About Matt Henry

Hi, I'm Matt.

I build systems. It took me a long time to notice, because it never looked like the same job twice.

In sixth grade it looked like making games in DOS and fighting a 256-color palette. In high school it was the broadcasting lab in Nampa, Idaho, where I ended up training the other students. In college it was film, and the blocking diagrams I drew before a shoot mattered to me about as much as the footage.

In 2010 I moved to Tokyo, on what I called at the time the first real leap of faith of my life. I stayed six years. I started out making videos for a language-learning company and ended up running the video team, where I got a little obsessed with how the work flowed: who did what, in what order, and how to make it repeatable. I wrote my own project-management software for it. That obsession turned into a career in product, which is still my day job.

Once you look for the pattern, it's everywhere. The board games I love are basically economies. I've run yearly reviews on my own life for most of my adult life. Somewhere along the way I went from collecting certifications to writing the courses.

These days the system I'm working on is the biggest and weirdest one yet: my own life. I live in the Salt Lake City area with my wife Jaimee and our cats, Ansel and Albi. At home I'm building a small crew of AI agents that file the paperwork, watch the servers, and remember what I said I'd do. The real question underneath is how to arrange a life on purpose, around what we actually care about instead of what's normal. Someday that means land, and a house we design ourselves.

I'm not on social media. I don't enjoy hiking. I'd like to run a cat sanctuary someday. When I was a kid I liked Pokémon so much that I ended up on the local news.