 My name is Mariah Riggs, I'm the director of the Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center. Welcome to On the Waterfront with me. Today, I'm really excited to have Mark Bull, who is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Super Collider. Welcome, Mark. Oh, well, thank you, Mariah. So before we kind of get into all the wonderful work you're doing here in Burlington, I want to find out a little bit more about the man behind Super Collider. Dun, dun, dun. Watch out. Okay. So, are you originally from Burlington? No, I am not. I grew up in New Hampshire, then I went down to Texas to get a degree, an undergraduate degree, moved to New York for two years, moved to Paris for 12 years, got married, had two kids, moved to San Diego, and then moved to Vermont because my wife got a job up here at UVM teaching economics. Oh, that's great. Yeah. Once you got here, you never wanted to leave. It's a real thing. It happens to all of us. Let's just say that. So we're so glad to have you. Oh, well, I'm glad to be here. So just really quickly, what is Super Collider? So Super Collider just started off, well, first of all, do you know what a real Super Collider is? A real-life Super Collider? Yes. You do? Okay. So just for anybody who doesn't, it's like a 10-mile circumference type thingy that accelerates photons up to close to the speed of light, smashes them together, and releases energy. And so that's a metaphor that I liked, a name that I liked. And we used that for Super Collider, which just started off as a meetup. We'd get together, have a drink, talk about mostly entrepreneurship because a lot of my friends were entrepreneurs. And that became a good name that we kind of coalesced around. In parallel, shout out to Michael Jagger at Solidarity because he was working on a concept called Super Collider, and we talked about merging them and stuff like that, but I just wanted to have a drink on Friday nights. So that became the Super Collider Have a Drink on Friday Night thing. But then about a year, let's see, last year we launched the first year of Synaptic Super Collider, which is a conference. And that has turned into a weekend-long adventure with all kinds of interesting events, but the core of it is a conference, and this year a party at City Hall, which is going to be a lot of fun. So in the interest of giving you all a great summary on the event, I'd like you all right now to watch last year's video of the event. So Synaptic Super Collider, this year around, 2021, it was a three-day event. On Friday night, we had three social events. The conference went from eight in the morning to seven at night. We had amazing speakers the entire day, and then we're finishing up tomorrow on Sunday with a hike. The speakers were absolutely fantastic. So we started off with Alan Newman. He's a person who's a serial entrepreneur, who started amazing companies like 7th Generation and Magic Hat Breweries. We were lucky at the last minute to have Kyle Clark from Beta Technologies come down and be a speaker. Every time he speaks, it's just amazing, but on the flip side, we had artists like Myra Flynn come in. She's a singer, songwriter. I'd ask her if we could lead the audience in composing a song, but she would have somebody tell a story for two minutes, just talk about their own life or difficulties they were having. And then she would extract words from that that sounded poetic, and then she would give us a chord progression, and then we ended up all singing it together at the end. Synaptic Super Collider was awesome. First of all, I had no idea that so much innovation and amazing creativity was going on in her months. So it was very eye-opening for me to hear from songwriters, people running rocket companies, people running aviation companies. Honestly, as somebody who lives in New York, I'm contemplating moving back to New York. Like my one takeaway from today would be there's a lot more cool stuff happening around here. It's just different than any other conference I've been to. Just the pacing of things was great, the variety of what you're doing on the tracks, and a ton of opportunity to meet people. I feel like I've met just about everybody who was here. I thought it was a phenomenal event, the balance of speakers, the subjects, the energy they brought. It was an incredible experience because it really showcases Vermont today in terms of music, art, AI, rockets, aerospace engineering. It was a lot of unexpected twists and turns and really showcased some great entrepreneurs and the work that they're doing right here in Vermont. If you have the opportunity to attend next year's events, there shouldn't be a question. I hope you all enjoyed that. It's a great video. It is, it is. It is very enjoyable. Shout out to Philip Casado who put that together and I will mention Jeremy Lesniak who just has a wonderful clip at the end. Great sales guy. The other thing about Super Colliders that comes to me too is that it uses the 10, 20 mile loop to propel these very small atoms together and it creates energy. Right. And so that too I think is very intrinsic of what you guys are trying to do. It's trying to get people together to create heat and energy around ideas. Right. Exactly. And we really, you know, I love events of all types but I invariably end up in a lot of events with other people working in high tech and, you know, and so, and I love those events but, you know, it's a little monolithic like people have same kind of backgrounds, educational