Matt Dalio

My StorY

My eyes opened to the world when I lived with a local family in Beijing when I was 11. My love of building organizations started when I was 16 when I spent a summer volunteering in an orphanage in China. I spent a summer playing with kids who were missing limbs and chambers in their hearts, as well as their parents. That summer led to the founding of the China Care Foundation, which placed hundreds of kids in foster families, supported hundreds of adoptions and conducted thousands of surgeries. We saved thousands of lives.

I realized at a young age that I could change the lives of children. These were children who yearned for families, whose hearts were broken, literally, in need of surgeries and kindness. This was my first “entrepreneurial” endeavor.

I was hooked.

A decade later, I went to India. It was 2010 and smartphones had not yet arrived. But it became obvious that they would, and billions of people were about to be connected to the internet. This was about to be a sonic boom of historic proportion.

I spent a summer talking to thousands of people in half a dozen countries, but one conversation in a tea shop in Bangladesh sticks with me. He gazed straight in my eyes and begged me, “Do this, for my country, for my people. Please.” That summer set me in motion, with all of my soul, to connect people to the pulsing web of the internet and the opportunities it puts within reach.

There were, and still are, gaps. Kids here in America have the computers of creation. Kids here have great, affordable internet connections. But billions of people still yearn for those.

We tackled this by building a desktop operating system called Endless OS, which solved the cost and connectivity barriers. We tackled cost by making device financing readily available and we addressed internet connectivity by building an ecosystem of apps that would work well on any internet connection, including none at all. We then made the content ecosystem available on a USB key.

In the process, we realized that we were trying to do something bigger. Everywhere we went, we saw that kids were sitting in front of our computers playing the games that we shipped, and learning from them. We realized that games can teach.

That set me on a mission to build a youth game making studio that can teach kids everywhere how to build games and, in the process, all of the 21st Century skills, like coding, design, digital art and project management. If we can teach kids to be creators, we give them jobs. And in the process we cultivate a generation that can harness the skills of Silicon Valley to build a new world.

At 16 I learned something that has stuck with me. I could make my little difference in the world. My goal is to unlock that discovery for every child possible, so that they can discover the joy of building their own dreams. And with the power of software and business, we can all do that at a scale never before possible. This is what I love. Building products, technologies, companies that empower a better future.