Matt Mankins

Lorem Labs · open source, MPL-2.0

Thanks, Computer 2024–

An agent runtime built on the idea that the hard part is not the model, it is everything around it: durability, evidence, and being able to say what happened.

Agent runtime

Small operations — JSON in, JSON out, any language — compose into op stacks dispatched by trigger conditions that route work across models, tools, and services. An alternative to LangGraph with durability and human review as first-class concerns.

Exactly-once durable execution

Continuations suspend a run for a slow model, a webhook, or a human reviewer and resume days later — exactly once, surviving restarts. Idempotency is the contract, not a retry policy bolted on afterward.

Root cause analysis as a first-class surface

Step-by-step replay of every decision, so a run that did something surprising three days ago can be walked forward rather than guessed at.

Cost and reliability instrumentation

Token and cost accounting with explicit model provenance — requested, effective, response — presence-gated so an absent value never reads as zero, O(1) memory over unbounded streams, non-fatal by construction.

Developer productivity as the default

A CLI and TUI, a Homebrew tap the release workflow bumps automatically and gates on non-prerelease tags, a four-platform GitHub Actions matrix on native runners, GHCR plus a self-hosted OCI registry.

Speaks protocols that already exist

Email/SMTP, HTTP, MCP, and cron as first-class ingress. An Anthropic Messages gateway means an existing client points at the runtime unchanged and picks up policy, retrieval grounding, and cost accounting on the way through.

thanks.computerDocs

Lorem Labs · reference application

Dripl.it 2026–

Serialized reading delivered by email. Email is the interface.

Retrieval you can defend

Intent parse → title/author lookup → embed → vector search under a relevance floor → catalog recognition → grounded reply. The model handles intent and prose; the database stays the source of truth, so recommendations cannot be hallucinated into existence.

Open Library shadow catalog

3.1M popularity-ranked works distilled from ~30M, shipped as read-only sharded SQLite and queried locally, so naming a book the system does not carry never touches an external API on the request path.

One good question

A conversational loop with accruing turn state that asks a single clarifying question rather than guessing.

dripl.it

Lorem Labs · Mac App Store

ClipRoom 2025

Video into a searchable, AI-indexed clip library. Everything runs on-device — no service dependency, no upload.

Shot-level multimodal index

Shot boundary detection, then quantized SigLIP vision and text encoders on ONNX Runtime embedding frames and queries into one space, so clips are findable by description rather than filename.

Speech

whisper.cpp ASR with model tiers resolved and fetched from Hugging Face at first use and cached locally; pyannote diarization; word-level timestamps driving caption rendering.

Progressive capability unlock

Processing starts immediately while optional models install in parallel. No setup wizard, no configure-then-wait. Tauri (Rust) with a native Swift helper, built against Mac App Store sandbox constraints.

Mac App Store

Creator payments

In a Moon 2022–

A creator-payment platform built end to end — ledger, apps, extensions, embeddable widgets, edge, and search.

Web components

<inamoon-like> and <inamoon-creator> let any site collect appreciation for named creators without adopting a platform.

Mac and iOS application

Native apps wrapping a Safari Web Extension from one shared Swift codebase: ASWebAuthenticationSession with PKCE, Keychain-backed session envelopes shared to the extension via App Groups, QR-code pairing, and fastlane release automation.

Cross-browser extensions

Manifest V3 across Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, recognizing people and projects on the web and awarding kudos.

Settlement

A double-entry point ledger on TigerBeetle — escrow funding, chunked fanout, idempotent per recipient. BigQuery materializes an immutable per-period snapshot; reconciliation must clear tolerance thresholds before a period is allowed to settle.

inamoon.com

Trained and served in-browser

Emoji-Print 2024

A learned embedding space that maps a page to emoji, trained and run entirely in the browser.

An embedding, not labels

A TensorFlow.js model maps page signals into a latent emoji space via an MLP backbone plus an emoji-prototype head — chosen over flat classification for expressive consistency.

No train/serve skew

The runtime featurizer is reused inside the trainer, so the features at training time are the features at inference time. Offline inference in an MV3 extension worker, p95 under 20ms after warmup.

Director of Engineering, Monetization

Condé Nast 2017–2020

Led the division’s largest engineering group — consumer revenue, martech, ecommerce, and ads — across every Condé Nast property. Seven engineering manager reports.

Ads library and TTFM

Rebuilt the ad library around time-to-first-money, a metric I introduced to align engineering and revenue. Viewability and impression instrumentation over Google Ad Manager, with first-money slot metrics that distinguish paid inventory from everything else.

Event platform

The event tier behind every property — browser beacons into Kafka, enriched server-side, acks=all against a 15ms batching window, a firehose topic plus per-application topics so each consumer sets its own retention, indexed to Elasticsearch under a content-hash document id so a replayed event lands once.

Segmentation

A signal service inside the ad request path: parallel fan-out to pluggable segmenters under a 500ms timeout, failing open rather than delaying the ad call, with hash-bucketed rollout per user. Behavioral, entitlement, and modeled lookalike audiences.

Paywall

A database-less edge paywall supporting dramatic revenue growth at no latency cost (JWT, VCL).

The part that lasted

Managers I hired and grew have since gone on to Apple, Amazon, and Google.

Executive Director

XRP Ledger Foundation 2025

Created the foundation in France to hold the IP for the XRP Ledger, and built the mechanism by which validators join an $83B chain.

