By Paul Snatchko
When Matt Casey moved to New York City in 2005, he wasn’t planning on a career in the technology sector.
The chief technology officer and co-founder of x.ai, Matt grew up in San Antonio and Dallas, Texas. He came to New York to study art, which he did at Pratt and School of Visual Arts, graduating from SVA in 2009 having concentrated on drawing, sculpture and ceramic sculpture.
“But I knew it was going to be a challenge to make a living at that,” he remembered. “So I sort of taught myself how to build websites.”
Matt landed web development contract work for startups, often creating simple landing pages using Drupal and WordPress. “It was important for me to build a usable interface for people. And, I began to see that art was falling out of the national dialogue – certainly not like technology is today,” he said.
After several years of running his own freelance business, Matt became a full stack engineer for Visual Revenue (VR), a predictive analytics firm. When VR was acquired by the content delivery platform Outbrain in 2013, he became a front end team lead for that firm. It was at VR that Matt came to know Dennis Mortensen and Alex Poon. Together with Marcos Jimenez Belenguer, they founded x.ai in April, 2014.
“It’s crazy how far we’ve come,” Matt says of x.ai, a personal assistant that schedules meetings using artificial intelligence technology. The personal assistant’s name is Amy Ingram. Currently in closed Beta for quality assurance, x.ai is working to fully launch by the end of summer.
Amy is successful, Matt believes, because she is focused on one task. “By reducing the expectation to just scheduling meetings, we feel we can achieve success 100 percent of the time. She’s really good at that.”
He adds, “Our main goal was to reduce the amount of emails in your inbox. So, I feel like we’re helping a lot of people. We are helping machines make life easier so people can do more interesting things.”
Except when the temperatures dip very low, Matt bicycles each day from his home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to 48 Wall St. It’s an easy commute, he says, across the Williamsburg bridge and south on the highway to the Financial District.
Matt said he appreciates Joynture’s inviting open spaces, large kitchen and social activities with other members. “I like that there are other companies at Joynture trying to solve problems in interesting ways. There is good camaraderie here,” he said.
When he’s not working, Matt said you might find him at MoMA PS1 or the New Museum or enjoying a beer at Nita Nita in Williamsburg. The Texan notes that he has found good barbecue in Gotham – at Fette Sau, also in Williamsburg. “It’s simple but barbecue should be simple,” he said. “Although, I do miss good hot sauce here.”