My Story

🪄 where it all began...

It all started with building side projects.

I wrote my first line of code in high school, explored basic full-stack & IOS development, participated in hackathons, and secured a handful of SWE internships. Little did I know that this journey would lead me to the realm of startups.

Early on, I learned a crucial lesson – the act of consistently building projects leads to unparalleled avenues of opportunity.

This philosophy paved the way for individuals to believe in my early potential. From being the inaugural engineer/growth lead at Virtually during Y Combinator's 2020 cohort, to becoming the youngest engineer at a Techstars-backed startup.

Amid my exploration in tech, I somehow stumbled into the world of crypto. First as an investor, and then eventually as a builder. With the rise of the web3 social token space, I built Agora Labs — a platform that pioneered the way for creators to connect their tokens and choose specific rewards and perks for their supporters.

Within weeks of launching, we reached a market cap of over $500K USD. We later raised hundreds of thousands from investors including the DeSo Octane Fund, ZFellows, Envision Accelerator, and Harmony Protocol amongst others. Almost exactly a year later, on October 2022, Agora Labs was acquired by Talent Protocol in which I lead the charge there on tokenomics as we geared up for the public launch of $TAL.

Through this journey, I found a sense of belonging by immersing myself in various tech communities where I met some of my current closest friends. Prominent among these communities were Buildergroop, 1517, Socratica, Safary Club, and Inner Circle.

As of recently, I spent 10-weeks in NYC, being 1 of the 13 hackers selected as part of the hackNY fellowship. Now, back in Toronto, I'm gearing up to wrap up my final two semesters of university before I return to the US to embark full-time on my next venture.

You can find me at @mattespoz on the rest of the internet.