Mark Skapinker is a Managing Partner at Brightspark, a software venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 firm based in Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

, Ontario

Ontario

Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

.

Born in South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

, he immigrated to Canada where, along with Bert Amato

Bert Amato

Bert Amato is an investor and consultant in the high-technology industry. He currently sits as an advisory board member of several firms, including XDL Intervest Management, Farelogix and Infotriever....

, he co-founded Delrina

Delrina

Delrina was a Canadian software company founded by four individuals, Dennis Bennie as CEO and chairman, Mark Skapinker as president, Bert Amato as executive vice president and chief technical officer and Lou Ryan as executive vice president of world wide sales...

, where they devised its first product, the electronic form software PerForm

PerForm

PerForm and PerForm PRO were electronic form programs, initially designed to work under GEM in DOS. Later versions were designed to work in Windows 3.1, at which point it was succeeded by FormFlow....

. He served as Delrina's President. The firm was sold to Symantec

Symantec

Symantec Corporation is the largest maker of security software for computers. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock market index.-History:...

 in November 1995.

In 1997 he founded Balisoft Technologies, a company that created intelligent customer interaction software. This firm was merged with Servicesoft Technologies in 1999, which was in turn acquired by Broadbase Software in September 2000.

One of his latest ventures is Collectionbuddy, a website which is trying to bring collectors together in order to produce a definitive record of all collectables. Mark and his partners realize that precious collectables are being lost for ever because there is no record of them and this is their attempt to fix this problem. The website is using new web 2.0 technologies and ideas from lessons learned from Mark's past ventures and experiences.

External links

• "Founding Father", an article about Mark Skapinker derived from Profit Magazine, accessed November 6, 2005
• "Seeds sown at Delrina are still sprouting", story about the founders of Delrina and what they went on to do afterwards, accessed November 6, 2005
• "Collectionbuddy: One of Mark Skapinker's latest venture"