Dear Listener,
If you’ve followed Second Drafts during the past year, you may have periodically heard about the memoir project I’ve been helping a friend write. After beginning the process in June of 2021 and making a research trip to California last October, I included three different excerpts from the book in the free Friday newsletter. The feedback from readers was positive.
On occasion of Mako’s World: A Memoir of Calculated Adventures officially releasing in print and Kindle format this past Tuesday, I’m making this June podcast free to all subscribers. This month’s guest? Peaches and I interview “Mako” himself—Mark Carroll.
So as not to give away too many details from the book, Peaches and I kept our discussion more general and a little shorter (about 35 minutes) than our normal hour-long podcasts. Still, in this interview with Mark, you’ll learn the story behind the nickname “Mako,” a brief history of California surfing, how losing his secret agent father at the age of 10 was both devastating and shaping for him, and how surfing has taught him many life lessons across his 61 years.
Enjoy the interview!
Craig
About the Book
Coming of age in 1970s southern California, Mark Carroll lost his father—a secret agent for the U.S. government—when he was 10. His idyllic world torn apart, he took up surfing to try to make sense of classmate cruelty, a complicated relationship with his oft-absent mother, and the struggles of being a default father-figure to his younger brother and sister.
Mathematics and physics became Carroll’s other coping mechanisms. Graduating as a top mechanical engineer from the University of California, Santa Barbara, he embarked on a 38-year career as varied as the number of beaches he’s surfed—from Department of Defense R&D, to corporate soldiering, to executive leadership in mergers and acquisitions around the world.
Chronicling the evolution of his “When in doubt, action!” approach, and filled with remarkable stories of escaping shark encounters off the coast of California, running from drug dealers in Mexico, and surviving a category five tropical cyclone in Fiji, Carroll will have readers shaking their heads while opening their hearts to his search for meaning while making peace with his past.
A memoir of calculated adventures, welcome to Mako’s World.
About Mark
Mark Arthur Carroll grew up surfing the beaches of southern California from Mexico to Point Conception and now lives in Newport Beach with his wife, Laurie. They have two adult children, McKenna and Dane, and two dogs, Slinky and Doug.
In the 1980s, Mark worked in a variety of engineering roles, including as a design engineer for an optical start-up, a rocket engineer on the Space Shuttle program, and a deep-sea salvage engineer for the U.S. Navy. In the 1990s, Mark transitioned from engineering into more sales and business leadership, working as an energy management consultant and optical metrology salesman before getting back into engineering in the world of space laser communications with a primary defense contractor from 1995-2000.
From 2000-2016, Mark ran an instruments business unit for the largest laser company at the time, managing $90 million in annual revenue and leading the product marketing, product development, and production of tunable lasers and photonic instruments. During this tenure, he started a new business to integrate optical, electrical, and mechanical components into high-value optical metrology systems for the semiconductor market and grew this new enterprise from $0 to $10 million in two years.
Mark also led two growth-minded acquisitions, expanding a tunable laser business from $6.5 million to $20 million over five years and a laser test and measurement business from $7 million to $17 million over two years. In addition, he turned around a well-known spectroscopy and solar simulator company, increasing profitability with lean manufacturing and value engineering, and saving more than $1 million in operating expenses in the first year.
In 2017, Mark started his own company, Bula Designs, a surfboard and paddle board design company based in Newport Beach. From 2018-2019, Mark served as a board member for a LiDAR start-up in Bozeman, Montana, where in addition, he served on the board of another small Bozeman company that designs and manufactures high-performance, low-temperature optical measurement solutions for the quantum computing market. In 2020, Mark became CEO full-time of this same company.
Mark graduated with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and earned an M.S. in Applied Mechanics from the University of California, San Diego.
