Marcus Eagan
I build NativeLink, which is open source, and a suite of scientific computing tools at Trace Machina for agents and their human collaborators. Our customers process and store several petabytes of data with us, often in air-gapped environments.
I was born and raised in Detroit. My first company was acquired by a router company that is now part of a public company. Afterward, I studied the foundations of Natural Language Processing (now broadly referred to as AI) at the University of Michigan, built a zero-to-one product at Lucidworks, a one-to-two product at MongoDB, Atlas Search, and a zero-to-one product at MongoDB, Atlas Vector Search, from an idea I pitched in an interview in 2020 to hundreds of customers.
I am an Apache Committer to the Solr project, mainly in developer experience and security features. I advised MongoDB, and now I advise Weaviate, a vector database. I am an affiliated scholar at UC Law San Francisco. I am an angel investor in roughly 50 companies, and some of them will have IPO'd by the time you read this biography.
I played hockey poorly as a kid, won LEGO competitions, and was a foster parent for four years to high-risk youth in the Bay Area. I live in San Francisco, I lived in New York for a few years, and my favorite place to be is wherever my loved ones are.
I first learned to code at 11 years old in the DAPCEP program in Detroit, while my older brother was studying Computer Engineering at Wayne State. I am passionate about funding similar opportunities for youth all over the world.
My favorite books that are not of spiritual importance to me:
- Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
- The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
- JavaScript: The Good Parts, Douglas Crockford
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz
- The Stranger, Albert Camus
- Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
- The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan, Matthew Restall
- Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
- High Output Management, Andy Grove
- Discourse on Method, René Descartes
- The Pragmatic Programmer, Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
- Lucene in Action, Otis Gospodnetić and Erik Hatcher, with Mike McCandless in a subsequent edition
- La isla bajo el mar, Isabel Allende
- The Prophet, Khalil Gibran
- The Whites of Their Eyes, Jill Lepore
The music of John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and countless others steers me through the stormiest journeys.