About

I’m John Mark Troyer. I manage the social media and blogging programs for VMware, an enterprise software company. Over the last few years, my colleagues and I, collaborating with the great people of our community, have created a set of successful social media experiences. These programs have benefited the participants, have increased the overall success of our customers and partners, and have been invaluable for VMware. In this blog, I am sharing some of our Social Media Stories from our past as well as how we’re still learning and having fun as we go forward.

Although I am an employee of VMware, these words and opinions are my own and not the responsibility of VMware, nor do they represent VMware’s strategies or plans. I will disclose any outside payments or remuneration given to me when relevant to a post. So far, nada.

Before VMware, I co-founded Neomar, a venture-backed enterprise wireless software company, where I was first CEO and later Chief Strategy Officer. We built some of the first browsers for the BlackBerry and the Palm VII with a secure, enterprise-strength back-end server. We were a little early on that.

I live on the foggy California coast over the hill from Silicon Valley with my lovely wife and two cats. When I’m not nurturing communities online, I’m learning to nurture our coastal cottage garden. There seem to be a lot of similarities.

I started my career as an academic. I have a PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of California, San Francisco. In the middle of grad school, I told my colleague that he had to see this new program Mosaic download “web pages” from all over the world. I showed him the MIT Science Fiction Club calendar and some Swiss train schedules. Mosaic promptly crashed. My world was never the same.

Thanks for stopping by.

–John Mark