Matt O'Brien
I'm the co-founder and co-CEO of System 3, the company behind Relay — local-first software that lets your team and your AI work together in the same files, without giving up ownership or privacy.
Before this, I spent a decade building products in San Francisco — AI at Meta, mindfulness at Lumosity, and digital therapeutics at Big Health — after starting out building software companies of my own.
I studied philosophy at the University of Chicago and depth psychotherapy at Pacifica in Santa Barbara. I see a small number of therapy clients.
Writing
The world Unix made
Unix is the nearest common ancestor of modern computing. Its bet: text as the universal interface.
AI is a universal GUI to programmatic tools
Non-developers can chat with AI, and AI can use any programmatic tool — so non-developers can access the developer stack.
The cost of learning to program is no longer front-loaded
Learning to program used to demand a big upfront investment before any payoff. Language models changed the shape of the curve.
We don't charge for privacy
The difference between “we promise not to look” and “we can't look” shouldn't cost extra. Sovereignty isn't ours to sell.