Mark Petrozzella
| Residence | Annadale, Staten Island, New York |
|---|---|
| Education | Tottenville High School; Fairleigh Dickinson University |
| Occupations | Entrepreneur · author · painter · podcaster · TV producer · actor |
| Years active | 1997–present |
| Known for | AllTheFood.com; the VIIEM book series; FantasyGold (FGC) |
| Website | paintings.ink |
Mark Petrozzella is an American entrepreneur, author, painter, podcaster, TV producer, and actor from Staten Island, New York. For more than two decades he has moved early into emerging online markets, from restaurant directories and social networking to daily fantasy sports, cryptocurrency, and esports, building or helping launch one venture after another and usually getting out before the category went mainstream.[1] He did much of it while holding steady public-sector jobs, working for years with the New York City Housing Authority and later the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In the 2020s he turned to creative work, self-publishing science fiction and nonfiction, selling paintings, and co-hosting the Yo Cuz Podcast.
A Staten Island restaurateur before he was anything else, Petrozzella moved onto the early commercial web around 2000, after a back injury made restaurant work untenable, and made his name in search-engine optimization.[1]
Early life and restaurants
Petrozzella was raised in Annadale, on Staten Island's South Shore, and attended Tottenville High School and Fairleigh Dickinson University.[4] He entered the restaurant business young, starting as a teenage busboy at a place called A Slice of Italy, which he later bought.[1] Over the following years he owned several restaurants in the New York area, including establishments on Staten Island and in Bayonne, New Jersey, and operated a Staten Island restaurant, Amici's, from 1997 to 2002.[1] A back injury that limited the time he could spend on his feet prompted him to move into internet business.[1]
Internet ventures
AllTheFood.com
AllTheFood.com, an online restaurant directory Petrozzella founded around 2000 (originally launched as atdeliver.com), grew from roughly 1,200 listings to more than 450,000 restaurants nationwide, including about 950 on Staten Island.[1] At its peak the site drew about 65,000 visitors a day and listed more than 150,000 registered users, and it ranked first for the phrase “restaurant directory” on Google, AOL, AskJeeves, Lycos and Amazon (second on Yahoo and third on AltaVista).[1][2] Among its features was an early “eCallButton” click-to-call (voice-over-IP) tool that let users make reservations and place orders from their computers, plus a members’ “Dining Club.” The venture was profiled by the Staten Island Advance in 2005.[1]
Zooped.com
Around 2006 Petrozzella launched Zooped.com, an all-in-one social network billed as “a new Business, Music and Personal Social Network.” The site combined personal, musician and business profiles with music playlists, blogs, video, news, groups and Flash arcade games, and offered a tool to import a user’s MySpace profile.[3] A 2007 review by the agency Ignite Social Media reported the network had grown from about 7,000 to roughly 120,000 users within a month; the reviewer criticized its business model while explicitly declining to fault its underlying technology.[3]
CaptionBubble.com and others
Petrozzella’s other early projects included CaptionBubble.com (2006–2007), a “Make Your Photos Talk” tool for adding speech-bubble captions to images; a MySpace layout-template business sold through webmaster forums such as DigitalPoint; and gamenasty.com, which supplied embeddable arcade games for social-network profiles.
Fantasy sports and cryptocurrency
Petrozzella handled marketing, business development and public relations for rotoinfo.com (“All Fantasy News All The Time”), a real-time fantasy-sports news site run by seven Staten Island partners from a small office in the Travis neighborhood. By 2011 the site reported roughly 200,000 registered users and about 65% visitor retention, as profiled by the Staten Island Advance.[4] In January 2014 rotoinfo.com merged with Fantasy Alarm, one of the leading independent fantasy-sports media companies; Petrozzella sold his stake at the time of the merger.[10] Fantasy Alarm went on to grow substantially and, operating as the Alarm Sports Network (FA Media LLC), was itself acquired by the UK-based Spotlight Sports Group in an all-cash deal in 2021.[11]
In 2017–2018 he was a member of the founding team of FantasyGold (FGC), serving as Director of Business Development. Marketed as “Bitcoin meets fantasy sports,” the cryptocurrency was created to serve the multibillion-dollar fantasy-sports and competitive-eSports markets and launched on April 4, 2018, using decentralized masternodes to power InstantSend and PrivateSend transactions.[8]
The project also staged “FGC Arena” fighting-game esports tournaments (featuring titles such as Street Fighter V, Tekken 7 and Dragon Ball FighterZ) in Las Vegas alongside Millennial Esports, with prize pools paid in both cash and FGC. He has also served as a new-business-development manager for the daily-fantasy site DraftDaily.com and as a consultant for fanrates.com.
As of June 2026, Petrozzella relaunched FantasyDailies (fantasydailies.com) as its sole owner. The rebuilt site is a daily-sports companion app covering betting odds, player props, scores and starting lineups across Major League Baseball, the NBA, the NFL and the NHL, drawing on live sports-data feeds, and adds several new features not found in the original version.
