My name is Erik Trautman and I’m a challenge-addicted entrepreneur trying to build a just and sustainable future for our children and the planet we inhabit while living meaningfully and well.

Thus far, the path has been anything but linear.

I studied mechanical engineering at Penn while participating in the early days of online poker, two things which combined to get me through the back door to Wall Street. I spent half a decade building analytics infrastructure and trading on energy commodities desks from New York to Houston before shifting gears to build communities and startups.

In 2013 I started The Odin Project, an open-source web development community that grew to over 100,000 members. In 2014 I founded Viking Education, the first fully online software engineering program where students didn’t have to pay until they got a job. Both were acquired in 2017.

I met Illia and Alex in 2018 and we joined forces with a group of world champion competitive programmers to build a smart contract platform called the NEAR Protocol and bring new primitives to the consumer web. In 2020, NEAR achieved its genesis and became one of the only full-featured smart contract platforms to attain decentralization.

In 2024, I fell down the metacrisis rabbit hole and am now actively exploring how to use systems thinking to tease apart the layer cake of challenges that afflict our world so we can build clearer paths towards impactful solutions.  That means being a guiding light to catalyze and unlock innovators to meaningfully tackle those challenges through a multi-pronged combination of education, community-building, capital deployment, advisory and operation.

Engineering and innovation form the sea in which I swim but creativity is the air I breathe. I’m the wrangler of Hank the Bus, Austin’s first rolling vintage music platform (in the body of a 1970 split window VW bus) and doing my best to become a musician along the way.   I have a (mostly) healthy obsession with old British lightships and weird experiential art. I also build stuff in meatspace and sometimes set it on fire.

Deeply community oriented, my core tribe is at the intersection of artists and entrepreneurs, big thinkers and get-shit-done builders, the globally engaged and locally rooted. Burning Man has been an experiential and personal anchor for more than a decade and catalyzed the creation of a coliving house in San Francisco which continues with its third generation of inhabitants today.

Chronically unable to sit still, I’ve ridden through each of the lower 48 states on a motorcycle, most during one epic trip in 2012, and have traveled Europe, India, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand in the saddle. I ran my first triathlon in 2016 and completed an Ironman a year later in Santa Rosa, California. The foolish urge to prove something by doing it again resurfaces every 5 years or so.

I’ve experienced the delicious variety of the digital nomad life and lived in a dozen different places but the song of my heart has brought me back to Austin TX, where I’m happily rooted today.

I can typically be found exploring new mountains or wiggling to whatever’s playing in my head.

Come along for the ride.