About
Matt’s an award-winning strategist & creative technologist who built the brands of global companies in social media. Now he leads Brava, a creative collective of amazing people.
He’s a husband, father of two, and uncle of two more. He lives in New York and knows JFK Airport all too well.
As seen in
Offline
What I like to read, write, watch, and think about.
Favorite books
Setting the Table
Danny Meyer
Kitchen Confidential
Anthony Bourdain
The Medici
Paul Strathern
Leonardo da Vinci
Walter Isaacson
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Neil Postman
The Attention Merchants
Tim Wu
Likes and dislikes
Like
Christmas villages
Jacob Collier
Prince’s Hall of Fame Guitar Solo
Third Eye Blind
Phoenix the Band
The Burger at Emily
Jamón Ibérico
College Basketball
Hospitality as a practice
Open APIs
Open Source
The Indie Web
WordPress
Blogging
The West Wing’s “Two Cathedrals”
Dislike
SEO Recipe Blogs
Walled Gardens
Drip Coffee
Corporate Jargon
Enshittification
Overthinking
Influencers who don’t convert
Online
Philosophy on what I believe about AI, social, the open web, and the future of work.
On AI
I beta test AI platforms and LLMs, run open source models locally, and build custom agents that automate what should be faster in our day-to-day lives.
I loved the idea of Aaron Swartz’s dream being realized by this technology. But we’re on shaky ground with product leaders trading its long-term potential for short-term balance sheets.
Claude Max
Primary orchestration layer to manage my and Brava automations and agents. The daily driver and planner. Claude Code + Cloudflare are running daily testing across all my personal and business apps.
ChatGPT
Purely used as a research partner. Sam Altman not being a real developer puts them at a disadvantage out of the gate. Until GPT Sol it was a third place finisher.
Gemini
I’m an early tester on every model release in Google AI studio. Bullish on agents as the real potential of AI. More exciting than the models themselves are the harnesses and consumer tools being built around it.
Gemma 4 12b
Running Gemma fully on-device. Lightweight, private, and handles 50% of my personal use cases and tools without a problem.
Flux
Personal concepting only. The legal risks of dirty training data in market are massive.
ElevenLabs Studio
Creative workflow development. I’m not high on the quality of generative AI, but this is great for comps that need to show an integration across models.
On Social
Audience-first. A brand’s role is to provide entertainment or utility, not to be another broadcast channel. Reply authentically instead of being unhinged.
It’s why brands I’ve worked with earn outsized loyalty instead of quick hits.
TikTok
Well ahead of every social network except Reddit. I lurk. Send me all your NYCTok.
Threads
My favorite at the moment. Proud member of the OG Tech Threads gang.
Instagram
A falling star but where I share memes and kids.
Bluesky
Had the most potential and the best interoperability but man did they squander that lead. I’m barely using it now.
Mastodon
Indie web and artists. Once a day.
LinkedIn
I syndicate what’s on here 24 hours later. Linkedin’s best days are long behind it.
On Tech & Open Source
I’m one of the last few tech minds left in advertising. The summer before high school, Sierra Online emailed to ask if I’d moderate their community. Hard to commit when you can’t drive yet.
I love the unrealized promise of Web 2.0, and the networks I use most are finally moving toward it.
Apple Notes
Writing. Sincere apologies to Notion, Bear, Obsidian, Evernote, and Google Docs. Simplicity won out.
WordPress + GreenShift
Publishing and page design. A capable amateur, with major emphasis on amateur.
What I Build
There are only a handful of creative technologists who move beyond the prototype to production. Here are mine: currently in use by some of the most competitive companies in the world.
Software
What I’ve built.
Nab
One drag. No menu, no dialog, no right-click. The image is just in your Downloads folder.
Feedly Article Highlighter
Set your keywords once. The noise disappears from Feedly for good.
Brave Goggles
A custom search filter for Brave that reranks results and removes outlets that don’t do the work.
Slop Filter for LinkedIn
Vaporizes AI and thought-leader slop in your feed and shows you the exact phrase that removed it. Never circle back again.
Agents
Built for Brava clients and running in production.
Campaign Consultant
Reads a campaign’s budget, trafficking, and ROI structure and returns clean insights. Developed to work with Slack and Lark.
Brand Guidelines Agent
Checks any static creative against a 140-page brand guide and gives feedback.
Brief Development Agent
Speeds up the manual review between brief and creative.
Automations
Running in production for Brava clients and in my own work.
Flight by Brava
Best-in-class agentic banner ad development. Ingest a Figma design or provide a reference. Receive approved static and video assets in seconds.
Wrangler by Brava
Drop the names of hundreds of your event attendees. The titles and emails you missed are enriched in seconds.
Handoff
Turns Figma designs into UX assets at scale, deployed to Contentful for multivariate testing.
Darkroom
Photos are treated with your house style, dated, paired, and search-optimized without touching a file.
Ranked SEO backlog
Every SEO task scored by estimated dollar value, so the next one is always the biggest.
Social Crisis Response
Paste any post and get a sentiment score and a severity tier.
AI weekly brief
RSS feeds and newsletters ranked down to the week’s few stories that matter.
Invoice to CRM
When an invoice is paid, the client’s CRM record gets a note with the link.
Theme deploys
One command validates, snapshots, diffs, ships, and purges the cache for a WordPress theme.
Need one of these, or something custom?
Brava builds agents and automations around the way your team already works.
What I don’t use
Twitter, Snap, Facebook, Blind (and anything like it). If you get a message from “me” there, it’s a bot after your password. Block and report.
Clients I’ve worked with
Say hello
Contact
Threads
Bluesky
Mastodon
GitHub