Mark Leslie (entrepreneur)


Mark Leslie is an American entrepreneur, business executive, venture capitalist and educator. He is a lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he lectures on entrepreneurship, sales organization, and ethics. He is also the managing director of Leslie Ventures, a private investment company.
Leslie founded Veritas Technologies and served as its CEO. During his tenure as Chairman and CEO, the company grew to be a top ten independent software company and achieved the distinction of becoming a Fortune 1000 company. More than ten years after leaving Veritas, Leslie, along with other former, senior Veritas executives, consented to have a judgement entered against him in federal court, in relation to allegations of fraud and wrongdoing that were the subject of a years-long SEC investigation. The judgement included a civil fine of more than $1.5 million.

Education

Leslie graduated from New York University in 1966 with a degree in physics and mathematics, in 1966 receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree. In 1980 he attended the Harvard Business School program for management development.

Career

Leslie started his career at IBM as a systems engineer, working on operating systems RAX. In 1969 as an IBM employee, he designed and developed the first software hypervisor. In 1972 he joined Data General as an account executive. He later managed regional DM operations.
In 1980, Leslie founded his first company, Synapse Computer Systems. He served as CEO of the company, which designed and built high availability, multiprocessor transaction processing systems. The company was not successful, and in 1984 he was recruited as CEO of Rugged Digital Systems. He served until the company’s sale in 1989. During this time the company revenues rose from $2M in revenue to 32M and became profitable.
In 1989 Leslie moved from the board to CEO of Tolerant Systems, which later became Veritas Software. He held the position until 2000. Under Leslie's direction the company pioneered development of the first commercially available journaling file system.

Teaching

Leslie lectures at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His work is focused on founding, growing and scaling companies. His work in technology lifecyicles, scaling of new products, and go to market strategies, which is based on Leslie's own experience as the founder and CEO became the foundations of Stanford courses, especially his marquee work ""

Philanthropy

In 2015 N.Y.U. opened doors to a 5,900-square-foot lab, financed by a multimillion-dollar gift from Leslie and his wife, Debra.

Boards and honors

Mark is a current or former member of the boards of a number of privately held high-technology corporations, including Context Relevant, Interana, StratoScale, Vera, Veritas, Yellowbrick, ZeroStack and Zerto. He has served on approximately fifty public and private boards including Avaya, Big Switch, Brocade, Model N, NetApp, Nutanix, Pure Storage, SeaMicro, Skybox, Veritas and Webex.
Leslie serves on the NYU Board of Trustees, the Board of Overseers for the NYU Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Board of Overseers of the Tandon School of Engineering and as a member of the Executive Board of the NYU Innovation Fund. Leslie also serves on the Board of Trustees of Stanford Health Care

Personal life

Leslie grew up in Queens, New York in a lower-middle-class family. He married in 1969, and had two sons.