Mark French Keeps Building Businesses in the Spaces Everyone Else Walks Past

The product on Mark French's desk is a can of soda with an identity problem, or perhaps an identity solution. It fizzes. It comes in root beer, grape, orange and flavors that sound as if a county fair won naming rights. It also contains 10 grams of whey protein. SkyPop is designed to make those facts feel less peculiar together than they do apart.

French, the founder and chief executive, has spent much of his career working in that brief interval between “Why would anyone do that?” and “Why didn't someone do that sooner?” Before protein soda, there were television screens in taxi cabs. Before that idea became NBC Everywhere, the notion that passengers might watch short programming while advertisers reached a captive audience was an awkward internal pitch at a large broadcaster. Then there was Court Grip, a product for basketball players tired of wiping dusty sneaker soles with their hands. The problems changed. His way of looking at them did not.

He searches for a familiar behavior with a small, repeated irritation attached. Then he asks enough people whether it bothers them too. The method lacks the romance of a lightning bolt. It has the commercial advantage of being useful.

First, walk onto the court

The origin story begins in New York, where French grew up loving basketball and occasionally treating schoolwork as an optional side quest. At 12, he cleaned up after dogs at a kennel and sold jean jackets he had decorated with airbrushed graffiti. His father, worried about his grades, offered a bargain: improve them, stay out of trouble and earn a trip to see the Knicks at Madison Square Garden.

French held up his end. At the arena, he arrived early and did what his father had explained was not done. He walked onto the court to meet rookie guard Mark Jackson. Security intervened; Jackson waved them off. French talked, shook hands and noticed the Knicks' head trainer sitting at the end of the bench. By the time he returned to his seat, he had identified the person he intended to ask for a ball-boy job.

The episode has acquired the clean edges of a family parable, but its best detail is not the trespassing confidence. Jackson later remembered that the teenager showed the security guards the same respect he showed the stars. French's shorthand for the business lesson is “Act like you're supposed to be there.” The fuller version includes nerve, attention and manners. One gets you through the door. The others determine whether anyone wants you back.

The corporate startup nobody ordered

After graduating from Ithaca College in 1997, French entered media and eventually built ventures inside NBC Universal. One became NBC Everywhere, a digital out-of-home network. The premise was that the fight for television attention did not need to stay in the living room. A screen in a taxi, at a gas pump or near a checkout could carry useful NBC programming, promote the network's shows and open advertising budgets that conventional television did not reach.

The idea began with one taxi. It spread to thousands of them around the country, then into other captive environments. French has recalled that, during the pitching stage, he “couldn't get arrested” inside the building. External interest kept him going. The marketplace was telling him something that the org chart had not yet learned.

This was entrepreneurship with an employee badge: find a neglected asset, build proof outside the usual approval loop and return with enough evidence to make refusal less comfortable. It also taught French a habit he would reuse. Institutional resistance is information, but it is not always a verdict.

Five hundred reasons to go all in

Basketball supplied French's next unsolved nuisance. Players on dusty courts lose traction, even in new sneakers. They wipe the soles with their hands, a ritual so common that it had become scenery. French hired chemical engineers and worked with Dwyane Wade to develop Court Grip, an instant-dry traction formula applied to the bottom of a shoe. He also patented a way to embed traction-enhancing material into rubber soles.

Professional validation mattered, but French did not use famous players as a substitute for customer research. He asked more than 500 high-school players, the intended retail audience, whether slipping affected their play. Their answers gave him the conviction to commit. It is a useful distinction: confidence came after inquiry, not before it.

French merged the company into MISSION Athletecare, became president and launched the Grip line through Foot Locker. More products followed, including an instant-cooling towel introduced with Serena Williams and Drew Brees. The athlete relationship was central, but French's preferred word was partner. He wanted to know what athletes used, what they worried about and what they might build together. Celebrity made the story travel; participation made the product credible.

