AI engineer · Revenue operator · Founder, Purple Squirrel Media LinkedIn GitHub @expertvagabond

Speaking & Community

On Stage, and in the Room

Panels, firesides, pitches and judges’ tables. Developer relations taught me that ecosystems are built in person, one conversation at a time.

Matthew Karsten with three other builders at ETHGlobal New York, all wearing event lanyards.

Stages, Judges’ Tables, Host Duty

  • Speaker

    EthCC 2025 in Cannes, plus ETH NYC and San Francisco while I ran developer relations at ZetaChain.

  • Judge

    Hackathon judge at ETHDenver. I’ve also judged Superteam bounties, which is where I met my Coldstar co-founder.

  • Host

    Co-hosted “House of ZK” with Metis at ETHDenver 2024, and ZetaChain × World events at World’s flagship store in San Francisco.

  • DevRel

    One of three developer relations engineers at ZetaChain: events, docs, developer tools, office hours, live streams and the Discord.

Talk Topics

Drawn from work I’ve shipped, not from slides I’ve read.

AI agents that touch real systems

What changes when a model can move money, deploy code or call an enterprise API, and how MCP servers make that safe to ship.

Growing a developer ecosystem

Starter kits, office hours and Discord moderation: what actually grew a platform to 10,000+ active developers.

The engineer who can sell

Why technical founders stall at the first sale, and what $50M+ in closed deals taught me about pricing and the close.

Years of Showing Up

A few of the rooms, from the Launch House residency to Consensus 2026.

Let’s Build

Tell me what you’re building, what’s stuck, and when you need it. Every message comes straight to me, and I reply personally.

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