Hey, my name’s Matt and I love product design
I came to design from a background in tech sales, photography, and computer science.
My Story
Growing up, I always loved the cross between technology and business. In high school, I was an affiliate marketer. I made an army of Instagram bots and promoted a wide-range of offers from MaxBounty.
In college, I went to Virginia Tech and majored in Business Information Technology. I started “Blockchain at Virginia Tech”, which quickly grew to over 370+ members. We traveled and competed in hackathons across the country. Dylan Love, the former head of content at Cointelegraph, found my website and offered me a job. I started writing technical blogs, articles and press releases for crypto companies.
I also worked directly with the Nirat Keswani, CEO of Empiric.io (now Procense.ai). As an account development representative, I built pipeline, improved product messaging and found their first enterprise contract, Tyson Foods.
My career started at Dell. I moved to Austin, TX and worked there for almost 3 years. As an Account Executive, I found, led and closed over $1.2M in new business data center sales (and $3.2M in total). I sold servers, SANs/NAS, APEX Backup Service (SaaS) and APEX as-a-service solutions. I also redesigned an internal VBA/Excel tool to automate emails and calendar invites, all in an intuitive user interface that encouraged my teammate’s to use it. On average, it saved each team 10+ hours each week.
Lastly, I decided to pursue my masters in computer science online at Virginia Tech. My dad’s a disabled veteran (and an amazing dad), which means I had college benefits but they expired when I turned 27. So, I decided to part ways with Dell and focus on learning my craft. I also had a calling to live in LA. That’s also where I learned about background acting. If you don’t know, most of the time spent doing background is in “holding”, where you can do whatever you want. So, I would take my laptop, practice coding and work in the film industry. This led to me growing on TikTok, working as a photographer and eventually getting signed as a commercial actor with the TheOptionAgency.com.
Why I Love Design
During my masters, my favorite classes were UI Design, AI Prompt Engineering and Project Management (Jira). I love seeing how users interact with UIs, engineering design systems for agents and coming up with new features. It also tied in with my experience in sales, like listening to customers, managing stakeholders and driving the bottom-line.