"Louis: My papa would like to meet you ... He runs our little group. Avner: I thought you ran the group. Louis: Everybody works for someone." -- from the 2005 film Munich (directed by Steven Spielberg)
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Mark (pic taken June 2020). A creature of SMBs. Have helped: start, grow & run 4; run 3 established ones; & advise 25+.
CURRENTLY
Since 2008, I've held lead roles in HR/ people, operations, litigations, training, ghostwriting/ content creation, investigations, health & safety and other functions at a 2-office law firm in Silicon Valley which specializes mostly in plaintiff's side employment law. See also my LinkedIn profile.
I've helped the firm's San Mateo, CA office serve clients in/ from California, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Hawaii, New Jersey, New Zealand, Singapore, the Philippines, India, Spain, France, Switzerland, the U.K., and some other U.S. states and foreign countries.
Legal advocacy teams I've served on have helped individual plaintiff employees (including 3 public company CEOs, at least 7 private company CEOs, over 20 CFOs, COOs and SVPs, as well as scores of engineers, scientists, founders, salespeople, secretaries, attorneys, I.T. personnel, HR directors, administrative assistants, and others) assert their claims against some of the biggest names in:
social media; electric cars; VR; cell phones; biotech; vaping; enterprise software; multimedia software; networking equipment; on-line auctioning; e-commerce; on-line payments; medical devices; billionaire "family offices"; flash memory products; SaaS; semiconductors; VCs; games; telecom; mobile applications; search engines; and many others.
As a result, I've experienced an enviable "backstage pass" to 100+ Silicon Valley lawyered'up & HR-up'ed employee off-boards (usually contentious) and on-boards (usually more civil), involving many iconic companies providing the products and services listed above, their hired guns (all cunning and ruthless legal and HR minds), and, a few involving direct reports to:
Tim Cook, Larry Ellison, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Eric Schmidt, Palmer Luckey, and Michael Novogratz, as well as direct reports to members of Jeff Bezos' and Elon Musk's C-suite inner circles.
I've also, 35x+, been a senior member of legal teams providing consulting and advocacy services to companies in regards to HR compliance, health & safety compliance, pre-litigation & litigated business disputes, California LLC registration and LLC manager(s)/ member(s) and ownership structuring, and related matters. The organizations served include:
an art gallery; a food distributor; a property management & real estate investment company; a motorcycle components company; a liquor store; a promotional items company; a law firm; a veterinary clinic; a beer brewery; a mortgage brokerage; a medical billing service; a specialty foods company; an engineering firm; a beverage company; and many others.
FORMERLY
Prior to 2008, I held senior/ team-leader positions/ roles in the San Francisco Bay Area, not only with other law firms (including one where I was 4x a team-member of jury & bench trials in civil courts) but also with a cable TV advertising company, a RDBMS/ SQL company, and a recruitment/ staffing firm. See also my LinkedIn profile.
I joined one organization as its "Employee #1" during its first week being open for business, and then helped scale it with its founders from start-up to a 3-fold increase in personnel, clientele and office space over a 5-year period.
I was also 4x a lead in guiding teams to start from scratch: 2 new branch offices to spearhead past employers' sales territory and market share expansions, and 2 new departments, including one in HR and another one specializing in private/ corporate security guards recruitment * and placement. (* Interestingly, my co-founder in the latter venture had, for a time as a younger man, la cosa nostra and bratva connections before being reformed by a Marine Corps stint, plus fatherhood. He schooled me in the ways of the private security business, street smarts, and dealing with violent situations/ scenarios, and I remain grateful to him for teaching me [not a tough guy] how real tough guys like him think and act.)
In addition, I've helped develop relational databases to facilitate bringing order from chaos, and signals from noise, within what were usually 50K to 1M+ page scanned and OCR'd document populations.
I also for a time teamed up with customers and their chosen video production teams to script and produce 30-second commercial spots from scratch, or adopt/ re-tool their previously produced spots, to run "on the air" with a local cable TV provider.
MISCELLANY
I was born and raised in Springdale, OH and then Wyoming, OH, two suburbs less than a 30 minute drive north from downtown Cincinnati, OH. At Wyoming High School, I was a member of its varsity football, track & field, and wrestling teams.
Growing up, I also spent a lot of time visiting family in Springboro, OH and Centerville, OH, two then rural communities outside of Dayton, OH.
According to my 23andMe results, genetically I am 99.3% European, with my ancestors hailing from: Poland (Podkarpackie and Podlaskie); Ukraine (Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk); Switzerland (Bern and Zurich), Hungary (Budapest and Hajdú-Bihar), and Romania (Arad County and Cluj County).
My travels have included 30+ U.S. states, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, the U.K., Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany (both West and East before reunification), Austria, and Italy.
I hold a Master of Journalism from the University of California -- Berkeley (UCB). Click here to go to my full profile on the UCB Graduate School of Journalism website.
I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies from the University of California -- Santa Barbara (UCSB), where I primarily studied East European history **, the Latin language, and the works of William Shakespeare. (** While at UCSB, I was honored to have been mentored for most of an academic year by a visiting professor from Hungary, Géza Jeszenszky, who later became his country's Minister of Foreign Affairs and then Ambassador to the United States.)