That network and operating experience later carried into The Players' Tribune. French joined the founding board of advisors and helped with business strategy, athlete relations, recruiting, fundraising and the team around Derek Jeter's athlete-led media platform. The common thread was direct participation. Give players a bottle of traction formula they helped develop. Give them a publishing platform where they speak without the usual filter. In both cases, the person customarily used as promotional material moved closer to the center of the business.

A portfolio becomes a beverage

French founded NLP Ventures in 2014 as an investor and hands-on operating partner. His public portfolio and advisory work crossed consumer goods, sports, media and technology, including the location-based app Twenty and the company Healthy Together. He has said that his investment test begins with the entrepreneur rather than the idea: can the person execute, collaborate and endure the hard days?

X2 Performance brought him back into a full operating role. L Catterton, the consumer investment firm behind the brand, first approached French about becoming chief executive. He declined, joined the board and learned the business. X2 made sports-energy products already used by more than 25 professional teams, but it lacked broad consumer recognition. After helping bring Kawhi Leonard into the company as an investor and partner, French accepted the CEO job and worked on retail expansion through CVS, GNC and other channels.

In 2023, French led X2 into a strategic merger with Don't Quit, the sports-nutrition brand created with fitness entrepreneur Jake Steinfeld, beverage incubator LA Libations and Keurig Dr Pepper. The combined company had energy drinks, protein shakes, athlete relationships and institutional investors. It also had the ingredients of a brand architecture meeting where every good idea arrived wearing a different name tag.

When the product outgrows the name

Don't Quit introduced protein soda in 2025. The first four flavors were fruit punch, grape, orange and root beer. Each sugar-free can offered 10 grams of whey protein and 45 calories. Retailers responded faster than French expected, with national plans involving Walmart, Albertsons, CVS and Safeway. Protein was already moving beyond the shaker bottle; the soda format placed it inside a more casual, everyday habit.

The early traction created a different problem. “Don't Quit” carried the cadence of sports motivation. The product wanted permission to appear beside lunch, on a desk or during the afternoon lull, far from a weight rack. After product research, consumer testing and retailer feedback, the company chose a name that sounded lighter. In January 2026, Don't Quit's protein-soda business became SkyPop.

French described the decision as recognizing when something bigger was happening. The product had worked, but the category was attracting competitors and the brand needed to explain itself at shelf speed. SkyPop rolled into Target, Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, Safeway, CVS and Gopuff, with French announcing more than 65,000 retail facings. By summer, the company was adding nationwide CVS and Albertsons banner launches.

There is a small comedy in taking a phrase as earnest as Don't Quit and deciding, with considerable discipline, to quit it. But the willingness to rename a working idea is consistent with French's larger record. He is loyal to the problem, not precious about the first solution.

The useful thing to steal

French's résumé can look like channel surfing: broadcast media, shoe chemistry, cooling fabric, athlete publishing, location apps, energy drinks, protein soda. Viewed by category, it is restless. Viewed by method, it is remarkably steady.

Notice what people have stopped noticing. Verify the annoyance with the people who live with it. Recruit partners whose participation improves the thing itself. Then do the unglamorous work of distribution, whether that means navigating NBC, winning NBA approval, earning space at Foot Locker or making a brightly colored can explain itself in a supermarket.

The method also explains French's continued ties to education and mentorship. He has served on the board of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship and remains involved with Ithaca College, where he sits on the School of Business advisory council. One Ithaca account tells of a student, Thomas Padula, who faced a last-minute housing problem during an internship at MISSION. French let Padula stay in his home, then taught him how to build relationships. Padula's networking helped lead to a first job at Madison Square Garden. The court, once again, was nearby.

SkyPop may become a durable beverage brand or one chapter in a category that is still teaching shoppers what to call it. French has already said fast followers would arrive. His wager is not that competition will fail to notice. It is that his team noticed early enough, listened carefully enough and can execute while the rest of the aisle catches up.

A founder cannot manufacture white space. It is already there, disguised as a dull taxi ride, a hand wiping a sneaker or a person who wants protein without another shake. French's career suggests the opportunity belongs first to whoever is curious enough to see the habit, and practical enough to ask what would make it better.