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Mark Erickson Biography Mark Erickson is the president and co-founder of Provisdom Corporation. He has been the driving force and key contributor in the creation of new concepts and tools in valuation and strategy, and has facilitated high-level decision-making through writing, training, and coaching. Prior to Provisdom, Mark worked with the semiconductor and venture banking industries to create novel real options approaches to their industries. Dr. Erickson has a B.S. in mathematics from MIT, an M.S. in EngineeringEconomic Systems and Operations Research from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from the Management Science and Engineering Department at Stanford. His dissertation, titled “Financial and Real Options: Theory and Lattice Techniques,” introduced a new, stand-alone system for analyzing decisions with a generalized real options-type discipline. Mark engaged in other activities which helped form his ideas about risk, uncertainty, and decision-making. While at Stanford, Mark founded and managed both an options trading group and a professional blackjack group to pay for graduate school. He later was a successful part-time professional poker for over a year. Mark made a large sum of money in one hour trading options and lost an equally large sum over three days shorting a small stock listed on the NASDAQ. Mark’s “MIT” blackjack team consisted of 25 players across the United States, which once followed a large three-day large losing streak in the Bahamas and Tunica, Mississippi with an even larger 24-hour winning streak, ending with a blackjack on one of Mark’s “table maximum” hands at Binion’s in Tunica. On that Bahamas trip, Mark and a teammate were “arrested” by dirty cops afterhaving their lives threatened and their money stolen by a Hilton-owned casino-hotel, which had paid for all their expenses, including their airfare. Mark has been friends with the two main characters in the popular book, Bringing Down the House, and Mark’s team is mentioned in the book. Mark knows when to split tens, how to get the best comps at the best places, how to NOT get thrown into a Bahamian jail, where the movie “21” was inaccurate, and how to run out of a casino gracefully.
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