and other things like that. And so I wanted to start something that would really mix things up and bring together like people, unexpected people that you wouldn't expect to run into and create collisions of people that don't usually meet. So we have all kinds of people at our events. We love to have musicians at our events. We don't have enough. Anybody who's a musician wants to come out on Friday nights please join us. We've got Philip that I mentioned. He's into theater. We're getting more people that are in theater involved. But like, for instance, at our last monthly meetup, which we had at Arts Riot, we had a bunch of people from Congo. Now there's a big community. There's about 500 people that are immigrants from Congo in Burlington. I met them through different people and I didn't know there was such a big Congolese immigrant population here in Burlington. But they're all doing amazing stuff. They're highly educated, doing great jobs, very entrepreneurial. And all of a sudden we had a contingency of about 10 of them come out to our event. And it's just really interesting. But I'll give another example. We have a sponsor for the Super Collider Party that's rectified bourbon. And they wanted to invite people to the party. And we've got free tickets for these people. But they wanted to invite people that work in the hospitality industry. So bartenders, waiters, waitresses, cooks, people who work in hotels. I've got 25 tickets ready to go for the party sponsored by rectified bourbon. Now people cooks and that's people I don't usually run into at social events. Because I run into people like me and I'm not a cook. But we want to bring them in. We want to bring them in. So across different kinds of jobs and things like that, the more the merrier. And that generally is a consensus that people believe that, and it's true, when you get people from different disciplines together in a room that might not have shared experience, ideas, knowledge, it creates its own energy. And it's a really unique thing that can be very beneficial to the community and to creating new and unique ideas in general. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll give an example of one of our best monthly events. We had in a woman whose name is Lucy Drummond. She has a business or had a business called Lucify Cakes. Not Lucifer, Lucify Cakes. And she made elaborate cakes for weddings and special events. And so we had a Friday night at V-Set. We had 30 or 40 people together. She brought in these little kits of cakes, sponge cake, and we learned how to make like elaborate cakes, like the techniques they use to make cakes. We also drank a lot of wine and beer. But it was one of the funnest events we've ever had. So we like to have like fun stuff that we do together. So that's another question. Is Super Collider doing other events? Yeah, so we have the monthly meetup. We have the annual conference, and that's spread over three days. And in the fall we'll be rolling out a few things. One is Philip Casado is going to do, I don't know if it mentions his name now, three times. He must be intrigued. Who is this character, Philip Casado? Well, Philip is going to do a class on video editing for entrepreneurs. That should be a lot of fun. And I will announce another class that we'll be rolling out by Joey in the Simba MBA program on, what do you call it? Improv. Improv, yeah. Oh, that's great. That'd be really fun. And improv, actually, this is an interesting point is that sometimes people don't understand that there's a great synthesis between things like improv and working in business. Sometimes meeting with investors, being able to publicly speak, being able to gauge in team meetings more effectively, all those things doing workshops and things like improv and some of the more theatrical arts lends itself to being a better business leader. Absolutely. So Joey, I just met him today and he's part of the Sustainable MBA program at UVM. And he has, I guess, a pretty elaborate theater background. But he did improv and is using it or thinking about it for business, for business folks. So just like you said. It's a real thing. Yeah. And sometimes you get stuck in spreadsheets. Right. Right. And you're not really out there with people. And trust me, actually, as much as you probably are surprised by this, I am a natural introvert. I don't believe that. But getting out of the box, being able to express yourself through how you conduct yourself or carry yourself around other people is a big part of being successful in today's world. Yeah. Absolutely. Improv gets you out of that box. Right. Speaking of getting out of the box, we, you know, like, you know, one of the reasons I, we sort of hatched this whole thing as part of, as we were being locked down under COVID. Right. And during that process, I signed up for South by Southwest, which subsequently got canceled by COVID. But as I was doing that, they have this little, these little services for $50 you can pay to be pre-registered for up to 600 social events at South by Southwest. So I was like, wow, 600 social events. What are these? They're always like free taco, free beer, free music, free whatever. But it's like a huge, it's fun, like the whole city lights up. And so that was, you know, one of the ideas for a synaptic supercollider was like, we want to make this first and foremost like really fun, like really fun social events. So Friday night we have an event at Wallflower Collective. If you are a conference