Meet LI venture capitalist Mark Fasciano

Mark Fasciano, managing director of Jericho-based Canrock Ventures, a venture capital firm, has become a leader in Long Island's efforts to create new companies and industries in a region struggling for jobs.

Fasciano's company finances and nurtures promising startups. In 1997, soon after receiving a doctorate in computer science from the University of Chicago, Fasciano and a former graduate school classmate, Roger Kahn, started FatWire Software, which manages web content, in a bedroom of his parents' Oyster Bay Cove home, where Fasciano was raised. He attended Chaminade High School in Mineola.

A few years later, they sold it to an investors group for an undisclosed price believed to be several million dollars; the company grew to $40 million in sales and is owned by Oracle Corp.

Since then, Fasciano, 43, has started and financed several other companies on Long Island, including General Sentiment, which trolls the Internet to measure how consumers feel about products and political candidates. The 10 companies in which Canrock holds investments -- all in information technology -- employ 53 people, mostly on Long Island.

Recently, Fasciano teamed with another venture capitalist, David Calone of Babylon-based Jove Equity Partners, to commit $500,000 to create more than a dozen companies on Long Island during the next two to three years, using technologies developed by local research institutions such as Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Fasciano is also a member of a regional economic-development council appointed in July by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to create jobs and provide input on Long Island development projects.

Here are excerpts from an interview with Fasciano.

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