Mark T. Nelson’s career trajectory evolved from a software engineer to executive to CEO. Mark is currently a Venture Partner at Madrona Venture Group in Seattle. Prior to Madrona, Mark was President and CEO of the data analytics company Tableau. He joined Tableau as Executive Vice President of Product Development prior to Tableau’s acquisition by Salesforce before assuming the CEO role in 2021. He was CTO of the travel and expense company Concur from 2013 to 2018. As part of these two roles he was responsible for the development organization for the two largest acquisitions of Seattle based software companies - Concur’s 2014 acquisition by SAP for $8 Billion and Tableau’s 2019 acquisition by Salesforce for $16 Billion. Before Concur, Mark was at Oracle for 17 years helping to found the development lap in Portland, Oregon and holding a variety of roles from developer to Vice President of product development. Early in his career Mark also held software development roles at database company Informix and at AT&T where he helped create software for 9-1-1 service. Mark is an active investor, advisor and currently serves on the board of directors for CircleCI, the leading provider of Continuous Integration and Continuous Development platforms having previously served as part of the board of Talend, a data integration provider. He grew up in the Chicago area and earned a Bachelor's Degree in General Engineering (now ISE) from UIUC. After his role at AT&T he returned to UIUC to earn a Master’s Degree in Computer Science working as part of the Theoretical Biophysics Group at the Beckman Institute. His Master Thesis involved the development of the molecular dynamics (MD) simulation package NAMD which is still widely used today.
