with a local Dallas blockchain startup named VeriToken that’s slated to ICO on September 1st, and looks to be on track to raise between $30 to $80 MM. Roger Wilco is launching a research division, and allowing folks to interact with its research marketplace using a blockchain-backed utility token. I’m also helping a company called TheftProofData bring its solution for protecting data from quantum computing attack to market as well.
I’ll also be speaking very soon at a number of local and national blockchain conferences, including the SmartContract Workshop on July 26th at UTD, and I’ll be debating up on stage on August 1st at the Digital Dallas: Digital Fight Club.
So yeah, not too much. 🙂
Contact Info:
- Address: 1601 Bryan St, 4201
Dallas, TX 75201 - Website: http://ro.gerwil.co
- Phone: 903-253-0143
- Email: mark@ro.gerwil.co
- Instagram: http://instagr.am/rogerwilco.agency
- Facebook: http://fb.me/rogerwilco.agency
- Twitter: http://t.co/rogerwilcoagcy
Image Credit:
Creative Commons BY-SA, Roger Wilco
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