Fouad Matin

In “mental freefall,” an essay published on his personal website on June 16, 2023, he recalled attending middle school at a public school in VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry. His first day of middle school began on a warm Monday morning in September; in the algebra classroom the teacher explained “You're not the center of the universe, you're just a part of it,” then outlined an unsolved math problem simplified so that they could understand it and said “You will be given problems that no one knows the answer to.” He writes that he realized that day he had never considered what the rest of the day would be like for everyone else in his class, having perceived life only through a first-person lens until then; each morning for the next three days he would wake up and change his mind about at least 10 things before breakfast, and on Thursday he woke up feeling calm.⁠[1]

He calls this disorienting state “mental freefall” and argues that it is actually a good thing: confronting one's deepest-held beliefs can be painful, but it is a process of discovery and the way people grow. He writes that years later, when he was talking with a friend about moments when their thinking had perceptibly shifted, she recalled watching fireworks on July 4th with her family and friends as a child, realized that people had been orchestrating the show behind the scenes all those years, and said “I want to be the person launching the fireworks.” He divides the process into three stages: an initial shock like a wave crashing into you, a stage of exploration, and finally “the doubtful serenity as we wash ashore.”⁠[1]

On June 5, 2014, he was selected as one of that year’s 20 Thiel Fellows, each of whom received $100,000 over two years but had to drop out of college and was encouraged, though not required, to move to the San Francisco area. The list of fellows gives him as 18 and from McLean, Virginia, and says that he was building software to make learning faster.⁠[2]

A BuzzFeed News article on VotePlz also notes that he and Ari WeinsteinAri WeinsteinAri Weinstein is a software developer and entrepreneur who co-founded Workflow, an iOS automation app that Apple acquired in 2017 and that became Apple’s Shortcuts. Selected as a Thiel Fellow in 2014, he founded Software Applications Incorporated, maker of the Mac AI assistant Sky, with Conrad Kramer and Kim Beverett in 2023; OpenAI acquired the company in 2025.Open the full entry were both recipients of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry.⁠[3]

On his personal website he writes that he was co-founder and CEO of StrongIntro from December 2014 to August 2016, a company “Connecting talent to opportunities in their network.”⁠[4]

Y Combinator’s startup directory lists StrongIntro as a company of its Winter 2016 batch, based in San Francisco, with a team of two and an inactive status, and names him as its founder; it describes StrongIntro as a recruiting tool and service that helps recruiters turn their entire company into a source by tapping employees’ networks, combining software with a human-centric approach.⁠[5]

On his personal website he writes that he was a co-founder of VotePlz from August to November 2016, “Helping one million people vote.”⁠[4]

An article by Nitasha Tiku in BuzzFeed News describes VotePlz as a nonpartisan nonprofit founded by four co-founders from the tech industry, he, Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry, Erika Reinhardt and Ari Weinstein, who wanted to approach voter registration like a startup and make the process easier for young voters. VotePlz offered online checks of registration status, online registration in states that allowed it, and free mailing of registration forms with a stamped envelope, which cost VotePlz about $1.20 per person.⁠[3]

The article states that Sam Altman and Erika Reinhardt were directors of VotePlz and that the organization was funded with money Sam Altman raised from unnamed tech industry insiders, an amount he put at “low single digit millions”; it had about six full-time employees and a handful of part-timers.⁠[3]

The article also states that he left Segment after his first week there to join VotePlz, and that he was working on a leaderboard to gamify urging friends to register to vote. On his own website he lists his time at Segment as November 2016 to November 2017.⁠[3][4]

Fortune wrote on October 24, 2016, that VotePlz, co-founded by Sam Altman, had registered more than 75,000 voters and helped 200,000 voters check their registration status.⁠[6]

A Twilio blog post of November 4, 2016, describes VotePlz as giving people information on where and when they can vote: users entered their address to find out where they could vote early or on Election Day, and could have the information sent to their phones by Twilio SMS, courtesy of Twilio.org.⁠[7]

