About

Matt was born in the Bay Area, California and is educated in the fields of Technical Project Management, Business Administration, and Aeronautical/ Mechanical Engineering.

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ENGINEERING EDUCATION

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Matt has always had an interest in engineering and business and half of the colleges he applied to were under engineering and the other half were under business.  He ended up attending UC Davis to learn Mechanical Engineering.  While there, he was able to maintain an honors GPA so that he could enter a 5-year grad school program for Aeronautical/ Mechanical Engineering that funded his degree.  He kept up his interest in business by minoring in Economics.  While in grad school, Matt was able to work on a partnership with U.C. Davis and Lawrence Livermore labs on laser peening.  It is a process similar to shot peening that imparts residual stress into parts in order to combat fatigue failure (failure due to repeated load cycles, such as landing an airplane).  Matt made contributions to the technology by completing his thesis on the ASTM standard for the Slitting Method and being published twice in the Journal of Engineering Materials and Technology.

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AEROSPACE

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Out of grad school, Matt started working at Lockheed Martin.  His first position was doing design of an electronics enclosure for Fleet Ballistic Missile.  After a few years (and two tries), Matt was accepted into the Operations Leadership Development Program.  Within that two year program he was able to learn leadership skills by working at positions setup by Directors and Executive Vice Presidents, joining national leadership conferences, and completing Drexel's Operations Leadership and Organizational Management certification.  Six-month rotations as a Buyer, Lean/Six Sigma Staff, Deputy Program Manager, and Facilities Manager expanded his breadth of experience.  One of the other key benefits of the OLDP program was that it helped fund Matt's goal of learning more about business and obtaining his MBA from Carnegie Mellon.

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After completion of OLDP, Matt worked in commercial space leading teams to build satellites in a hi-rise, clean room building.  There he was Spacecraft Manager, responsible for coordinating multiple teams to integrate components onto the satellites, go through testing (vibration, acoustic, EMF, and thermal), and then launch.  He helped build and launch MUOS, JCSAT, and GeoEye satellites in a commercial setting with aggressive schedules due to less government intervention and requirements.  It was here, while balancing multiple projects, that Matt first got an appreciation for Product/ Project Management and how necessary it was to efficiently run any operation.

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An opportunity to become a Certified Principal Engineer on SBIRS opened up and Matt became responsible for mechanical components for that program.  First the rotary encoder (high precision angle measuring device) and then the solar relay release mechanisms (pop off in orbit to extend the solar arrays).  Around this time, Matt finished his MBA and searched for opportunities within Lockheed to use his new talents, but found none.

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LIQUOR BUSINESS

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A couple of years later, Matt went on vacation with some friends to Vietnam.  At the end of the trip, his friend had him try some liquor - which was the best he had ever tasted!  As it turned out, his friend's family owned the distillery that makes the delicious sticky-rice libation. So, Matt started working on a business plan with his friend and one other mutual friend of theirs.  Once the business matured, Matt quit his job at Lockheed Martin and formed W+E Imports and Exports LLC with the intention to import delicious Vietnamese liquor to America.  A lot of things went wrong, including a supplier taking their money to pay off his debts and never making anything, and years later there was still no product coming out of Vietnam.  Matt decided to pivot and start his own company that would make a rice wine version of the product.  Having witnessed the laissez faire attitude of those he relied upon in Vietnam, he decided that the new product had to be made in America.

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JUST1 SHOES

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While developing the new plan to start everything in America, Matt discovered a niche industry of customizing shoes.  For a long time, he had brainstormed on how to help others create a source of income that had low barriers to entry and could also eventually result in high payout if the craft was learned over time.  For a year, Matt studied how to customize shoes by watching videos and connecting with well known shoe customizers and wrote articles at www.just1.shoes.  The site still gets over 300 visits per day and produces a small amount of money from purchase links in the articles.  Having empowered hundreds or thousands of individuals to make additional earnings, Matt sought to further enable hobbyists and children to join in the fun by purchasing custom shoes kits that he created by testing 100s of products.  In the end, the sales could not keep up with storage costs and the business folded (but the website still exists).

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BLUE PHOENIX: PREMIUM VIETNAMESE-AMERICAN RICE WINE

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Around the same time Just1 Shoes had run it's course, Matt's new plan of having rice wine made in America was coming together.  He had received answers to his request-for-quote to all of the domestic sake manufacturers and began working with Texas Sake Co.  After 8 batches, an excellent product that mimicked the sticky-rice alcohol from Vietnam was achieved.  Finally, Blue Phoenix was released in early 2020 and Matt began sales to Vietnamese restaurants and bars!

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COVID-19

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By April of 2020 Matt had successfully sold to 12 of 13 restaurants.  The famous Le Colonial, PPQ Dungeoness Island, and Co Nam locations were some of his early adopters.  That is when COVID-19 hit and closed down every single one of his customers.  Without customers at tables drinking wine and cocktails, sales of Blue Phoenix tumbled and new customers were not taking appointments for new products.

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EUTOPIA: FOR A BETTER TOMORROW

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Even though restaurants and bars were suffering during COVID-19, retail sales of alcohol were not.  In fact, people were drinking at home more than ever.  Because of this phenomenon, Matt began developing a plan to produce a ready-to-drink (RTD) product for retail sale.  Ideas of cocktails-in-a-can, virgin cocktails with re-sealable lids to add optional liquor, and functional hard seltzers were considered.  After research into each industry and interviewing a few current and previous business owners of companies that did those things, Matt decided on creating a functional hard seltzer.  After 5 years of development, Eutopia was born at the end of 2025 and debuted in Las Vegas.

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TECHNICAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT

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Wanting to become a better, more informed leader, Matt decided to explore Program and Project Management.  His experience as VP of Engineering at Frontier Bio led him to see TPM as a necessary function for any business seeking to optimize and actively manage schedule, labor, and budget.  After completing a Coursera Program Management introductory course, Matt considered either U.C. Irvine's program management courses or U.C. Berkeley's Technical Project Management courses.  Since U.C. Berkeley's curriculum would allow for expansion into software companies or projects, Matt decided to go with them. He has become proficient in Software Development Life Cycles, Work Breakdown Structures, Gantt Charts, Budgeting, Jira/Confluence, Burn-Up/Down Charts, Velocity Charts, and Scrum, Waterfall, Agile, and Hybrid Frameworks.  He has taken additional Udemy classes on Jira/ Confluence and Jira Advanced Roadmaps (Gantt).  With over 270 hours of coursework and 40 hours on Udemy, Matt has become ready to perform TPM duties for an engineering company.

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MOT-HAI-BA-YO! FLAVORED RICE WINE

In 2025, Matt partnered with @phodaculture (450k followers) to launch a flavored rice wine (similar to soju) for the Vietnamese community.  The 2 pallet pre-sale quickly sold out in 19 days, and plans are now made for mass production.

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ROBOTICS, AI, AND REINFORCEMENT LEARNING

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Matt's latest achievement has been obtaining a professional certification in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence from U.C. Berkeley.  Matt's focus has been on computer vision, with his capstone project being to classify 5 fruits from 10,000 images.  Continuous learning is always going on with a focus on reinforcement learning.