🎯 Mark Freeman II

onthemarkdata.com | Senior data engineer helping brands with GTM and content strategy.

I'm a community health advocate turned data engineer interested in the intersection of social impact, business, and technology. My life’s mission is to improve the well-being of as many people as possible through data—especially among those marginalized.
 
As the founder of On the Mark Data, I use this platform to help brands connect to data professionals through captivating content.
 
I received my M.S. from the Stanford School of Medicine and I'm also certified in Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In addition, I have worked within numerous startups where I have put machine learning models into production, integrated data analytics into products, and led migrations to improve data infrastructure.
 
The culmination of my technical skills, content success, and experience within startups would make me an asset whether you are looking to create a successful content strategy, engage in influencer marketing campaigns, or develop a go-to-market strategy for your startup.

You can learn more about opportunities to collaborate, my media appearances, or my content at onthemarkdata.com.

Tech Lead, GTM Engineering

• Joined as employee one to lead GTM at Gable to help us reach our first customers.
• Worked with the CEO to establish our GTM strategy, content strategy, and messaging for technical audiences.
• Building internal data products to drive our GTM strategy and sales.

Hannes Mühleisen (co-founder of DuckDB) doing his slides like SQL queries is so damn cool.

The most powerful communication is often what's not said.

Dev 🤝🏼 GTM | O’Reilly Author | [in]structor (33k+ Learners)

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Joe Reis recently inspired me to consider Claude Code as a writing tool when he challenged the notion of context graphs.

He essentially took the Foundation Capital article that has been going viral and ran it through Claude Code.

It instantly transformed a very theoretical article into an entire code repo you could explore on his public GitHub (then used that as a tool to critique).

A thought then popped into my head:

"What if my writing was so clear that you could throw an entire article into Claude Code and it would one shot a working POC of the presented ideas."

Welp, the implementation chapter of our book (Ch. 7) is public on GitHub and is stored as a README file.

So let's see if my writing is clear enough for AI to one shot it.

I downloaded the repo to my local machine, got rid of every file except the README, the JSON dataset, and a folder of diagrams from the chapter.

Then I prompted: "This is my technical chapter of the book. Implement it."

I couldn't believe it... In about 10 minutes it was spinning up a Docker image, loading data into Postgres, and then running my tests.

Keep in mind I spent a couple intense weeks building that codebase for the book.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for such code to be useable, but rather it's now a tool that I can use to further validate my writing.

Present your novel ideas.
But show the working POC.

It's the same as in academia where you have research papers that include code and data for repeatability.

The bar has risen for everyone now. Talk is cheap.

Crazy Idea: I use claude code on a live stream where I'm building an app from scratch.

But...

People on the live stream can enter prompts on my behalf while I'm building to either help or mess with the project.

I think the chaos would be both fun and hilarious.

You didn't hear it from me, but the coolest talk at Data Day Texas is happening at 2:55PM in room 204 👀

Live coding exercise for my conference talk at Data Day Texas? You bet!

Saturday - 2nd Floor - Ballroom 204

Code: The Untapped Metadata Source Driving Most Data Failures

Over the past three years, collaborating with organizations implementing data contracts and writing the O'Reilly book on the topic, it has become abundantly clear that data is surprisingly the wrong surface to address systemic data issues —we actually need to focus on code. Code not only defines what data is captured and moved through software systems, but it's also the ultimate source of truth in how a business operates and its documented changes over time. This is evident in how some of the most significant internet outages can be traced not only to code changes, but also to how those changes affected underlying data models. In this talk, I share case studies and lessons learned in extracting metadata from code and using it to enforce expectations across software systems and data products.

Remember back in the ancient internet times when you could use this cool thing called HTML to customize your Myspace profile.

Just randomly hacking away at sections to see what changed. Copy and pasting random code and hoping it works.

Vibe coding feels eerily similar.

What data scientist experienced in 2023 with the realease of ChatGPT is the same experience software engineers are experiencing today with Claude Code.

Back in 2022 I was transitioning from data science to data engineering, and a major project that led to that promotion was building and deploying a natural language processing pipeline.

Back then I was using SpaCy, which was an opinionated framework for implementing the latest production-ready NLP models.

Yeah... I open up ChatGPT and immediately see the "advanced" work I put into production was now antiquated.

While I wouldn't throw an LLM at my production project back in 2023, I was intimately aware of what was required to get business value out of text.

What ChatGPT showed me was that a large portion of the difficult parts of NLP were now just a simple API call... and more importantly, highlighted the inflection point if the momentum of change followed.

Fast forward to today, and so many software engineers built side projects over the holiday break and experienced the exact realization I had back in 2023.

"This LLM accomplished way more than I expected, and I can see an inflection point if this trend continues."

Imagine what will be accomplished in the next few years.

DataStax

• Lead a team of 6 to ensure renewal of ≥$200M of annual recurring revenue

Head of Global Renewals

Head of Investor Relations

• Research and size new markets, contributing to two strategic acquisitions that brought us into the fast-growing data streaming market and the AI space
• Write strategic visions that influence the CEO and leadership team’s thinking
• Own special strategic projects, like developing the early pricing strategy for our new flagship product, AstraDB, our multi-cloud DBaaS
• Develop and maintain a central system for market research, empowering IR, PR, finance, marketing, and product teams with a consistent, data-driven view of market trends
• Create frameworks and data products to support strategic, data-driven decisions across the company
• Influence D&I actions, including expanding our diversity referral bonus plan to include transgender & non-binary people and spreading the use of pronouns in Slack & Zoom

