Hello,
My name is Matt Mireles.
I try to create companies that change the world.
In 2015, I co-founded Dishcraft Robotics, maker of dishwashing robots for restaurants powered by low-cost robot arms and computer vision.
In 2008, I co-founded a company called SpeakerText that transcribed videos using a hybrid of speech recognition and crowdsourced labor. In 2012, SpeakerText was acquired by CloudFactory after raising $1.1M from Google Ventures, Mitch Kapor and 500 Startups.
I mostly blog about entrepreneurship and emerging technology trends, but occasionally I foray into politics and cool life hacks.
In my previous life, I was a journalist with a knack for magazine writing and photography. From 2007 to 2009, I worked as a scrub reporter for the New York Times and a contributor to Newsweek. In 2006, I was awarded the Eric Breindel College Journalism award––the largest college journalism award in the country––for a profile of an Iraq veteran attending Columbia University that I wrote. The $10,000 cash prize allowed me to pay for the next semester of college and not drop out.
After graduating from Columbia University in 2008, I attended a summer program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business that exposed me to crazy Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurship and changed the course of my career and life. I also met one of my earliest mentors, a guy named Joe Kennedy, CEO of Pandora, the coolest music service I had ever seen.
Before any of this, I was working as a 911 paramedic in Harlem and the South Bronx. After starting college at UC Berkeley after attending an all-boys Catholic high school in suburban Orange County, I almost immediately had dropped out to work on a 911 ambulance in south Los Angeles as an EMT. I re-enrolled at Berkeley, then dropped out again in 2002 to fight forest fires for the US Forest Service in Montana, Alaska, Utah, Washington and Northern California.
After a few years and a bit more medical training, I decided to go back to college and enrolled at Columbia University in NYC. My parents thought this was a terrible idea (tuition was 5x more than UC Berkeley) and so I ended up having to self-finance my education. To do this, I worked as a 911 paramedic in New York City on nights and weekends: 12X in Central Harlem, 18X & 17W in the Bronx and 13Y in Washington Heights.
During this time, I lived a double life. Monday through Thursday, I was any Ivy League student with all pomp, circumstance, intellectual ferocity and privilege that entails. Friday through Sunday I was a cowboy street medic, working 12-16 hour shifts, carrying the fat & the sick down dark stairwells in government housing projects with broken elevators. I revived the dead. I did CPR on babies. I rescued the junkies. I cared for bullet-ridden crack dealers while the neighbors fleeced their belongings, grabbing shoes and watches off a dying man like little piranhas.
It was a crazy life. It continues. And I love it.