At 12, Matt built his first super computer - it was larger than the refrigerator in his parent’s house and could only be turned on during the weekends because it would turn off all electricity to the house if loaded it up too high with data collecting jobs. This was before the days of Hadoop, and it was built using Perl, the 50+ motherboard/CPUs his mother had bought from auctions for him, and a server rack from a data center going out of business.
At 19, he started his first official company. Over the course of the next several years he would advise some of the largest software and internet companies in the world on engineering, work on the Human Genome Project to unlock the mysteries of the human DNA, build an internet casino for a publicly-traded company on the NASDAQ Stock Market, and deploy several data centers.
At 24, he started his second company, Sometrics, to monetize the social web, along with his two partners.
In 2008, Sometrics was backed by the Mail Room Fund (William Morris Agency, Accel, Venrock, AT&T) and the company started to rapidly expand. Growth numbers blew far past the competition in the online advertising space. Impressions were in the billions per month.
In 2009, Sometrics raised a second round of funding from Steamboat Ventures (an affiliate of the Walt Disney Company) and actively moved into the online gaming market. Company numbers for 2009 were absolutely stunning: Sometrics amassed an online network of 100 million gamers in 228 countries for a total of 1 trillion virtual currency credits. That’s a lot of people :)
