From Lotus 1-2-3 to Nine Digits Under Management
Mark Suster grew up in Northern California, the child of Romanian-Jewish parents who had emigrated to Philadelphia before moving west. By the mid-1980s, when the PC revolution was still a rumor to most Americans, he was already selling custom software to local businesses and teaching classmates how to use machines they barely understood. He was also throwing keg parties and running for social chairman of his fraternity at UC San Diego. The two impulses - analytical and social, systematic and theatrical - have never resolved. They simply became a management style.
At UCSD, studying economics, he redesigned his fraternity's accounting system using Lotus 1-2-3 macros. Not because he was asked to. Because the existing one was inefficient and it bothered him. He graduated in 1991 and joined Andersen Consulting, then spent almost a decade as a software developer and consultant across Europe, Japan, and the United States. That peripatetic decade gave him something most Silicon Valley investors lack: a genuine sense that the world is bigger than the Bay Area.
In 1998, he left to get his MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The following year, he co-founded BuildOnline with Irish property entrepreneur Brian Moran - a construction collaboration platform, enterprise SaaS before the term was fashionable. They raised venture capital, grew it internationally, and in December 2006, merged it with US rival Citadon. First exit. First proof of concept.
He did not pause. While BuildOnline's final chapter was still being written, he founded Koral in September 2006 - a content collaboration tool. Salesforce acquired the entire nine-person team in April 2007. Suster became VP of Product Management at Salesforce. He stayed just long enough to understand what it felt like to sit inside a large company looking out, then left to join GRP Partners as a Managing Partner.
GRP Partners later rebranded as Upfront Ventures. The name change was Suster's idea, in part: he wanted a brand that said something about orientation, about being at the front of things, not managing a historical portfolio. Under his watch, the firm became the defining early-stage VC in Southern California - writing $3.5-$4 million checks at seed and Series A, then backing winners harder as they grew.
The blog launched around 2009-2010. "Both Sides of the Table" was the obvious name for someone who had genuinely sat on both sides: as a founder pitching VCs, and as a VC being pitched by founders. What made it different from the typical partner blog was the specificity. Suster wrote about real conversations he had, real mistakes founders made, real things he got wrong. He coined "fauxmentum" - the manufactured urgency that some founders project to create artificial FOMO in investors who have not done their homework. The word entered the vocabulary because it named something everyone had experienced but no one had labeled.
In 2012, he founded the Upfront Summit. What started as a $300,000 networking event grew into a $2.3 million production by 2022 - held at Paramount Studios, the Rose Bowl, and the Santa Monica Mountains. The innovation was deliberate: Suster invited limited partners alongside traditional VCs, transforming what might have been a VC-only echo chamber into one of America's premier LP fundraising venues. Guests have included Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Novak Djokovic, and Prince Harry. The zip lines and hot air balloons are not incidental; they are part of a calculated philosophy about what makes people remember a conference.