Today, Mark Suppes is a famous fusioneer
Ten years ago, I was editing demo reels at a commercial production company in NYC, in charge of a massive archive of material on 3/4” videotape, and wanted to build a system to organize it all and make the reels automatically. I wanted to do this with FileMaker, so I learned some FileMaker, went to a users group meeting, and met this guy, Mark, who was my age and way smarter and ambitious than most of the other FileMaker developers there. So I asked about hiring him, we had a meeting, and a month later was September 11 and I quit my job and lost interest. But Mark made an impression on me—a 22-year-old serial entrepreneur. A titan in the making.
By chance, last week I was signed on to IM (which I do very, very rarely) and Mark sees me and we start to chat at 3AM. He’s seen me around, on Daring Fireball and stuff, he’s been busy building a fusion reactor, which is not really something you can do with FileMaker, evidently. A man on the street in the video above refers to it as “The Brooklyn Project” which I thought was pretty clever.
Today, he’s everywhere. BBC, HuffPo, this particularly good piece on Gizmodo.
It’s a very cool thing he’s working on—I can’t pretend to comprehend even a single piece of it, but I know that he’s onto something big and he’s in it for the right reasons. Mark is well on his way to becoming a captain of industry. And to think, he and I were a hair’s breadth away from revolutionizing the commercial demo reel industry for all of humanity. Nice going, terrorists.