Unique Node List

Architected and implemented the list responsible for consensus — how validator nodes are admitted to the network.

Governance to production

Validator changes arrive as pull requests against a YAML source requiring three approvals. On merge, CI compiles YAML to JSON, cryptographically signs it, and publishes a timestamped artifact plus a staged list that a monthly cron promotes to the live endpoint. Multi-party approval and a staging window, applied to an artifact that cannot be wrong.

No direct authority

Aligned independent validator operators across organizations, none of whom reported to anyone. Also coordinated NPM vulnerability response across several organizations.

xrplf/unl

Research Fellow, Mozilla

Business Models for the Web 2021–2022

A fellowship on how the open web pays for itself after third-party cookies.

Accept-Monetization header

Worked with the W3C on a content-negotiation header letting a browser state how it is willing to pay for a page — advertising, subscription, or micropayment — before the page is built.

Kudos retroactive-reward algorithm

An open algorithm for retroactively rewarding the people who helped you: attribution treated as an incentive-design problem rather than a tracking one.

Privacy-preserving advertising

Prototyped in-Firefox advertising that does not depend on third-party identity.

COO / VP Engineering

dMetrics · Minsky 2016

An early AI/NLP startup with a team of PhDs. I named and shipped its product, Minsky — after Marvin.

ML training and serving infrastructure

Designed the production pipeline that trained and served adaptive-learning NLP models — offline training runs and the online path both (Apache Spark, Java, AWS microservices).

Research to production

Led the ML/NLP researchers, and built the interfaces that made model output legible to the ad agencies and pharmaceutical companies who bought it. Taking research into production is a translation problem as much as an engineering one.

minsky.ai

CTO

Fast Company 2011–2014

Grew engineering from one person to a full UX, frontend, backend, and infrastructure team, and moved the magazine to the cloud.

Event-driven rendering

A microservice rendering layer keeping multiple CMSes aligned in production (ZeroMQ, Node.js). The same architecture Thanks, Computer is built on, a decade later.

Cloud migration

Moved the data center to EC2, cutting infrastructure cost about 25% while absorbing millions of monthly readers and several production releases a day.

NLP auto-linking

Machine learning over editorial copy for navigation, SEO, and ad context — text-based algorithms to engage readers by interest. ML that showed up in revenue.

diginomica interview, 2014

Developer rewards infrastructure

Semicolons.com 2022–2026

Paying the people whose open-source work everything else is built on.

Firehose and analysis

A GitHub firehose ingester recording realtime commit data (Node, Redis, BigQuery, Ably), plus a GitHub Action analyzing repository contributors via SBOM analysis (Go, Docker, Bash).

Keys and money

MPC key-generation ceremonies using Go threshold signatures; addresses served from a custom DNS server over BIP-32 HD wallets; a FinCEN-compliant money-transfer architecture with built-in KYC.

Producer · and built the platform

The Faithful 1999-2021

A feature documentary by Annie Berman, and the streaming and virtual-cinema platform that released it through its festival run.

Title launch, end to end

Scheduled screenings and ticketing, Stripe checkout, entitlement-gated playback (HLS through Mux, SMPTE timecode), a virtual theatre with live chat, and an admin surface.

Built to run itself

SvelteKit on Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, and Firebase Hosting, with secrets resolved per environment from Secret Manager and a pub/sub video processing pipeline.

the-faithful.com

Fair Tread · Adieu.io · Atri

Buy your own ads 2014–2016

“What if you could buy your own ads, and show things you want to see instead of things you don’t?”

Real-time bidding, consumer side

An interface to AppNexus letting people bid on their own ad inventory through real-time bidding.

Developer

Journalism Online 2010–2011

The first production metered paywall for newspapers.

One tag

A single JavaScript drop-in rendered a metered paywall modal against a Cassandra backend — no integration project required of the publisher.

Owner · Cambridge, Massachusetts

Lorem Ipsum Books 2003–2011

Converted a derelict bicycle shop into a bricks-and-clicks bookstore whose shelves were simultaneously listed on Amazon.

Point of sale, from scratch

A custom web-based POS integrating online marketplaces and local peripherals (XMPP, Perl, MySQL), with Google Shopping integration and custom credit-card flows.

Founder, Director of Internet

Vert 2000–2002

Location-based advertising on taxi-top digital signage. VC-backed.

An ad server and a Linux distribution

Built the ad server, and a custom Linux distribution that displayed advertisements on top of taxis using GPS and cellular modems. Several US and international patents for the general architecture.

Founder · sold 2001

EMUmail · SMTP.com 1998–2001

The first white-label webmail service. If you had a dot com and needed webmail, you came to us. The company went public.

Webmail before webmail

Open-sourced “Webex” in 1995, probably the first webmail in the US. Clients included Intel, UPS, Rackspace, and Harvard.

A custom SMTP server

With digital signature support, in Perl, when that was an unusual idea.

Education

MIT Media Lab · University of Miami 1996 · 2003

MIT Media Lab

M.S., Media Arts & Sciences. Split between the Smart Cities and Context Aware Computing groups, building a bottom-up architecture for location-linked information. Readers: Bill Mitchell and Tim Berners-Lee.

University of Miami

B.S., Mathematics and Computer Science.

Monetized.Link

Web2 / Web3 bridge for creators 2022

Sell content via links

Firebase backend and SvelteKit UI; an image service generating social PNGs on Canvas; multi-modal purchase flows including tokens (Solidity, Unlock Protocol, The Graph).