Mike O'Connor

I'm a community organizer, entrepreneur and tech-geek turned business-leader type person. I became moderately famous here in Minnesota as one of the people who popularized the Internet back in the mid-90’s. These days I divide my pretty-retired time between being a "domainer" (I've still got a gaggle of great domains to figure out) and serving on the ICANN Business Constituency.

My current non-work activities include; restoring 420 acres of Wisconsin farmland to the state it was in prior to agriculture, participating in a variety of local non-profits and learning the craft of furniture-making.

In the mid-to-late ‘90’s I co-founded gofast.net (a St. Paul based ISP that ultimately became the tech-core of Agiliti). I also served as the founding President of the Minnesota Internet Services Trade Association (MISTA). I have been an active participant in all sorts of Internet community-building activities (The St Paul Broadband Advisory Committee, the Lowertown Pub, Twin Cities Freenet, Minnesota E-Democracy, Minnesota Citizens Online, MetroNet's Plugging Along project, and the River project). My colleagues and I at gofast.net pioneered much of the "interesting" high-speed Internet access technology here in Minnesota -- ISDN, ADSL, wireless and wired cable modems. I guess that makes me a fully-qualified "construction worker on the Information Highway."

I also got moderately famous in the domain-name community for turning down a $50,000 offer for TELEVISION.COM in the mid-90's. Later, the sale of that name and others allowed me to retire at age 50 -- and confirmed for me that old adage "if you have a choice between being really smart and being really lucky, take lucky."

I've done a fair amount of civic committee type stuff. A few of the recent things include; the St Paul Mayor's Y2k Taskforce (chair), St Paul Mayor's Education Taskforce (chair), Minnesota Legislative Coordinating Commission Working Group on Taxation of Telecommunications (member), St Paul Mayor's High Tech Council (founding member), State of Minnesota Information Policy Council (member, Steering Committee), and the Lowertown Cyber Village Association (founding member).

My background includes about 30 years of managing large-scale technology and information systems initiatives and leading a variety of non-profit sector development efforts. My previous positions have included President and General Manager of several public radio stations, divisional MIS Director at CDC, Managing Associate at Coopers & Lybrand, and Associate Vice President of Finance (and Controller) at the University of Minnesota.

I graduated from Grinnell College with a Bachelors Degree in Economics, and received a Masters in Business Administration from the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.

At various times I have held the CPIM (Certified Production and Inventory Manager) certification from APICS, and the CSP (Certified Systems Professional) and CDP (Certified Data Processing professional) certifications from ASCSP.