Sports marketing
From about 2017 to 2019 Petrozzella served as Vice President of Marketing for the Nashville Knights, a women’s American football team that competed in the Legends Football League (formerly the Lingerie Football League). The franchise was founded in December 2017, went undefeated in its 2018 regular season, and was dropped from the league’s 2020 schedule after the LFL rebranded as the X League.[7]
Television and film
In 2010 Petrozzella and his teammate Joseph Verriotto competed on the VH1 reality weight-loss competition Money Hungry, produced by 51 Minds Entertainment, in which teams of two raised their own stakes toward a $100,000 prize; the Staten Island Advance covered his run on the show.[5][6] His IMDb profile credits him as a producer, with credits including Staten Island Hustle (2018), Dr. G: Medical Examiner (2004) and The Job (2013).[9] He also maintains an actor profile on Backstage, where he lists his casting type as a strong New York accent, “thug or cop.”
Consulting
Alongside his own companies, Petrozzella has taken on consulting work across television, music and marketing. He consulted for CBS on the reality series Big Brother, organizing a large open casting call on Staten Island. In music, he worked with First Priority Music, including campaigns for the singer Eamon and for the Star and Buck Wild show, and with Jive/Zomba, for which he ran a MySpace campaign promoting the OutKast film. His other consulting clients have included Fanrates.com, the independent film Jay Sebring....Cutting to the Truth with Kwan Burton, and Blink beauty salon in Garfield, New Jersey.
Writing
Petrozzella self-publishes fiction and nonfiction via Amazon KDP and Draft2Digital, with audiobook editions on Audible and titles sold through his own sites sellbooks.online and viiem.com. He has said his primary motivation for writing is to leave a digital footprint for his grandchildren.
VIIEM: The Harvest, Vol. I - The Signal
The first volume of Petrozzella’s VIIEM saga - a first-contact story that opens his interconnected fictional universe. It reached #12 in Amazon’s First Contact Science Fiction category.
DONOR 1405
A dark thriller built around a sinister donor program, sharing the unsettling cosmology that runs beneath Petrozzella’s fiction.
Voice to Text
A supernatural thriller that turns an ordinary phone into a doorway to something far less ordinary.
The Ozempic Divorce
How the GLP-1 weight-loss boom is reshaping marriage, relationships, desire, and the dating market - “check in here before you check out.”
No Bottom
An exposé of how online casinos and slot apps are built to take everything - and why no one is coming to stop it.
Visual art
Petrozzella is a self-taught painter working in acrylic and mixed media, in an expressive, neo-figurative style. His work is sold through his gallery site paintings.ink and through ArtPal and Saatchi Art, and he has issued digital editions of his paintings as NFTs on OpenSea. He also shares his art on Instagram at @mark_petrozzella.
Podcasting
Petrozzella co-hosts the Yo Cuz Podcast with his biological cousin Justice Pratt, an unscripted conversation show (“Real conversations. No script. No filter.”) distributed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
Personal life
Petrozzella lives in Annadale, Staten Island. He is a father of two and a lifelong New York Jets fan.
References
- [1] Williamson, Lisa Ann. “Annadale resident is founder of on-line restaurant directory.” Staten Island Advance, March 30, 2005.
- [2] “Popular Online Restaurant Directory’s Traffic Skyrockets Over 40% on Valentine’s Day.” 24-7 Press Release, February 24, 2005.
- [3] Tobin, Jim. “Why Zooped Sucks.” Ignite Social Media, September 13, 2007.
- [4] “Petrozzella helping turn fantasy into reality.” Staten Island Advance (South Shore), October 2011.
- [5] Johnson, Ben. “Big Brothers.” Staten Island Advance, July 29, 2010.
- [6] “Money Hungry.” Wikipedia.
- [7] “Nashville Knights (football).” Wikipedia.
- [8] “FantasyGold (FGC).” CryptoSlate.
- [9] “Mark Petrozzella.” IMDb.
- [10] “FantasyAces Announces Exclusive DFS Partnership With FantasyAlarm.com.” PR Newswire, March 17, 2015 (noting Fantasy Alarm’s January 2014 acquisition of Rotoinfo.com).
- [11] “Spotlight Sports Group Acquires Alarm Sports Network, Leading US Fantasy Sports Operator.” Spotlight Sports Group, 2021.
External links
- Books & store: sellbooks.online · viiem.com · Amazon author page · Audible
- Art: paintings.ink · ArtPal · Saatchi Art · OpenSea
- Podcast: yocuzpodcast.com
- Film/TV: IMDb · Backstage
- Professional: LinkedIn · rotoinfo (LinkedIn)
- Social: Instagram @markpetrozzella (author), @mark_petrozzella (art) · TikTok @markpetrozzella, @paintings.art · YouTube · Facebook · X @captionbubble, @fanrates