Hey, I’m Matt. I'm currently on the Leverage Engineering team at OpenAI, working on scaling the company by using our models (we're hiring!). Before this, I co-founded a company called Formfunction, a Solana NFT marketplace made for 1/1 art and independent creators. Previously, I was at Meta. My last team was in an org called NPE (New Product Experimentation). I worked with a small team building zero to one products. Before that, I worked on designing and implementing an IPC protocol for AR/VR devices. Although I prefer working on products—something I only really realized after doing systems software for a year—it was fun to work so close to the hardware. In addition to picking up cool new acronyms like "MCU" and "SoC," I learned a lot about C++, TCP, FlatBuffers, and how painful it is to stand up a Bluetooth stack. My first team at Meta was content integrity, where I built tooling and infrastructure for the thousands of content moderators Meta has around the world. My projects included building a system that maps decisions to actions (which is a lot more complicated than it sounds) and making content moderation a less harrowing experience. If you want to learn more about the ins and outs of content moderation, I recommend the Post No Evil podcast by RadioLab.

I graduated from Caltech in 2017, where I majored in Computer Science and minored in English. Most of my computer science sets are still on GitHub, although they’re mostly just gibberish to me now. At least I can rest assured that I used to be able to write proofs. In 2016 I won Caltech’s poetry award with a poem called "Encounter", which means that English minor was definitely worth it.

I’ve suffered two concussions in my life, both while playing basketball—one as a high school senior and one as a college freshman. Perhaps my proudest achievement is just getting through college while dealing with post-concussion syndrome. Over the years I tried a lot of medications—Topiramate (the most effective for me), Verapamil, Amitriptyline, Innopran, Indomethacin, etc. I also went to quite a few different doctors—multiple neurologists, multiple chiropractors, an acupuncturist, and multiple physical therapists. Seeing a neurologic physical therapist at Stanford in 2018 helped me finally overcome my symptoms. If you’re suffering, or have ever suffered, from brain problems, I highly recommend a book called The Brain that Changes Itself. It gave me hope when it seemed like things would never improve—brain plasticity is an amazing thing.

In my spare time, I like to make stuff. I’ve tabled at LA Zine Fest and SF Zine Fest—here are a couple of the t-shirts we made for LAZF (yup, we made a t-shirt with the Vim icon on it). I’ve also made a few songs, some of which are on Soundcloud. I use Ableton Live, in case you’re curious. Occasionally I write things; my Medium has more technical content, and I try to write a daily haiku and TIL on my personal blog. Some of my other hobbies are bouldering, playing tennis, foraging for mushrooms, and playing games on my Nintendo Switch and Oculus Quest (Echo VR is awesome). I also read a lot—some of my favorite books are listed down below.