goer, you can get a free cocktail, the supercollider, especially made for the event. Wait, what is the supercollider drink? Oh, it hasn't been invented yet. Oh, wow. Me and Matt, I just like to tell Matt over at Wallflower Collective that I'm going to be over there sometime this week and we're going to make it. We're going to make it together. Because last time I let him make it and design it and it had some Campari in it or something. I don't like those bitter things. So this time I want to be more hands on. Again, this is all part of the collaborative process. Yes, yes. Right, right. But yeah, like every piece we try and throw in something. So Friday night, Nectar's like, if you've got a conference pass, you get a free cover. But anybody can go. Anybody can go on Friday night. Anybody can go on, you know, to the two events on Friday night. Saturday we have a conference. So that's paid. Then there's a film showing at Main Street Landing. That's free. You can go see a film made by a director, Andrew Lyman Clark, who's born and raised in Vermont, lives in New York City. Film director, awesome film. What is the film? It's called Night Sweats and Night Sweats. And what is it about? Very topical. It is about a person who gets infected by a virus through, I believe, a relationship, if I remember right. Oh, wow. But then it devolves into like a thriller where they realize that this virus is actually hatched on the local population by a pharmaceutical company who's trying to sell the antidote to the virus. Oh, wow. Oh, it's a thriller. That is timely, too. Yeah. Be careful. Be careful. Well, that sounds like a great film. Yeah. And then Friday and then Saturday night, big party at Contoy's Auditorium. Which is going to be awesome. It's going to be quite the party at Contoy's. If anybody shows up, it'll be awesome. No, we have an incredible lineup. So we have Malmai's, which is playing, which is like an eight-piece amazing band with influences from all over South America. We have Bread and Puppet that's going to do a performance in the middle of all this. And then we have DJ Ja Red, who is going to finish up the night with a lot of fun music. So that's 8 to 12 on Saturday night. But here we are, T minus 10 days from the actual event. And we've only sold, like, a handful of tickets. Okay, Burlington. You have to get out there and buy some tickets. But there's going to be a lot of people there because we've got the secret sauce. We've got Philip Quesado. That's the fourth time I've mentioned him. But we're going to be out on Church Street regularly with all kinds of discount codes. And I said we have 25 free tickets to get away, to give away to anybody who's working in the hospitality industry. We have another sponsor, Magic Man, who's considering sponsoring a bunch of musicians to go. So it's going to be packed. That's really exciting. Oh, it's going to be huge fun. No, so I mean, this is a very exciting event. And this is something pretty unique, I think, and special in the mix of what we do here in Burlington nearly. And so I kind of also want to get a sense from you. You know, what are you trying to create with this event? Wow. So that's a moving target. So what I started wanting to create was like a place where I could go have beer with my friends and I wouldn't get kicked out. That worked out pretty good. Then it turned into like a yearly conference, but it started off last year pretty small. Now we're rolling out these educational opportunities. But at the core of Super Collider, it starts off with creative people getting together, unexpected collisions and unlocking energy. Now that's really vague. And for the first six months, like the people I started with kept telling me, like I want to invite people, but I don't know what to tell them. And I tell them that and they'd be like, that's not a thing. Like I can't, that's not, that doesn't make sense to anybody except you. And I was like, well, that's what it is. It's just, that's it. We like get people together, creative people and create these unexpected collisions and it unlocks energy. And then, you know, I met a guy here locally recently and he was really adamant that he liked the fact that it was unexpected. Like you don't have an expectation going into it. And so, you know, then we started rolling that out in our invitations. You know, don't come with expectations, you know, come without expectations, leave with inspiration. So it's purposefully left open-ended. Wait, I love that. Okay. Come without expectations and leave with inspiration. Yes. That's a lovely tagline. Yep. It rolled right off my tongue. That's wonderful. Late one night for no apparent reason. And actually, we all need a little bit more of that in our lives. Yes. And I think the Burlington community in general would benefit greatly from an event that creates that space. But I'll give another shout out to Thor Retzlap, who has an incredible startup here locally and who was adamant about, he really liked the fact that there was an expectation. Like he didn't know what it was going to be about. And at first I was like, really? Do you really like that? And then the more I thought about it, I was like, yeah, if you don't have expectations, you're not easily disappointed. And second of all, you've got to go into it and make something of it. You know, you're an actor in what happens. It gets back to the super quieter concept that people are making their own heat. Yeah. You know, it's self-driven. Right. You know, so people