Who Is Matt Shumer? Everything You Need To Know

Some people are born to be entrepreneurs, and Matt Shumer is one of them. Everything you need to know about this young extraordinaire, including his early life and current hobbies, in this article.

John Angelo Yap

Updated June 14, 2024

Featured image of Matt Shumer, generated with Midjourney

Featured image of Matt Shumer, generated with Midjourney

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The launch of GPT has opened the doors to many entrepreneurs who are looking for creative ways to solve issues in our society. Many have failed spectacularly, but there are also those who thrived despite issues of false positives and oversaturation.

Matt Shumer is one of those people, but I wouldn’t categorize his success as luck.

In this article, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about Matt Shumer, including his early life, career, company, and current activities. I assure you, his life is worth reading, so stay tuned!

Early Life and Education

Most of what we know about Shumer’s early life can be attributed to this first-hand account of his childhood. If I were to summarize the entire article, I’d say that I can characterize him as a non-conforming, obsessive malcontent. And I don’t mean that in a bad way at all.

By his own account, he never dreamt of having a “regular” job. At the age of 12, Shumer took an anecdote from his friend about selling shoes that were too big for him and turned it into a business. He experimented around before creating a marketplace for other shoe vendors. From there, it took only a month before he garnered thousands of followers and dozens of listings on his website. Unfortunately, his designer had a minor front-end mishap that ended up shutting down his business.

In all that time, he was still attending high school at Half Hollow Hills High School East. He did well enough in his studies to secure consistent honor roll standings, but his heart was always elsewhere.

Early Career

Sometime in 2015, Shumer founded FURI Sport, a direct-to-consumer tennis racquet manufacturing company. His aim was to broaden the reach of tennis by making it accessible for people to buy racquets at a fair price. 

Soon after, Matt attended Syracuse University’s Martin J. Whitman School of Management, where he was taking up entrepreneurship. He became a participant in the Blackstone LaunchPad program, where he pitched his newest startup called Visos. It’s a virtual reality company focused on medicine and healthcare.

However, while he was working on Visos, he also discovered AI and the paramount effect it was going to have on the world. He then decided to shift his focus and fuel his efforts towards learning everything he can about AI, leading him to the next big chapter of his career.

Founding OthersideAI

The year was 2020, and the world was ravaged by a pandemic. Most people would’ve taken this time to take a break, but not Matt Shumer. Instead, he pitched another idea to the 2020 Blackstone LaunchPad’s SummerStart Accelerator with a good friend named Jason Kuperberg.

The idea was OthersideAI, and the core concept of it is simple: make writing easier with artificial intelligence. OthersideAI’s first product is HyperWrite, a collection of AI writing tools for different use cases.

Some of HyperWrite’s features include the following:

  • Flexible Autowrite: Uses GPT technology to write anything.
  • Summarizer: Creates a detailed summary of the input.
  • ELI5: Introduced by the TV show “The Office” and popularized by Reddit communities, the concept of “Explain Like I’m 5” is simplifying a complex topic or question to the point that it could be understood by a five-year-old.
  • Rewrite Content: Takes an input and rewrites it.
  • Blog Post Writer: Uses keywords or topics to generate complete blog posts.
  • Keyword Extractor and Keyphrase Generator: Outputs SEO keywords or keyphrases related to the input.

Recently, they launched Hyperwrite’s AI Agent. It allows you to create your own customized AI Agent to automate simple tasks such as managing emails and ordering pizzas. All you have to do is install their Chrome extension, record your workflow and use Hyperwrite Assistant Studio to refine your instructions further. 

OthersideAI quickly gained a lot of traction. By 2023, three years into its existence, the company was already on track to produce $1 million in revenue. Suddenly, all eyes were on Shumer and Kuperberg, and they definitely earned it. They were even named as one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 for consumer technology.

His Other Interests

Shumer is still active in the AI community, releasing new open-source products on GitHub every once in a while. His projects have 10M+ combined views on Twitter this month alone! 

Recently, he unveiled a new open-source project called “Claude Author,” which creates an entire novel with one prompt using Claude Haiku and Claude Opus.

And if you’re interested in learning more about him, you can talk to an AI version of Shumer here.

The Bottom Line

Some people were born to be cogs in a machine, but Matt Shumer never fit into that mold. He was always a disruptor and someone who was going to be an entrepreneur in one way or another. 

His work on establishing not just one but multiple successful businesses is proof that persistence works if you’re smart enough. Across these companies, a common trend has always been spotting an opportunity and taking advantage of it. This is what he’s always been great at and something that most people should be noting.

It’s really no wonder success and recognition keeps following Shumer. I’m excited to see where he goes from here. 

In the meantime, readers can visit some of our other “Who Is” articles. I highly suggest this one on the Strip Mall Guy or Pieter Levels. Have fun!

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Written by John Angelo Yap

Hi, I'm Angelo. I'm currently an undergraduate student studying Software Engineering. Now, you might be wondering, what is a computer science student doing writing for Gold Penguin? I took up studying computer science because it was practical and because I was good at it. But, if I had the chance, I'd be writing for a career. Building worlds and adjectivizing nouns for no other reason other than they sound good. And that's why I'm here.

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