Matt
Condon
hackNY class of 2014
Matt Condon is an alum from the class of 2014. He’s founded or worked on several startups throughout his career, most recently as the CTO of Pleasr. He helped orchestrate the launch of Own the Doge, tokenizing the official Doge NFT, which has donated millions of dollars to charities like Save the Children. He architected and built please.house, a crypto-native streaming platform.
His open-source work on various Ethereum standards and their respective implementations in libraries like OpenZeppelin have secured hundreds of millions of dollars in value for individuals and organizations across the globe.
Matt’s Favorite Projects
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How Many Rocks Are There
Take part in a massive multiplayer mobile experience designed to figure out: How many rocks there are, and where are they?
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asdfghjkl
Introducing asdfghjkl, a revolution in computer-human interface design patterns. One of the biggest inefficiencies in modern desktop computing is moving your hands from the keyboard to the trackpad. So we got rid of that. Yup. Really.
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Proofs of Steak
Decentralized networks are a rare medium well-done. Steak Network is a decentralized social network of Steak enthusiasts built on top of Ethereum. The core feature of the Steak Network is the Steakchain, a set of validated, user-submitted Proofs of Steak.
Origins
Matt was born in Louisiana. In his senior year of high school, he learned to code iOS apps to impress his friends. While that wasn’t exactly the coolest thing at the time, he did impress the team at Grooveshark (RIP), where he interned in 2013 – the summer before college.
On top of attending school freshman year, Matt spent time working remotely for Grooveshark and traveling to hackathons at MIT, Yale, Princeton, and UCLA. He also dabbled in the iOS jailbreak scene, developing modifications for unlocked devices.
hackNY
experience
During the summer of 2014, Matt worked as a hackNY fellow at Magnetic. During the fellowship, he made lifelong friends while living in the NYU Palladium dorms next to Union Square with the rest of his cohort.
HackNY was Matt’s first time visiting New York City. His time in the fellowship helped him fall in love with a city that he would continue returning to for the next decade.
In a summer full of megagames, food tours, late-night coding, and hackathons, one of Matt’s most memorable moments was a private sit-down during the speaker series with cofounder of hackNY, Chris Wiggins, and CEO of Buzzfeed, Jonah Peretti.
Full-Time
Intern
Once Matt realized coding was more fun than school and that people would pay him to do it, he dropped out to become a full-time intern. He started out with an internship at IFTTT that winter before moving to Google NYC and mentoring hackNY fellows during summer 2015.
At the spring and fall hackNY hackathons that year, Matt built the iconic hack Express on Rails, where he strapped an array of IOT sensors onto model trains to simplify full-house data collection. (The server was in Express.js, the model train was on rails.)
Digital Nomad
With internships wrapped up, Matt took the opportunity to start traveling the world as a digital nomad. He visited Panama, Colombia, Argentina, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Germany, Denmark, and Japan, where he biked from Hiroshima to Kyoto with fellow alumNY Jeff Wang h’16.
During this time, he freelanced, working for various startups sourced by word-of-mouth referrals from the hackNY alum community. He also kept working on his side projects.
Return to NYC
After traveling, Matt returned to New York to work at Skillshare in the spring of 2016, moving in with his fellow hackNY class member, Shy Ruparel h’14. He enjoyed hanging out with the alumNY community around town.
This summer also marked the launch of Pokemon Go, a game that took over the streets of New York for a few intense days. Its popularity prompted Matt to build the popular Twitch Plays Pokemon Go.
Over this summer, a contingent of friends from hackNY also traveled to Japan and conducted a Pokemon Red/Blue/Green tournament at the summit of Mt Fuji.
Ethereum Era
In late 2017 after a year in New York, Matt took off for Japan (again), Paris, Hungary, Spain, South Africa, and more. During this time, he became interested in the burgeoning crypto space.
Matt ended up spending a year in San Francisco working on an NFT gallery startup before returning to New York – just in time for the pandemic.
In early 2018, Matt read the Ethereum whitepaper. He went on to learn Solidity, see the rise of NFTs, and make a lot of friends along the way. During this phase, Matt’s most proud of his contributions to OpenZeppelin, a library for secure smart contract development that was the backbone of most smart contracts at the time.
Ethereum logo by Ethereum Foundation, CC BY 4.0
Pleasr
Due to his experience with NFTs, Matt was invited to join Pleasr, a DAO defined by collective ownership in various NFTs and objects including the Doge NFT and the Wu Tang album.
When it became clear that Pleasr needed a technologist to manage the DAO’s treasury and orchestrate its on-chain operations, Matt stepped up and was the organization’s CTO through 2023.
Hiking & Return
to Nature
Currently, Matt is enjoying funemployment and reconnecting with nature.
He spent this summer hiking one thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail.