Mark Kozlowski

The Story

An obsession with the line you hate standing in

Mark Kozlowski runs Upped Events, a Philadelphia company that does the unglamorous work behind the wristband: registration, contactless payment, the membership card, the app in your pocket, the dashboard the organizer stares at on Monday morning. In May 2025, after years of quietly stitching that together, Events.com bought the whole thing. He called it a transformative partnership. The press release was polite. The backstory is better.

Because Upped did not begin as an event platform. It began as a stopwatch. The founding question was almost absurdly narrow: how fast can you get a drink into someone's hand at a bar? The answer they chased was under ten seconds, and they hit it within four months. Most founders start with a manifesto. Kozlowski started with a timer and a tap.

That single discovery is the hinge of the entire story. After roughly fifty events, clients kept asking for more - more features, more control, more reporting. The lazy move is to guess and ship. Kozlowski did the opposite. He and his team sat down with event owners and listened, and what they heard was almost embarrassing: people running enormous, complicated, high-stakes festivals on the same tools you'd use to plan a birthday dinner. A spreadsheet. A shared doc. A prayer.

From pouring beer to printing receipts

Before Upped had a name, Kozlowski had BeerMe. Launched in 2016 with three fellow Wharton graduates - Evan Glickman, Tyler Neal and Ted Lui - it was a cashless ordering app aimed at the exact bottleneck the stopwatch exposed. The insight was sharp: the slow part of a bar isn't pouring, it's paying. Cards, taps, signatures, the fumbling. BeerMe synced to PayPal and let a handful of Philly bars take orders straight through the phone. It even had a punchline of a sales pitch - never again do the next-morning walk of shame to retrieve the card you abandoned at the bar.

BeerMe was a feature in search of a company. Upped is the company. The throughline is the same nervous tic that animates everything Kozlowski builds: friction is the enemy, and friction is measurable. If you can time it, you can cut it. If you can cut it, you can sell it.

The consultant who escaped

Kozlowski did not arrive at startups by accident, and he didn't arrive broke either. He came up through the polished pipeline - a Schreyer Honors College degree from Penn State in business management and information sciences, a study-abroad term at London's Bayes (then Cass) Business School, and later graduate work at Wharton. The early resume reads like a recruiter's dream: finance intern at DuPont, summer analyst seats at Princeton Capital Management and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, then a stint at IBM Global Business Services as a business transformation consultant advising Fortune 500 clients.

Most people would have stayed. The corner office was practically pre-ordered. Instead he co-founded Unlimit3D, an online marketplace built to drag 3D printing out of the lab and into ordinary hands, where he served as president and COO. It was early. It was weird. It taught him the thing consulting never could: how to build the product instead of the slide deck about the product.

What Upped actually sells

Strip away the category jargon and Upped is a promise to a specific, overlooked customer: the person running a food festival, a county fair, a community event on a shoestring. The pitch is that you should not need a full IT department to do it. One platform handles the registration, takes the contactless payment, runs the on-site app, manages the membership, and hands you analytics in real time instead of a shoebox of receipts. The company's headline claim is bracing - that it can lift average attendee spend by as much as 100% within two years. Whether or not every client hits that number, the ambition tells you who Kozlowski is building for: owners who want the machine to make money while they sleep.

He runs it with a small, sharp bench - Louis Blitzman as COO, Filip Risteski as CTO - and a value system that reads less like a poster and more like a personality test: boldness, trust, continuous improvement, and a near-religious commitment to data-driven decisions. Don't guess. Measure. Then move.

The Events.com deal in 2025 is the period at the end of a long sentence that started with a beer and a stopwatch. The payments, the ticketing, the on-site tools, the analytics - all of it folded into a bigger platform. For a founder whose entire career has been an argument that small operators deserve enterprise-grade tools, getting absorbed by the enterprise isn't a contradiction. It's the proof.