I teach at Columbia, I’ve built a couple of companies, I back founders, and I write. I’m a little ADHD – and I’ve never liked “the way it’s always been done.” This is a small subset of the things that hold my attention.
I’m happiest questioning the way things are supposed to be done – whether that’s teaching people to code, helping people overcome addiction, or learning something new just because it pulled me in.
I’m a two-time Y Combinator–backed founder and an award-winning faculty member at Columbia Business School, where I’m also an Innovation Fellow at the Lang Center for Entrepreneurship. I co-founded Ophelia, an online treatment platform for opioid addiction, and One Month, an accelerated learning platform.
I advise founders and executives on growth, scaling, product, and team – and I’ve worked with companies like Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, Condé Nast, and American Express. I was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Education, and wrote Python for MBAs.
Before all that, I studied Philosophy and Finance at NYU and wrote my thesis on the metaphysics of consciousness under David Chalmers and Ned Block. I’m still chasing the same thing I was back then: figuring out how things actually work.
Getting MBAs from an idea to their first customers – helping them avoid some of the avoidable mistakes.
Python and data for people who believe they’re “not technical.”
What AI does and doesn’t change about building a company.
An online treatment platform for opioid addiction that treats it like what it is: a medical problem, not a moral one.
Visit →An accelerated learning platform built on a simple bet: you can learn to code (or almost anything) in a month if it’s taught right.
Visit →A book that takes people who thought they’d never code and gives them real, working fluency with Python and data. It came straight out of my classroom, built on the idea that “I’m not technical” is just a story people tell themselves.
Growth, scaling, product, team. Usually the real problem isn’t the one you started with. I’ve worked with teams at Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, Condé Nast, and American Express, and with early founders figuring it out for the first time.
“He is who I wish I was when I was his age.”
“Mattan knows more about the tech startup scene in NYC (and in general) than anybody else I know.”