go in, they don't know what to expect, but they create their own heat and whatever happens from that is maybe unexpected. Right. And we need you all bringing the heat. I dropped the y'all. I dropped the y'all. Yeah, yeah. Burlington needs to bring the heat. Very, very, very important. So to put it in perspective, it sounds like Super Collider is a three-day event. Yep. Okay. And it has a festival component that ties the three different components together that overarches all of it, right? And we have this festival. There's a conference. And then there's a party and several series of social engagement events. Right. And it all finishes up with a hike on Sunday. Really? Yes, a hike Sunday morning, 10 a.m. Probably Mount Philo, because we're worried somebody's going to have a heart attack and we can't cover it with insurance. But so normally in Mount Philo, if we have enough people, we might have a splinter group that does camel hump. Well, that's the real hike. Yeah. Right. But that's, you know, I talked about South by Southwest. We're kind of taking a page out of what they're doing, but this is not no me too, South by Southwest. This is Burlington, Vermont. We're making this, you know, new and fresh, unique. What other conference do you go to in the world where you go on a hike the last day? I don't think there is one. Well, that's where you really get in breakdown barriers. Right. There's nothing like hiking a mountain. Right. To break down barriers with people. Yeah. True. And it's amazing what comes out while you're hiking. True. Very true. Especially after the party on Saturday night. Yes, exactly. That's a great impetus right there. Right. So I also wanted to talk to you. This came up briefly before we started our interview. You were telling me that in your other life you do some other work. Right. And one of the things I found was really interesting is you work with several individuals in Ukraine. Right. Yeah. So my main bread and butter comes from making apps to help people learn languages, like French and Spanish and Italian. The name of that company is Vida Lingua. Vida Lingua. Been doing it for a long time. We have over 15 million people that have downloaded our apps. We have like 600,000 active users every month. And we do that right here, designed by me here in Burlington. And I work with 20 people across the world. A lot of them are linguists. Some of them are developers. But I actually work with five people actively right now who are in the Ukraine. So two are developers. One is a designer. He makes graphic, a new graphic character. Two of them are linguists. And so every month, yeah, I work with five people in the Ukraine. And they're doing okay. Yeah. It's actually extremely surprising and unexpected. You know, that's a whole different subject. But one thing about Ukrainians, like, I all offered them. I literally said, and this is real honest-to-truth offer, I said, look, why don't you take a vacation and just come over here to Burlington or Austin and I'll find you a place. You take a vacation, right? If there's going to be war over there. None of them wanted to leave. And then I said, well, if things get rough, you know, then they, like, men couldn't cross the border. But it's a huge country. So I was like, just give me a pin on the map and, you know, go through some forest and I'll be on the other side and we'll just drive back to, you know, to Paris or Austin or whatever. And none of them want to leave. They're like, they want to fight. Got to love that. Yeah, well... Maybe if they weren't, maybe if people were, like, this is ever going to happen, pouring in from Quebec, you'd probably want to save, you know, Vermont, you never know. Yeah, if it was people from Quebec, I would definitely want to save. There you go. But I found that very interesting and I'm glad to hear that they're able to work and that you're able to engage them and give them employment and they want to stay. I mean, it's a real thing. Oh yeah, definitely. And so, you know, I mean, the people I'm working with, they've moved out into the countryside. It's a huge country. It's huge. 44 million people. So there's a lot of countryside that just can't bomb everything. So, you know, they just work day in and day out and everything's fine. They still have internet. Yeah, so that, thank goodness. That's a shot. I mean, that leads me into my own assumptions that I have. But I believe they actually have like Starlink. That company started by Elon Musk provides internet from the sky. Oh, that's wonderful. I didn't realize that. That's so cool. That's another great tie-in. So that was my aside. Okay. We're getting back to Super Collider. And I want to know, because this is a great conference that's coming up in a week. But I assume that there are other projects that you're doing with this. Yeah, so, yeah, this, so just recently, I don't know, it's just like all kinds of things started coming to our attention. And so, I spent about, I actually live half the year in Austin, Texas now. And so, I started a chapter of it down there. It's pretty easy to start a chapter of Super Collider because all you have to do is give everybody a rendezvous in a bar at five o'clock on a Friday night. And bingo, you've got a chapter of Super Collider. So we've got a chapter of it down there. I'm actually going to Paris on the 3rd of October. And I'm going to start a chapter in Paris because I know a lot of people because I lived there for 12 years. So I'm going to invite a bunch