Director of Corporate Strategy

• Evangelize the DataStax story to potential investors – let's go Astra!
• Updated the IR narrative with the new strategic principles I co-authored alongside the corporate strategy team, helping land more investor interest including a $115M round in June 2022 led by Goldman Sachs
• Own competitive analysis, tracking our success alongside others' in our market to bolster our IR narrative and inform C-Suite's investment decisions
• Stay connected with leaders throughout the business to constantly refresh the IR narrative
• Facilitate non-deal roadshows and other meetings with C-suite

Director of Investor Relations

Purcell

Marketing & Strategy Advisor

Humu

• Led technical configurations and deployment of two new products to a Fortune 15 company, leading to 43% user expansion within 3 months, along with leading operations for multiple unicorn startups
• Created and ran the company-wide product feedback loop, capturing 150+ unique, actionable customer insights in first 2 months
• Created company-wide release notes process, resulting in reduced duplication and faster product cycles 
• Partnered with Product Leads to launch new features, including a solution to provide agency and transparency for low n-count edge cases, based on customer insights
• Operationalized new features, leading testing and enablement to ensure quality at launch

Product Operations Lead

IDEO

• Consulted with a community hospital, coaching a group of doctors and nurses to conduct design research of the patient experience; the group went on to design and implement a "before visit summary" to empower patients before surgeries, improving patient and employee experiences
• Coached a liberal arts college’s inaugural cohort of faculty intrapreneurs in design thinking, empowering the grassroots group to lead a design-led transformation of the student and faculty experience

Org Designer

LAUNCH: The University of California's Startup Accelerator

• Designed and executed LAUNCH's three-month accelerator program serving 75 founders
• Coached risk identification and mitigation, sparking a team to pivot their business model and raise $1M
• Created, marketed, and ran LAUNCH's first-ever make-a-thon. Recruited 40+ engineering, business, film, and design students to help our startups build out a piece of their product, branding, marketing, and more in 30 hours

Head of Programs

Capital One

Short-term consulting engagement to define, document, and operationalize the product development process at Capital One Labs. I took on this role after I had been admitted to, but before I started, the MBA program at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.

• Established a regular, transparent project review process to enable "failing fast" and accelerated product evolution; enabled reallocation of $1M in labor costs to projects more desirable to the parent company
• Built a central knowledge base capturing user research, experiment results, and project plans; reduced cost of staff turnover and accelerated design cycles

Product Operations & Strategy Consultant

Opower

• Improved software deployment quality by 33% in 2 months by leading a cross-functional team through a Six Sigma project; won the “Think Big” award for “innovative ideas that drive the organization forward”
• Led a team of 3 technical writers to create 500+ standard operating procedures; 65% of delivery work linked to an SOP after 1 year. All 3 writers were promoted for their excellent project work
• Developed and drove KPIs of strategic initiatives for Technical Operations Senior Directors

Associate Manager, Business Operations & Strategy

• Embedded within Design team to provide business and operations consulting; restructured their organization and streamlined processes, resulting in a 107% increase in throughput
• Reduced rush requests of the design team by 50%; rush requests were 9x more likely to lead to quality issues; identified that root-cause was unclear turnaround times, developed a menu of services with clear turnaround times and inputs required, and training project managers on new systems

Senior Analyst, Business Operations & Strategy

• Designed and implemented a company-wide system to control access to client data, passing a security audit to retain a $2M+ client; won the “Good Teammate” award for “collaborating joyfully and having a great attitude”

Analyst, Business Operations & Strategy

Resources for the Future

• Modeled U.S. electricity markets for the EPA’s 2015 Clean Power Plan
• Documented the sequence and purpose of every Stata program involved in the model to cement institutional knowledge
• Built an econometric model estimating labor supply's response to changes in energy prices for an academic paper on the social cost of carbon price policies
• Organized an academic seminar series for staff to increase idea-sharing between economists and research assistants

Analyst, Electricity Markets

Federal Reserve Board

• Authored weekly trend analysis of U.S. energy and agriculture markets and delivered directly to Chairman Bernanke so he could better appraise inflation
• Wrote and maintained over 20 interdependent statistical forecasting programs, written in FAME, to study USDA, WSJ, ICE, Bloomberg, and NYMEX energy and food price datasets. I improved processing time and accessibility by adding automation and simple user interfaces.
• Provided research support for a paper on interest rate elasticity of mortgage demand published in American Economics Journal

Senior Research Assistant - Energy and Agriculture Prices

• Co-authored two papers examining international competitiveness using a novel price measure, collecting underlying data, building the aggregate price measure, and running regression analyses; presented findings to the International Monetary Fund research group, including Nobel laureate George Akerlof
• Forecasted global financial flows to brief the Governors on the state of international financial markets prior to FOMC meetings

Senior Research Assistant - Global Financial Flows

I lead Global Renewals and Customer Engagement at DataStax, the GenAI Data Company. I help our customers get the most value from the DataStax platform, ensuring mutual success, on-time renewals, and expansions when they're ready. I leverage my Six Sigma & Design Thinking background to champion the voice of the customer, channeling it into continuous improvement–it's the only way.

My previous experience includes economic research (Federal Reserve Board, Resources for the Future), process improvement and innovation (Opower, Capital One), operations (Humu), and organizational design (IDEO).

I combine my background to help companies and leaders find a new way forward out of ambiguity and inertia. At the Fed, I researched international financial transactions and inflation during the Great Recession, supporting critical policy decisions. At Opower, a cleantech company, I drove improvements in efficiency, quality, and employee experience. At Capital One, I redesigned the innovation lab’s operational model to get innovative products to market faster. 

I hold a B.S. in Economics and Environmental Science from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the Berkeley Haas School of Business. I live in Santa Cruz, California with my wife, dog (Huck), and cat (Karl).

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The Battle

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}🎯 Mark Freeman II's LinkedIn Performance

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