Michael Kowalchik - Engineer, Entrepreneur and Creative Hacker

I'm an engineer, entrepreneur, and creative hacker. I love technology and using technology as a way to express creativity. I love the process of building great things with great people. I currently live in Boston Massachusetts with my amazing wife Juliette, our daughters Ada and Clara.

I'm currently founder and CEO of Matterbeam. Matterbeam is the culmination of a certain set of ideas that reflect 20 years of working with data, technology, and integrating data systems at various companies and startups. Founded in 2022, Matterbeam is building a new way to unlock the potential of data at scale in organizations.

Prior to Matterbeam, I spent several years working at Pluralsight, leading architecture and platform. I had been the CTO and co-founder at Smarterer which was acquired by Utah-based Pluralsight in 2014 to bring together Pluralsight's training capabilities with Smarterer's cutting-edge skill assessment technology. After the acquisition, Juliette and I made the trek out to Salt Lake City so that I could bring my technical expertise to Pluralsight. In 2018, we made the trek back across country to our beloved Boston, now with two little ones born in Utah.

Before co-founding Smarterer, I was co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Grazr Corporation, a web technology company based on web feeds and social media data analytics. For three and a half years I led the engineering team and acted as primary software developer and architect for Grazr's various products. These products included Grazr.com, VibeMetrix, and AlertRank. In June of 2009 I decided to leave Grazr and venture out again on my own. Sadly, Grazr was never able to find success with the products we launched and officially shut down on September 30, 2010.

Prior to co-founding Grazr corp, I worked for seven years in in the advanced research and development labs of Hopkinton, MA based EMC Corporation (now owned by Dell) and before their acquisition by EMC, Data General Corporation. I worked with cutting-edge distributed computing and storage architectures, parallel processing, hardware, software and systems design and analysis. While at EMC, I was awarded patents on large-scale, high-performance, storage architectures.

When I have spare time I also work on a number of other side projects.

You can follow me on Twitter.