of people out to the bar on a Friday night. We've got a chapter in Paris. But we want to start one in Montreal, Boston, and New York. And yeah, so there'll be monthly meetups. There'll be hubs. So hopefully people from Montreal and Boston and New York will continue to convene on Burlington for a synaptic Super Collider. But we'd like to do regional conferences. We'd like to open up this education activity. But fun education, short courses that appeal to entrepreneurs and things like that. But yeah, we want Super Collider to be first and foremost a place you come have fun with interesting people. If we can achieve that, par for the course. We're happy. If we can help those same people find fulfillment in their professional lives or professional being very wide and broad, like you might want to come to start a company and meet a partner to start a company. You might want to start a band. We hope you come and think of Super Collider to meet other people to start a band. That's something that'll be sort of core. But then we'll also offer ways to sharpen your skills, like point skills that you would use to start a company. And you can also, I mean, it sounds like, too, it also has that built-in contextuality where you can have mentorships. You can learn from others, engage. Maybe you meet somebody who's had the same experience that you're going through as you try to start up a company and they can help you because there are hurdles that you don't know how to cross. And those kinds of community engagement things kind of just lifts up the whole. It does. And we want people who are unemployed or underemployed. We want them to think of, oh, I'm going to plug myself into Super Collider because that's where I'm going to regenerate, find partners, find jobs. So anybody who's underemployed or unemployed can get a discount code to go to Super Collider for almost free, just contact me by email. But that's a real thing. I actually was unemployed for a strange reason. I worked at Microsoft in Oracle. I worked at Oracle for four years in the 90s. Microsoft for three years in the 90s made so much money off of stock options that I found myself like too much money, took a year off, and then after about six months I was bored out of my tree. I turned into Mr. Mom. I spent a lot of time taking care of my kids, which was okay. My wife was getting a PhD at the time. But I felt like I dropped off the face of the world because I didn't have a job. A job has kind of become the hub of modern-day life. It's like the people you interact with. But if you ever leave that job for reasons, hopefully good reasons like me or bad reasons like you get fired, you literally lose your hub. So yeah, we want Super Collider. And it's hard to create energy if there is no hub. I mean that's sort of what that is. So this creates sort of that communal hub, which is really wonderful. So everybody, you have to come to the conference. It's going to be awesome. It's a really wonderful thing. Mark, thank you for trying to launch something new and exciting in Burlington. You know, something that's not just the business community, but is the arts community. You know, is the academic community. You know, is the hospitality community. Is the unemployed community. Is the unemployed community. I mean, it's just all of that together is better as a whole. Absolutely. And that's another thing is everybody has specifications that they can utilize to leverage intellectual property to become better. Yeah. Which is part of the whole push. Right. Super exciting. Don't let me forget that last thing that I was supposed to. Yeah, I know. I've got that. All right. So I also want to quickly let everybody know Mark has been super wonderful and is going to be doing a five tickets for the conference for anybody who's watching this. If you go to Symptomatic Super Collider, it's the bottom of the screen. See www.com. You've got it. Synaptic Super Collider. It's a real thing. Thank you. If you go there and you enter the code when you check out MSLNOW, you will get a 50% off ticket to the conference. Right. That's Main Street Landing Now, MSLNOW. And we'll even throw in this pair of glasses. Didn't know this was going to turn into QVC. No, no, we're not allowed to go there. I think there's licensing rights. So we have a myriad of discount codes for all types of people. Like I said, students, educators, unemployed, underemployed. We even do trade out. You got a great skill. You want to help us promote the thing. We might even do trade out with you. We want everybody that wants to go to be able to go. People who can afford to help us offset the cost of catering the spaces, the band, the DJ. All those things cost a lot of money. So people that can afford it and can help us do that. We appreciate it. I want to thank our sponsors. I'd like to give a shout out. Our lead sponsor this year is Benchmark Space Systems. They are sponsoring 16 students to attend the event. Which is super exciting. Yeah. And so thank you. Thank you so much for bringing this to town. Well, thank you. And I hope it's a big success. I want everyone to keep an eye out for it. I want people to go to the party at Contois next Saturday. It's going to be fun. It's going to be a great weekend. So get out there. Make sure you go to Super Collider. It's going to be an amazing conference in Burlington. Go to the website. Check it out. Thank you guys all so much. And I will see you next month. Thank you, Mark. Well, thank you, Mariah. All right. Take care.