Alumni News

New Yorker Tech Issue Features 'Digital Rockstar' Nanis '12

Computer programmer Max Nanis '12 was at the center of a New Yorker Tech article about a cast of "digital rock stars" who are in such high demand that a talent agency was formed to represent them.

The San Francisco-based agency, 10x, claims to represent the top developers in the world, or "digital rockstars"—Nanis among them—who are capable of achieving "ten times the productivity" of the average programmer. 

The company was formed by music and entertainment managers Michael Solomon and Rishon Blumberg, whose client list has included actual rock stars, including John Mayer and Vanessa Carlton.

When a tech entrepreneur approached Soloman looking for a talented programmer with a mastery of several different coding languages—Python, Django, Angular, JavaScript, the Twitter A.P.I.—he immediately recommended Nanis. 

"Max does everything," a fellow 10x programmer said. 

Nanis, who has a day job in the Scripps Institute’s molecular-and-experimental-medicine department, where he confronts biological problems using computers, said he likes to work on “anything that’s really hard."

"I prefer it if somebody comes to us and says, ‘Two people have failed at this. Can you get a minimal viable product functional?’ 

Read the entire New Yorker piece

Explore a sample of Nanis' work.