Companies> People>Matt Harrop

Matt is an entrepreneur who was born on a mountaintop, near a town called Rock Creek, somewhere in British Columbia, Canada. For the first five years, his family did not have running water or electricity. Thankfully his parents decided to return to civilization and relocated to the thriving metropolis of Toronto.

In 1993, at the wise age of 18, Matt dropped out of high school to start his first internet company, Interlog, in the basement of his parent’s house. The kicker…. it actually worked, growing to 150 employees and 65,000 consumers before it was acquired by PSINet a publicly traded multinational ISP. So did his second company, Bird on a Wire Networks that he co-founded with his brother Lorien. It was acquired by AT&T Canada. Matt, Chief Technology Officer of both companies, as well as pingg, is your prototypical self-taught technology whiz.

Fresh from his successes on the information superhighway, Matt set forth to conquer the elements, water and air. He dyed his hair blue, trained for a pilots license, built an ultra light aircraft, joined the crew of Challenge Team Spirit, a 72 –foot cutter, in a trans Atlantic yacht race and then spent three years sailing across the Atlantic & Pacific Oceans with his then girlfriend (and now wife) Melissa.

Matt is sometimes affectionately referred to as “Matt-apedia” because he seems to know everything from strange ingredients in toothpaste, to how to fix a diesel engine, to the philosophy of Kierkegaard. He currently lives in Toronto where pingg’s development office is located.

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