Two Whirlwind Months Later... Matchwise is Born

The last two months have gone by incredibly fast. It started on May 29th at a Light DAO event at AGI House in SF. Ruby Yeh hosted an event with Jeremy Nixon, which proved to be very interesting - Jeremy dug deep into his perspective on AI and predictions on how it will move forward.

Prior to this event I had been experimenting with having guided conversation avatars debate each-other and had been building avatars for the major U.S. presidential election candidates.

While the election was top-of-mind for most people, I had doubts about the long term business opportunities for debating political avatars and was brainstorming about other applications. I was reminded of our Smarter Dating effort, and AI's ability to do really good summarizations of chats.

I wondered if we could use chat summarizations for semantic matching and apply them to other matchmaking opportunities such as business and social networking events. So I put together a quick demo: use guided chat to ask specific and deep questions about event attendees, do separate summarizations for each topic, and then use the text embeddings to calculate similarity scores.

While my demo wasn't ready for people to test, I was able to shop the idea around the event and got incredibly good feedback. Two people in particular showed deep interest: Gina Levy, and Doug Campbell. Both of them had extensive experience with organizing events, and both wanted to explore where this idea could go.

Over the last two months both Gina and Doug have given amazing feedback and really helped steer the evolution of the matchmaking idea. Gina attended two both the Hacker Dojo hackathon with me, and both Gina and Doug attended the GenLab one. At the Hacker Dojo hackathon Gina and I teamed up and gathered a team to write fresh matchmaking code. To our pleasant surprise we ended up winning a prize from the Fireworks sponsor!

Gina continued to test the matchmaking authoring tools, evangelized the ideas with other event organizers, and came up with the Magic Match name we have been using for testing. Doug provided many UI design ideas. And both have always been available to brainstorm marketing, branding, and features.

While Magic Match is a good name and exudes a playful and fun vibe, I also wanted a name that could be more professional and registered Matchwise.ai. We are now doing most of the new brand development work around Matchwise, but will continue to keep Magic Match as an alternate property.