Meet the Practitioners Behind Breakout Labs: Gideon

Gideon Fernandez was our first instructor.

I first saw him teach in October 2025 and I remember being impressed.

He has a very story-driven way of teaching. He draws on years of hands-on experience and beautifully weaves those stories into his teaching.

We signed him as a Breakout Labs instructor in December.

Since then, Gideon has taught numerous trainings with us and supported us in many other ways.

I haven’t had the privilege of teaching with him myself, but Marvin Geerken has, so I asked him what it’s like.

The first thing he said:

Always the most prepared person going into a session.

That didn’t surprise me 😄

Because, the one thing I’ve learned about Gideon, it’s that I can count on him. 100%.

We’ve had situations where we were in a tight spot. Things needed to get done, the deadline was looming close, and we were running out of bandwidth.

Guess who’s the first person I call? Gideon! 😄

One good example: This spring, we suddenly had to hand over the development of several eLearning labs mid-project.

We only had a few weeks. Gideon stepped in, took ownership and delivered on time. And that’s pretty much how it always goes.

If Gideon says he’ll do something, I know it will get done. That’s the #1 thing I appreciate about him.

When you’re building a company, having people around you who you can count on, that’s invaluable.

It shows up in smaller things too. In May, we had our first full Breakout Labs get-together in Mallorca, where Gideon lives with his amazing wife Nadia Fernández and their son.

Before we’d even properly started planning the week, Gideon had already booked our dinners. Of course he had 😄

Next week, we meet again in Lisbon, where Gideon is hosting the 2nd edition of his Freelance Data Meetup.

Looking back, we got pretty lucky with our first instructor.

I’m very happy to have you with us, Gideon 🫶

PS. While I’m writing this, Gideon is co-teaching our AI-Native Analytics Engineering course for an Americas class together with our Ana Patrícia Oliveira. Go crush it! 💪