Spotnana welcomes Mark Nelson to our board of directors

Spotnana’s mission is to modernize the infrastructure of the travel industry. To achieve this goal it’s essential that we seek the guidance of individuals with tremendous leadership and technical expertise. 

Today we’re thrilled to announce that Mark Nelson has joined Spotnana’s board of directors. Mark has a long career leading product and engineering organizations and is currently a Venture Partner at Madrona Venture Group. Prior to Madrona, Mark served as President and CEO at Tableau, CTO at Concur, and held a variety of roles at Oracle over a 17-year period. Mark also serves on the boards of CircleCI, the leading CI/CD platform, and Veezoo, a startup looking to help anyone make decisions with data, and he is an advisor to a variety of startups. 

Mark recently shared his thoughts on the opportunity to improve travel industry technology and why he decided to join Spotnana’s board.

What were some of your key takeaways from your time as CTO at Concur?

“I spent four and a half years at Concur where I learned about the challenges and opportunities of the travel industry. It’s an industry that affects all of us and yet the experience that we get today often isn’t what we want. You can draw a direct line from my experience at Concur to joining Spotnana’s board. I worked for Steve Singh there, and I’m excited to continue to work towards revolutionizing the technology that lies behind travel in order to provide The Perfect Trip for travelers. 

I’m excited about Spotnana because it has a vision for a better way forward. Spotnana is providing new, modern infrastructure for the travel industry. It can enable a world where consumers get the experiences they want because suppliers can provide them with the best possible offers.”

What do you see as the opportunity for Spotnana?

“I first met Sarosh when Madrona was looking to invest a few years ago. He had an amazing vision and passion for the problem and how to solve it. Spotnana is built in a modern fashion, and the technologist in me is thrilled to see this. 

Spotnana essentially provides a way to divide and conquer the business of booking and servicing travel into smaller building blocks that you can use to compose what you want. This gives a lot of optionality to the people who are building on top of Spotnana. It’s exciting to see a fresh take on travel infrastructure and one that is done right with respect to how software is developed today.

Spotnana also has an opportunity to improve the economics in the travel industry in a way that better aligns incentives for suppliers, buyers, and the entire ecosystem. By building technology that improves how travel agencies operate, Spotnana is trying to make the entire ecosystem work better.”

What is the impact you’d like to drive as a board member?

“I love creating software. It’s what I’ve done for my whole career. It’s fun to be back in the details, and I’m hopeful my experience building software – and specifically building software for the travel industry – will be of use. I would love to help Spotnana grow and fulfill its vision for revolutionizing travel tech.

I’m also looking forward to working with Steve again. A huge reason Concur succeeded was due to the people and the culture. I have no doubt that any company that Steve is involved with will do things right, have an amazing culture, and attract the right kind of talent because of that.

For decades Steve has been chasing the dream of what travel could look like. Between Steve and Sarosh, there is no one who knows the industry better. If you’re going to make a bet in the travel space, I can’t think of anyone better to make that bet with than Steve and Sarosh.”