in economics, and an M.B.A. with a specialty in international finance from University of Michigan, Mariotti worked as a financial analyst for Ford Motor Company.

[1] At Jane Addams High School in the Bronx, Mariotti was tasked with developing an off-site program for special ed students who had been expelled for violent crimes.

[6] Mariotti regularly represented NFTE as a speaker at The World Economic Forum in Davos, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a lecturer at colleges and universities.

Mariotti has authored or co-authored 34 books, textbooks and workbooks, including The Young Entrepreneur’s Guide to Starting and Running a Business (Random House 2000 and 2014) with Debra DeSalvo, the junior-college textbook Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management (Pearson 2010, 2012, 2014), An Entrepreneur's Manifesto (Templeton Press, 2015) and Goodbye Homeboy: How My Students Drove Me Crazy and Inspired a Movement (BenBella Books, 2019),[1] which received multiple awards and reached number one in four Amazon categories.

In 2013, Mariotti traveled to Southeast Asia as a guest of the U.S. State Department to discuss entrepreneurship education with business leaders in emerging economies.

Mariotti's meetings with entrepreneurs in Cambodia and other war-torn regions inspired him to focus his Huffington Post blog on exploring how exposure to the entrepreneurial mindset helps victims of extreme traumas like war and genocide build thriving new lives.