Hi! I'm Marcus, an adventurer and strategist known for insatiable curiosity and passionate mentorship. In 2012, drawing on my experience as a software engineer for Bay Area startups like Twitter, I co-founded the immersive software engineering school Hack Reactor, which now teaches thousands of students each year. Personally stewarding so many of those remarkable people into prosperous and rewarding new careers has been one of the greatest honors of my life. Having studied both the philosophy and technology behind cryptographic systems like blockchain since the early 2000's, I see tremendous opportunities for society to implement healthy, sustainable coordination and exchange mechanisms.
Today, I provide advisory services for early-stage startups and entrepreneurs, career and achievement coaching for high impact clients, and systems design consulting for distributed ledger projects that hold pro-social values as their top priority. The rest of my time is spent stewarding The Erstwhere Institute, a mixed online/offline space for passionate artists, optimists, and engineers to build the infrastructure of a kinder, more collaborative world. Apart from writing community coordination tools, we create immersive real world spaces, host live music and comedy shows, organize lectures and salons, and lead co-working sessions for forward-looking projects.
Prior to my career as a technology entrepreneur, I spent years hitchhiking and performing in the streets of the US & Europe, with no formal employment or fixed address. Growing up in our family's immense video store, I was raised to be unconventional, self-determined, and well storied. I love learning from others as much as sharing what I know, and plan to continue lifelong studies of incentive mechanism design, complex adaptive systems, math, philosophy, design, martial arts, and urban dance.