Patrick Egan

Patrick Egan is the President, CTO and Co-Founder of Spark Interactive. He has designed and implemented online communities and social networking systems for almost 30 years beginning with an application for university collaboration built for the IBM mainframe in 1982. At that time, he was also an early adopter and contributor of the Bitnet project, a predecessor to today’s Internet. In 1997, with 15 years of development and marketing experience, Patrick took the product management lead for a group of products at Platinum Technology, and after it’s acquisition by CA (Computer Associates) he continued to lead this product division as VP Marketing until 2000. It was during that time, that he implemented the first "user-driven" community platform that both provided product users communication and collaboration as well as key metrics on usage for product management. In 2000, building on this community model, Patrick created a business model and strategy for monetizing online communities and founded CMC Media. CMC Media built and operated several successful online "event-driven" communities that re-defined online marketing in the technology industry. With the rapid adoption of new media and streaming technologies, Patrick drew upon 3 decades of expertise to co-found Spark Interactive with the goal of creating a repeatable platform and model for rapidly deploying successful and thriving social broadcasting communities. Patrick holds a BS in Math and Computer Science from Loyola University of Chicago.