Brian Marks

Brian Marks is a North Carolina–based educational-technology entrepreneur and engineering leader. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University (1992–1997) and began building open-source web applications for teachers and students in 1999, starting as an applications programmer at NC State working on the WebAssign project in the Physics Department.

Marks is best known as the co-founder and founding CTO of WebAssign, the Raleigh-based online homework and assessment platform. He grew and led the technology team and, as an influential member of the executive team, helped bootstrap the company to more than 170 employees, over one million users, and roughly $30M in annual revenue — a widely cited EdTech success story in the Triangle region.

After WebAssign, Marks co-founded CourseFork — later rebranded as Trinket (trinket.io) — alongside CEO Elliott Hauser. Pitched as "GitHub for education," the company is an open teaching platform and in-browser coding tool that lets educators create, share, fork, and teach courses and run code (Python, HTML, and more) directly in the browser. CourseFork went through The Startup Factory accelerator (Fall 2013 cohort) in Durham. At Trinket, Marks focuses on DevOps, customer development, scalability, and operations.

More recently, Marks has served as CTO of CustomerIQ, a Chapel Hill, NC–based company, and earlier held roles including Director of Software Engineering at The St. James, CTO of WAAM, senior full-stack developer at Diveplane, and advisor at Lea(R)n. He is active as a startup mentor in the Raleigh/Durham community and has served on the board of the Wade Edwards Foundation & Learning Lab (WELL). Outside work he enjoys travel, hiking, and building LEGO projects with his children.

• Stage: Seed-stage angel investing, writing personal checks rather than deploying an institutional fund.
• Sector: Education technology — consistent with his entire operating career (WebAssign, CourseFork/Trinket). He describes himself as "an ed tech angel investor."
• What resonates with him: A deep, repeatedly stated conviction that openness and freedom are critical to effective teaching and learning; he has built open-source tools for educators since 1999. Founders building open, scalable platforms for teachers and students align with his worldview.
• Operator's lens: With direct experience scaling a company from zero to ~$30M ARR, 170+ employees, and 1M+ users, he evaluates teams through the practical lens of scalability, DevOps, and customer development.
• Geography: Naturally connected to the Research Triangle / Raleigh–Durham startup ecosystem, though his EdTech investments span beyond NC.