On October 31, 2016, he published “Help Your Users Vote” in VotePlz’s Medium publication, signing off with the VotePlz team and asking tech companies to promote VotePlz’s early-voting tool, polling-place finder and “See your ballot” tool: to send early-voting push notifications in key states, add calls to action to find a polling place, and send Election Day reminders; the post includes an example banner with its HTML/CSS. He writes that it was personally his first presidential election, as it was for millions of young Americans, and that he wanted to make voting seem as easy as calling an UberUberUber is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco, United States, whose legal name is Uber Technologies, Inc. Co-founded by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, it uses digital platforms to connect riders with drivers, delivery consumers with merchants, and shippers with carriers, with main businesses in Mobility, Delivery, and Freight. Dara Khosrowshahi has been chief executive officer since 2017.Open the full entry.⁠[8]

The figures in the post include: more than 20 million registered voters did not vote in 2012; 28% of Americans skip voting because they are “too busy”; with less than a week until Election Day, more than 22 million Americans had already voted; and early voting was available in more than 30 states.⁠[8]

On his personal website he writes that he was an engineer at Segment from November 2016 to November 2017, “Designing more informed product experiences.” Twilio’s website describes Twilio Segment as a customer data platform that collects, unifies and enriches customer data across apps and devices, creates unified profiles, and sends first-party data to the data warehouse or more than 550 destinations.⁠[4][9]

On his personal website he writes that he was co-founder and CEO of Indent from March 2018 to May 2024, “Building the future of security.” AI Engineer’s speaker page describes Indent as an enterprise access-control company and him as its co-founder and former chief executive.⁠[4][10]

In a post on Indent’s blog signed by him and Dan Gillespie, “Indent raises $5.6m for on-demand access control,” the company announced, after three years of research and development, a $5.6 million seed round led by Shardul Shah of Index VenturesIndex VenturesIndex Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in Geneva in 1996. It invests from seed through growth and operates across London, San Francisco and New York, supporting technology companies through a transatlantic network.Open the full entry, Lookout CTO Kevin Mahaffey and Swift Ventures, with participation from Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dylan FieldDylan FieldDylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma and an angel investor. He studied computer science and mathematics at Brown University, explored browser-based design tools with Evan Wallace, and founded Figma in 2012 with support from the Thiel Fellowship. His personal history also includes collecting digital art and investing in companies such as Mercury and Socket.Open the full entry (Figma), former Facebook CSO Alex StamosAlex StamosAlex Stamos is an American cybersecurity expert who served as chief information security officer of Yahoo, chief security officer of Facebook and founding director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, and has been chief information security officer of SentinelOne since 2024.Open the full entry, former GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry CSO Gerhard Eschelbeck, Olivier Pomel, Datadog’s Alexis Lê-Quôc and Amit Agarwal, April Underwood (Nearby, formerly of Slack), Jack AltmanJack AltmanJack Altman is a general partner at Benchmark and a member of its management company, and the co-founder and executive chairman of Lattice.Open the full entry, Eric Koslow and J Zac Stein of Lattice, Cristina Cordova (formerly of Notion and Stripe), Andrew Peterson and Zane Lacky of Signal Sciences, Maya Kaczorowski of Tailscale and others.⁠[11]

The post describes Indent as a service that automates and routes access approvals across a team: employees request access through Indent’s apps, reviewers approve in SlackSlackSlack is a team communication and collaboration platform developed from an internal tool at Tiny Speck. It organizes work through channels, direct messages, searchable history and integrations, with features including Huddles, Clips, Canvas and AI assistance. Its paid service launched in February 2014, and Salesforce completed its acquisition in July 2021.Open the full entry, and access is revoked automatically when the time expires.⁠[11]

On his personal website he writes that he has worked on security at OpenAI since May 2024, “Security and safety for the future of AI.” AI Engineer’s talk page states that he spent six years running a security startup before joining OpenAI Security and later moved into Agent Robustness and Control in post-training, working on Codex and the open-source Codex CLI.⁠[4][12]

At the AI Engineer World’s Fair 2025 he gave the talk “Safety and security for code-executing agents.” Its abstract says that code execution lets agents solve more than programming tasks, and that making this autonomy useful requires isolation, enforceable network limits and review.⁠[12][10]

