Mark's professional experience includes many different areas in the Computer Software industry, with a focus on Java, Smalltalk, and testing.

He was at IBM for 5 years, joining that corporation immediately out of a college co-op program. He started with an assignment working on the creation of a software development environment. However, he soon became interested in providing additional software development solutions that were complimentary to IBM's offerings. With ideas in mind, Mark considered the viability of a starting a company that would provide Object-Oriented development solutions.

Mark Foulkrod and Michael Silverstein founded SilverMark in 1996. The inspiration for SilverMark was drawn from a common set of experiences that the founders had while working together at IBM. A vision was born from these experiences, and that was to provide professional software developers with tools that would enhance the quality of their day-to-day coding. This was in a time when most companies were focused on providing enterprise solutions to increase the quantity of code that a developer could produce.

The founders made four key decisions upon the start-up:

1. Launch their initial product offerings in the niche Smalltalk market. This was the ideal staging market to develop a core technology because the founders had experience within this marketplace and had already formed a relationship with IBM.
2. Provide quality tools that would target software developers but would also support a technical QA team
3. Maintain a small, low overhead independent company until their product vision could be fully developed
4. Create a core technology that could be expanded into future growth markets (such as Java).

Test Mentor was developed and available for first customer ship by December 1996. By the end of 1997, SilverMark had a couple of dozen Fortune 1000 companies and an international installed product base.