Our story

MAC Interactive is the development arm of MAC Media and is one of 6 subsidiary companies/projects of MAC Media.

MAC Media was founded in 2010 by Jordan Allen with the goal of building out a global real-time simulation platform to give finance students hands-on experience with the concepts being taught in the classroom. The product became known as StockLinkU. StockLinkU took 2 years to develop and was launched into private testing in 2012. The system continued to operate through 2015 when it was shut down due to rising data licensing fees that made it uneconomical to continue running the platform. During it's operation, StockLinkU was used by 160 universities all over the world and became widely recognized as the most comprehensive and realistic simulation platform on the market.

StockLinkU was the core focus for MAC Media over the 5 year period, but multiple "side" projects were started by the MAC Media team with the goal of eventually monetizing them as SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) applications. Those projects included Foliometrics (an extension of StockLinkU for managing real money), a financial planning application (designed to compliment FolioMetrics), and Meister (a dynamic assessment application for job simulations and recruitment being developed for a recruiting tech company through a strategic partnership). After StockLinkU was shut down, all efforts were refocused on Foliometrics and the financial planning application, which would eventually be merged into a single application targeted at financial advisors. An additional requirement for the financial advisor solution included a set of business management functionalities, so an additional project was started to specifically focus on this. With Foliometrics, the financial planning application, and the business management applications comprising the complete financial advisor solution - development was expected to continue until the end of 2017. With the development completion date over a year away, we realized the need to generate revenue in order to continue our efforts. The idea of developing software for external companies had come up repeatedly during various business conversations with third-party companies, so the team determined that establishing a development company would be the best way of fulfilling the revenue requirements. It was then that MAC Interactive was established.

From MAC Media's launch in 2010 through today, a handful of additional partners were added to the company through investments and strategic partnerships. Those partners are listed below as principals in the company.