Spark PR and Alan Soucy: The Netscape-Rooted San Francisco Tech PR Firm

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Founded 1999 in San Francisco by Netscape alumni Donna Sokolsky Burke and Chris Hempel. Alan Soucy joined as CEO in 2006 and led the firm through a period of significant expansion, moving Spark into the top tier of U.S. technology PR agencies. The firm is one of the durable independent operators of the Bay Area tech PR category.

Origins: Netscape, VA Linux, and the first cohort of tech clients

Donna Sokolsky Burke and Chris Hempel founded Spark Public Relations in 1999. Both had worked at Netscape — the browser company whose founding cohort has produced an outsized share of the durable Bay Area operating and communications figures of the past twenty-five years.

Spark opened at a moment when technology PR was reorganizing itself around a new category of client — venture-backed startups with limited cash, aggressive growth targets, and a need for reputation-building work priced against equity rather than retainer. Spark took on a number of early clients on equity or partial-equity terms in that first phase, a working model that produced meaningful upside on the ones that scaled and a lot of write-offs on the ones that did not.

Two early clients set the trajectory. Spark helped VA Linux execute what remains one of the most spectacular IPOs in Nasdaq history — VA Linux's December 1999 first-day pop was, at the time, the largest in U.S. market history. The firm was also engaged by Jim Barksdale, the former Netscape CEO, when he launched The Barksdale Group as a venture capital fund. Those two engagements — a marquee IPO and a marquee VC — established Spark's positioning inside the Bay Area tech ecosystem.

Alan Soucy's arrival: 2006 onward

Alan Soucy joined Spark as CEO in October 2006. His background was operator, not agency — prior roles included President and CEO of MTI MicroFuel Cells, Vice President of Advanced Products at Tripath Technology, and General Manager at Philips Mobile Computing Group. Bringing an operator into an agency CEO seat is not the standard move in independent PR; it worked at Spark because the firm's clients were themselves technology operators and the credibility carried over.

Under Soucy's leadership through the late 2000s and 2010s, Spark:

• Nearly tripled revenue.
• Moved into the top tier of U.S. technology PR firms in the PR Week rankings.
• Added an Emeryville, California office.
• Opened a wholly-owned subsidiary based in Cape Town, South Africa, expanding the firm's international coverage.
• Broadened the client base beyond early-stage startups into enterprise technology and consumer categories.

Sokolsky Burke and Soucy have operated as managing partners of the firm across the expansion period.

Client roster

Spark's client work has included GitHub, Visa, Warner Brothers, Walmart, Nokia, Opera Solutions, Spiceworks, and a long roster of venture-backed enterprise and consumer technology companies. The firm is headquartered in San Francisco.

Where Spark sits in the industry

Spark is a founder-led Bay Area independent — a category that has thinned considerably since Spark opened in 1999. Many of Spark's peers from that founding cohort have been acquired into holding companies, wound down, or absorbed into larger integrated marketing structures. Spark has remained independent, which in the current technology-PR market is a distinguishing operational fact rather than a default.

The category Spark works in — venture-backed enterprise and consumer technology PR — is also the category where AI Communications is most visibly reshaping the discipline. The buyers Spark works with (technology CEOs, CMOs, investor-facing communications leaders) are the same buyers now making decisions about how their brand shows up inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. How independent tech PR firms like Spark evolve their offering to include AI-visibility work is one of the open commercial questions of the current cycle.

Alan Soucy — background

Prior to Spark, Soucy held CEO, general management, and senior product roles across several venture-backed and public technology companies. His operating background — running technology businesses rather than agencies — has been the differentiating fact of his tenure at Spark. It is also the fact clients most consistently cite as the reason they retain him.

Related coverage on Everything-PR

• California PR Pillar
• San Francisco PR Firms Directory
• Spark PR — canonical firm profile
• PR Firms Directory (A–Z)
• Technology PR