UPDATED: March 14, 2021

Hi! My name is Mark Koester. I’m a phenomenologist and technologist. I ponder life’s fundamental questions through an on-going exploration of human experience and behavior, and I design and build “enablers” or tools (mostly digital products, books and, of course, this blog) that attempt to maximize human potential, health and creativity.

I also love speaking, teaching courses, running innovation events and programs, and building product-centric companies.

About This Blog

I’ve been writing this blog in some form since 2007. I use my blog and writings in general to think through, document and share various ideas. On multiple occasions, I have sought to try to establish a “theme” for the writings here, but with little success. Each attempt to force some sort of one-dimensionality tends to, like a medusa, grow new heads. Thus, this space will remain an organic space for my writings, learnings and creativity (warts and all!).

Individual themes can be explored across multiple pieces using the category tags.

For example, if you want to dive into self-tracking and data-driven life, checkout “Tracking Everything”, which covers a range of topics related to self-tracking, health, and the quantified self including all of my quantified self, self-tracking and biohacker experiments.

If you are interested in behavior change and goals, you can go through various posts under the rubric of “The Science of Goals” where I explore psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience as it relates to changing human action and decision making.

Broadly speaking, my writings have included at one time or other: travel, startups, running a tech business, digital nomad life, language, running, web design, cross-cultural experience and understanding, storytelling, religion and atheism, sociology and, of course, a good bit of philosophy mixed in.

If you enjoyed something you read, I’d love to hear from you or read something you’ve written. Please send me your comments and questions to markwkoester at gmail.com or reach out to me through one of my social media accounts.

My Speaking Experience

I have spoken at numerous technical, design and startup conferences, ranging from topics on entrepreneurship and innovation to data science and machine learning. I am particularly interesting in the intersection of technology and behavior change, like goal setting and data visualization of personal data.

Here are some of my latest speeches:

My Professional Work

Here is a short bio used for media and speaking engagements:

Mark is an experienced technical product designer, product manager, entrepreneur, and developer. With a mix of programming and data science skills, he brings hands-on experience to designing, building, and launching both online technology products for web and mobile and offline training programs and event management. Increasingly his personal and professional focus is on data-driven products with an interest in healthtech, healthcare and wellness space. He previously led regional development for Techstars in Greater China and launched a software development agency in 2010.

My Design and Development Portfolio

You can find my design and development portfolio at Int3c.com and my open source development work at github.com/markwk/.

I have also created a dedicated page for my product.

Where am I from? Where am I now?

Currently Living in Venice, California

I was born grew up in the Omaha, Nebraska, United States. I went to university in Chicago (DePaul University) and later did graduate studies in Paris and Strasbourg, France. Afterwards, I moved to China where I spent nearly a decade, including an adventure Living in Qingchengshan in Western Sichuan.

I am fluent in English, French, Chinese, and Spanish.