The written summary on the talk page states that he predicted every agent will become a code-executing agent; he recommended, as a first safeguard, giving an agent its own computer and limiting its internet access to reduce exposure to injected instructions and opportunities to send information out; reviewers can review final diffs in a pull request or request confirmation for consequential actions, with a newly introduced dependency as a particularly consequential case; he showed part of a macOS Seatbelt policy and a Linux sandbox combining seccomp and Landlock for unprivileged sandboxing intended to prevent escalation as examples; and he used the example of user-generated text in a GitHub issue instructing the agent to retrieve the latest commit and post it to an unrelated destination, arguing that the system should prevent the outbound call even if the model attempts it, with a network policy denying access to the destination as the authoritative control.⁠[12]

AI Engineer’s speaker page lists him for the AI Engineer World’s Fair 2026 with the conference affiliation “Cyber Team Lead” at OpenAI.⁠[10]

His GitHub bio says that he was an engineer at Segment and ClassDojo (“eng @segmentio @classdojo”), and AI Engineer’s speaker page also says that he previously worked at ClassDojo and Segment. ClassDojo’s website describes it as a free platform that connects K-12 teachers with families for classroom communication, behavior tracking and student portfolios.⁠[13][10][14]

His GitHub bio says that he founded Help Users Vote, and AI Engineer’s speaker page says that he helped build civic-technology projects including VotePlz and Help Users Vote. Help Users Vote’s GitHub organization page describes it as “Simple tools and APIs for companies to help their users vote”; its repositories include libraries and APIs for companies, a Terraform module to run Help Users Vote on Kubernetes, and integrations with common tools.⁠[13][10][15]

The repositories pinned on his GitHub profile include “proposal-try-expressions,” a proposal for simpler exception handling with functions and Promises in ECMAScript; Help Users Vote’s modules library; VercelVercelVercel is a cloud application development and deployment company founded by Guillermo Rauch in 2015 as ZEIT. It contributes to the open-source React framework Next.js and provides application hosting, deployment and runtime services; its products later expanded to AI SDK, v0 and infrastructure for AI applications. The company adopted its current name in 2020 and raised a $300 million Series F in 2025.Open the full entry’s Next.js; Segment’s archived analytics.js; and “physics-final2012,” an object and motion tracker written in Python using OpenCV. On GitHub he belongs to the organizations voteplz, usermirror, helpusersvote, rehooks and indentsecurity.⁠[13]

On his personal website he writes that he sometimes invests in startups and lists these investments: Retro (seed; a new but familiar way to stay in touch with friends and family); Ambrook (pre-seed, seed and Series A; simple finances for the modern farm); Living Carbon (seed and Series A; growing more trees); Otter (pre-seed, seed and Series A; childcare that feels like family); mint.fun (pre-seed and seed; seeing what is happening on web3); Laudable (seed; bringing customer testimonials to life); Positional (seed; a modern toolset for content marketing); and Run Reveal (seed; a simple security data platform).⁠[16][4]

On his personal website he introduces himself as a software engineer and product designer and writes that over the last few years he has worked with nonprofits to help a few million people vote and with companies to manage their customer data; on his “About” page he writes that in his free time he cooks, reads and appreciates life.⁠[16][4]

His blog describes its subjects as the software industry, programming, tech, videography, music and his personal life; its posts include the essays “mental freefall,” “overgrown gardens,” “pursue unique opportunities” and “hero’s journey,” a recipe of beets, quinoa and berries, and a recipe for an asparagus and green pea panna cotta.⁠[17]

His GitHub profile gives his location as San Francisco, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry.⁠[13]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18]

Segment: Official website: https://www.twilio.com/en-us/segment (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

ClassDojo: Official website: https://www.classdojo.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]

Help Users Vote: Official website: https://helpusersvote.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]

OpenAI: Official website: https://openai.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

Personal website: https://fouad.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16][13][10]

X: Public account: https://x.com/fouadmatin (opens in a new window).⁠[10][16]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fouadmatin/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10][5]

Instagram: Public account: https://www.instagram.com/fouadmatin/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/fouad (opens in a new window).⁠[16][13]