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Mark Heesen has advocated for the venture capital industry, entrepreneurship and innovation for nearly two decades, first as NVCA's head of public policy and, since 1999 as the Association's president. Under Mark's leadership, the NVCA has grown in both scope and scale as it relates to its public policy agenda, research initiatives, and member programs. Mark is constantly engaged in legislative and regulatory issues surrounding information technology, life sciences and clean technology investing, providing strategic direction for the NVCA professional staff and managing a board of 26 venture capital practitioners.
Mark has taken a leadership position on behalf of the venture capital industry on issues such as carried interest taxation, financial services reform, the FDA regulatory approval process, highly skilled immigration, patent reform, U.S. competitiveness issues, energy reform, support for basic research funding and countless other policy issues that impact America's entrepreneurial ecosystem.
As the primary spokesperson for the venture capital industry, Mark is often called upon by the financial media, NVCA members, limited partners, and regional associations to offer insights and perspectives on trends and developments occurring within the asset class. He is a frequent presenter at industry conferences, a familiar and trusted source in news articles focusing on the venture industry, and a recurrent guest on CNBC and Bloomberg Television.
Prior to his work at NVCA, Mark was an aide to a former Governor of Pennsylvania and was Deputy Director for Federal Funds reporting to the Texas Legislature. Mark received a law degree with an emphasis in taxation from the Dickinson School of Law in 1984.
W. Brian Arthur is an External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute and Coopers & Lybrand Fellow. From 1983 to 1996 he was Dean and Virginia Morrison Professor of Economics and Population Studies at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. from Berkeley in Operations Research, and has other degrees in economics, engineering and mathematics. Arthur pioneered the modern study of positive feedbacks or increasing returns in the economy--in particular their role in magnifying small, random events in the economy. His ideas have come much to the public eye with the recent legal case of the US Department of Justice vs. Microsoft. His work on increasing returns won him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987 and the Schumpeter Prize in Economics in 1990. Arthur is also one of the pioneers of the new science of complexity. His main interests are the economics of high technology; how business evolves in an era of high technology; cognition in the economy; and financial markets. Arthur was the first director of the Economics Program at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico; and he currently serves on the Board of the Institute. He is a consultant to Citicorp, McKinsey and Co, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Intel, among others.
About his book:
The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of the origins and evolution of technology. It accomplishes for the progress of technology what Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress. Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Conventional thinking ascribes the invention of technologies to "thinking outside the box," or vaguely to genius or creativity, but Arthur shows that such explanations are inadequate. Rather, technologies are put together from pieces - themselves technologies - that already exist.
