Matt grew up knee deep in trouble on the foggy shores of the San Francisco Bay and never got tired of asking the three questions that children delight in and parents detest: “why?” “why?” and “why?” The upshot of this patience-bending routine is his abiding interest in how activists, organizations and social movements measure and monitor their progress.

In 2009 he led grassroots communications for 350.org as they coordinated 5,300 climate rallies in 181 countries -- what CNN called, "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history."

These days he directs the Attention Lab at Upwell, where he works to make the ocean more famous on the internet through ‘big listening’ social analytics and distributed network campaigning. The Guardian once called him ‘wickedly funny and evidence-based” but they didn’t know it was him.