🎯 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.

Data & AI/ML Entrepreneur | Early Stage Investor

Over a decade of experience within AI/ML and Data Infrastructure as a founder, operator and investor.Passionate about bringing new and paradigm-shifting technologies to market. This passion has led me to a over decade-long entrepreneurial career focused on emerging software industries and global markets - from AI &amp; Data Infrastructure startups and venture capital funds to Fortune 500 technology leaders such as Google. Raised +$50M in early-stage funding from top VCs as a founder and operator. A big believer in people, data, design and telling a story. Passionate about building new products with the right GTM, messaging and growing teams that do so.Deep understanding of the venture capital, private equity, SaaS, cloud, data and AI ecosystems with solid global relationships at all levels.Frequent keynote speaker on topics around data, AI, startups and venture capital. Considered as one of the top AI &amp; data thought leaders in the Nordics.

Oliver Molander

The Anthropic team wrote all of Cowork (their newly launched non-technical version of Claude Code) using Claude Code 👇 

And they built it in 1.5 weeks (confirmed by Felix Rieseberg).

Holy sh*t.

Things are changing fast.

At the same time, I see founders struggling to make a simple update to their website in 1.5 weeks.

Anthropic launched an entirely new product in that time.

And as Felix noted, they’re releasing Cowork early. It has rough edges. But figuring out what to build is increasingly the hardest part of software engineering - and they believe getting feedback early and hearing what users actually need is how you build something truly good.

And this is a company valued at close to $0.5 trillion, with thousands of employees.

Founders, you have no excuse anymore.

Don’t fall into the anti-AI hype.

There’s a saying that the future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed.

I still see plenty of developers insisting that AI coding tools are overhyped and error-prone.

But I’m also starting to see the opposite:

People who’ve fully embraced them and now find they’re so good that it’s triggering a real crisis of confidence.

If you haven’t seriously tested AI coding tools in the last year, try them again. 

Don’t assume anything.

You’ll be surprised.

#artificialintelligence

I see too many brilliant technical founders in Europe getting stuck in what I call intellectual procrastination.

They debate in their own minds what to do, weighing different outcomes - instead of just doing.

This is why high-agency founders succeed. They start doing, fail, learn, and repeat.

As Andrej Karpathy puts it:

Agency > Intelligence

Karpathy has said he intuitively had this wrong for decades, shaped by a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence - media narratives, entertainment, obsession with IQ, etc.

Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce.

Are you hiring for agency?

Are we educating for agency?

Are you acting as if you had 10× agency?

The best thing about high agency is that it compounds.

This is something organizations like YC are especially good at: pushing founders out into action.

There’s a saying in Finnish, “Liike on lääke”, which roughly translates to “Motion is the cure.”

The best founders get anxious when there’s no motion - when nothing is happening or being tested and validated.

For too long, European cities like Stockholm - despite an incredible concentration of talent - have been held back by societal expectations: first get a master’s degree, then gain experience at a big company, and only then maybe think about building something. 

But the truth is, you don’t need permission - you can just do things.

The tides are turning fast, though.

Now is the time of the high agency builder.

#artificialintelligence

One of the biggest myths right now that needs to be busted is that Claude Code is only for coding.

It can be used for so much more.

As my friend Antoine Moyroud recently said, we need to stop treating AI like a chatbot.

The gap between power users of AI and casual chat users is going to widen very fast. Start experimenting with Claude Code now.

Non-technical people shouldn’t be afraid of the CLI.

You can already leverage Claude Code for almost any kind of knowledge work:

Sales, marketing, growth, fundraising, law, taxes - you can become surprisingly competent quickly.

It’s hard to overstate how big the gap will be between people who understand how massive this shift is and those who don’t.

As Greg Isenberg put it:

You’re just a few .md files away from outperforming 99% of people on this planet.

2026 is the year Claude Code grows beyond coding.

#artificialintelligence

Probably not a biggie, but the creator of Node.js just admitted that the era of humans writing code is over.

#artificialintelligence

Here's a shout-out to all young technical operators from the Nordics working at the frontier in leading AI companies - you embody the future.

Gabriel Petersson 
Erik Kaunismäki 
Jonatan von Martens 
emil fagerholm 
Emil Ahlbäck 
Minette Kaunismäki 
Christian Ryan 
Matheus Mendes 
Eric Zakariasson
Jonathan Granskog

...and many more that I've missed.

The future is in the youth.

#artificialintelligence

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🎯 Mark Freeman II

Oliver Molander

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The Battle

🎯 Mark Freeman II

Oliver Molander

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Posts

Engagements

Likes

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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Performance Score🎯 Mark Freeman II's LinkedIn Performance