In my spare time, I press, curl & swing kettlebells and dangle on power towers (hoping someday I can do 10+ chin-ups without the help of an elastic band), alongside rucking the highlands due west of San Francisco International Airport wearing a 30 lbs. weighted vest.
Since 2008, I've held lead roles in HR/ people, operations, litigations, training, ghostwriting/ content creation, investigations, health & safety and other functions at a 2-office law firm in Silicon Valley which specializes mostly in plaintiff's side employment law. See also my LinkedIn profile.
I've helped the firm's San Mateo, CA office serve clients in/ from California, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Hawaii, New Jersey, New Zealand, Singapore, the Philippines, India, Spain, France, Switzerland, the U.K., and some other U.S. states and foreign countries.
Legal advocacy teams I've served on have helped individual plaintiff employees (including 3 public company CEOs, at least 7 private company CEOs, over 20 CFOs, COOs and SVPs, as well as scores of engineers, scientists, founders, salespeople, secretaries, attorneys, I.T. personnel, HR directors, administrative assistants, and others) assert their claims against some of the biggest names in:
social media; electric cars; VR; cell phones; biotech; vaping; enterprise software; multimedia software; networking equipment; on-line auctioning; e-commerce; on-line payments; medical devices; billionaire "family offices"; flash memory products; SaaS; semiconductors; VCs; games; telecom; mobile applications; search engines; and many others.
As a result, I've experienced an enviable "backstage pass" to 100+ Silicon Valley lawyered'up & HR-up'ed employee off-boards (usually contentious) and on-boards (usually more civil), involving many iconic companies providing the products and services listed above, their hired guns (all cunning and ruthless legal and HR minds), and, a few involving direct reports to:
Tim Cook, Larry Ellison, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Eric Schmidt, Palmer Luckey, and Michael Novogratz, as well as direct reports to members of Jeff Bezos' and Elon Musk's C-suite inner circles.
I've also, 35x+, been a senior member of legal teams providing consulting and advocacy services to companies in regards to HR compliance, health & safety compliance, pre-litigation & litigated business disputes, California LLC registration and LLC manager(s)/ member(s) and ownership structuring, and related matters. The organizations served include:
an art gallery; a food distributor; a property management & real estate investment company; a motorcycle components company; a liquor store; a promotional items company; a law firm; a veterinary clinic; a beer brewery; a mortgage brokerage; a medical billing service; a specialty foods company; an engineering firm; a beverage company; and many others.
FORMERLY
Prior to 2008, I held senior/ team-leader positions/ roles in the San Francisco Bay Area, not only with other law firms (including one where I was 4x a team-member of jury & bench trials in civil courts) but also with a cable TV advertising company, a RDBMS/ SQL company, and a recruitment/ staffing firm. See also my LinkedIn profile.
I joined one organization as its "Employee #1" during its first week being open for business, and then helped scale it with its founders from start-up to a 3-fold increase in personnel, clientele and office space over a 5-year period.
I was also 4x a lead in guiding teams to start from scratch: 2 new branch offices to spearhead past employers' sales territory and market share expansions, and 2 new departments, including one in HR and another one specializing in private/ corporate security guards recruitment * and placement. (* Interestingly, my co-founder in the latter venture had, for a time as a younger man, la cosa nostra and bratva connections before being reformed by a Marine Corps stint, plus fatherhood. He schooled me in the ways of the private security business, street smarts, and dealing with violent situations/ scenarios, and I remain grateful to him for teaching me [not a tough guy] how real tough guys like him think and act.)
In addition, I've helped develop relational databases to facilitate bringing order from chaos, and signals from noise, within what were usually 50K to 1M+ page scanned and OCR'd document populations.
I also for a time teamed up with customers and their chosen video production teams to script and produce 30-second commercial spots from scratch, or adopt/ re-tool their previously produced spots, to run "on the air" with a local cable TV provider.
MISCELLANY
I was born and raised in Springdale, OH and then Wyoming, OH, two suburbs less than a 30 minute drive north from downtown Cincinnati, OH. At Wyoming High School, I was a member of its varsity football, track & field, and wrestling teams.
Growing up, I also spent a lot of time visiting family in Springboro, OH and Centerville, OH, two then rural communities outside of Dayton, OH.
According to my 23andMe results, genetically I am 99.3% European, with my ancestors hailing from: Poland (Podkarpackie and Podlaskie); Ukraine (Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk); Switzerland (Bern and Zurich), Hungary (Budapest and Hajdú-Bihar), and Romania (Arad County and Cluj County).
My travels have included 30+ U.S. states, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, the U.K., Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany (both West and East before reunification), Austria, and Italy.
I hold a Master of Journalism from the University of California -- Berkeley (UCB). Click here to go to my full profile on the UCB Graduate School of Journalism website.
I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies from the University of California -- Santa Barbara (UCSB), where I primarily studied East European history **, the Latin language, and the works of William Shakespeare. (** While at UCSB, I was honored to have been mentored for most of an academic year by a visiting professor from Hungary, Géza Jeszenszky, who later became his country's Minister of Foreign Affairs and then Ambassador to the United States.)
In my spare time, I press, curl & swing kettlebells and dangle on power towers (hoping someday I can do 10+ chin-ups without the help of an elastic band), alongside rucking the highlands due west of San Francisco International Airport wearing a 30 lbs. weighted vest.