Hi! I'm Marcus, a teacher 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. We believed that a serious curriculum in an immersive container could turn determined career changers into working engineers in a matter of months. The school went on to train more than ten thousand of them. Personally stewarding so many remarkable people into prosperous and rewarding new careers has been one of the greatest honors of my life.
In 2023 I co-founded Deep Atlas with some of my closest friends, my brother, and former students I'd stayed close with over the years. It's a school for experienced technologists who want to understand machine learning at the nuts-and-bolts level, how such systems work, what they can and cannot do. I designed the curriculum architecture, and helped our curriculum designers build on it.
Nowadays, I steward The Erstwhere Syndicate, an offline culture and social network of passionate artists, optimists, and engineers building the infrastructure of a kinder, more collaborative world. We write community coordination tools, create immersive real world spaces, host live music and comedy shows, organize lectures and salons, and lead co-working sessions for forward-looking projects. I also advise early-stage founders and coach a small number of high-impact clients on career and achievement.
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.
If someone we both know pointed you here, drop me a line about an interest we share: hello@marcusphillips.com