Moltbook is not an overnight success. It was 20 years in the making. I've known @MattPRD since he was in high school and I was in college. At every stop in his life and career, he has been super early and first to the newest technologies and trends. Our paths crossed because we were both obsessed with social networks. In 2006, I started a Facebook group called "Students Against Facebook News Feed" to protest the launch of the News Feed. It grew to 730,000 members (10% of Facebook at the time). It was so big that Facebook added privacy controls in response. That was my first taste of the power of social platforms—and what happens when you build a community around them. In 2008, Matt and I were roommates in Silicon Valley. I was a junior reporter at @Mashable covering the rise of social media. Matt was junior at Ustream, helping build one of the first live video platforms. Two kids living together, watching the social web explode in real time. 2008: Ustream Matt moved to Silicon Valley instead of going to college to join a tiny startup called Ustream. Ustream became the main competitor to Justin.tv, which became Twitch. Matt went from doing biz dev to leading product at Ustream when he was just 19 years old. He was so young that they brought in the legendary @joshelman—one of the greatest product managers in tech history (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Robinhood)—to mentor him. 2012: Y Combinator Matt took Tracks.by through @ycombinator. The company built the social media presence for major celebrities, including growing Lil Wayne's Facebook following from 1 million to 30 million fans. (He helped Lil Wayne break the world record for most likes in 24 hours.) Future YC CEO @garrytan saw Matt's greatness and wrote him a check—along with @alexisohanian @naval @joshelman and more. Matt and I were both building on top of social networks before most people understood how powerful they would become. 2016: The Chatbots Community In April 2016, Matt saw a new wave forming: chatbots. He didn't just write about it. He helped create the entire ecosystem. Matt created Chatbots Magazine, which became the #1 publication for the industry with over 200,000 readers per month and 400+ contributors. Matt didn't just predict the chatbot wave. He built the community that powered it. 2016: Octane AI A few months later, Matt convinced me to start @OctaneAI with him to build AI chatbots on Facebook Messenger—before most people ever thought a chatbot would be a thing. @BoostVC and @gcvp came in as the first investors. We built the first chatbots for major celebrities like 50 Cent, KISS, and Aerosmith. All those celebrity connections? They came from Matt's Y Combinator company back in 2012. 2018: The Shopify Pivot Matt saw the rise of e-commerce early and made the decision to move our company to @Shopify. It was one of the best decisions we ever made. The pivot worked. @BullpenCapital and @JavelinVP came in to back our growth. That pivot saved us and turned @OctaneAI into a profitable company. We now power AI for over 5,000+ ecommerce brands. 2023: Autonomous Agents Matt went viral for writing the first in-depth article on autonomous agents. It reached over 250,000 readers and became the definitive guide to the space. Go read it: mattprd.com/p/the-complete-b… 2024: YesNoError @pmarca tweeted that he would fund a serious effort to use AI to find errors in scientific papers. Matt saw it. He built @yesnoerror in response. An AI agent that audits the world's scientific research papers for errors. It went viral. 2024: Theory Forge Ventures Two years ago, Matt and I started @TheoryForgeVC—a venture fund backing the next generation of AI founders. Thanks to our early work in AI, we got offers to scout. But Matt had a different idea. He DM'd 50 people we knew, asking them if they would invest in a venture fund that we would start. That turned into a 10-figure venture fund that's now backed 22 AI startups like @gumloop and @PaymanAI. Active AI founders backing AI founders. 2025: Moltbook Now hundreds of thousands of AI agents are talking to each other on a platform Matt built without writing a line of code. @karpathy—founding team of OpenAI—called it "one of the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent things" he's seen. At every step of the way, @MattPRD has seen the future. And I have been there to witness his greatness. I've been his business partner and co-founder for a decade now. We've been best friends for going on two decades. Matt and I have gone through hell and back together—fundraising, building a company from nothing, surviving the moments that break most partnerships. There is nobody I would rather be in the trenches with than Matt. @Moltbook didn't happen by accident. It happened because Matt saw the future and has been building for it his entire career. He knew AI would build code, and he became an expert at it. This week, the rest of the world is learning why Matt is my co-founder—and why I do everything with Matt. This is what 20 years of seeing the future looks like.