Matt
Webb

There is a clock on Matt Webb's shelf that writes poetry. Not figuratively. Every 60 seconds, it composes a brand-new rhyming verse about whatever time it happens to be. It uses ChatGPT. It cost him roughly 20 minutes to build the first prototype. He then turned it into a Kickstarter campaign that hit 117% of its goal, got covered by the New York Times, and ended up in the hands of people all over the world who wanted to watch minutes tick past in verse. That product is called Poem/1. It is, in miniature, everything you need to know about Matt Webb.

Webb is not a futurist who talks about the future from a stage without ever touching it. He is the kind of person who makes the thing, then talks about making it, then makes something else. He spent two decades building at the intersection of design and technology before "design thinking" became a buzzword and "the Internet of Things" became a marketing category. He was there doing it. His studio BERG - which he co-founded and led as CEO - made Little Printer in 2012, one of the world's first consumer internet-connected devices. A small, friendly machine that pulled content from the web and printed it as tiny paper strips. Charming. Functional. Physical. BERG's work was acquired into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Fast Company named BERG one of the world's 50 most innovative companies. None of this was accidental.

Before BERG and after Oxford (where Webb studied Physics, MPhys, at Trinity College), he was doing things that didn't have category names yet. In 2004, he helped establish the BBC's first national broadcaster podcast - before the word "podcast" was in most people's vocabulary. The same year, he co-authored Mind Hacks, a book that translated cognitive neuroscience into plain English and was subsequently translated into seven other languages by people who presumably wanted to understand their own brains in their mother tongue.

Between BERG and now, there were turns. He ran not one but two startup accelerators in London as Managing Director of R/GA Ventures' IoT arm, investing in and mentoring the kind of connected hardware companies BERG had helped pioneer. He founded Job Garden in 2018. He was Chief Product Officer at Sparkle from 2021 to 2022. He spent two years consulting for Google's AI group on an internal publication that bridged research and product teams - operating in the gap between what AI could do and what product teams understood about it.

Then he went back to making things on his own terms, through Acts Not Facts - a one-person studio whose name is both a manifesto and a methodology. The name says what it does: the output is acts, not facts. Shipping beats speculating. Webb also created Machine Supply, a curated bookshop operating from a vending machine. Not a metaphor. An actual vending machine, stocked with hand-picked books, hosted at Google and Hachette, covered by the BBC. The man has a gift for making the mundane strange and the strange mundane.

Webb grew up in the New Forest, a 900-year-old stretch of the English south coast that, as he has noted with characteristic precision, was actually deforested for royal hunting and is therefore not a natural forest at all. He now lives in London. He has a physics degree but thinks in design. He files patents (six filed, three issued) but prefers plain text files. He values the open web but owns an iPhone. He is the kind of person who notices these contradictions and blogs about them anyway.

And the blog. Interconnected, at interconnected.org/home, has been running since February 2000. Through the dot-com bust, through the rise of social media, through the smartphone revolution, through AI - Webb has posted. More than 316 consecutive weeks without missing one. In 2025 alone he published 61 posts totaling 58,160 words and 549 links. He ran a marathon that year. He blogged about it being hard. He also celebrated 25 years of the blog with a reflective post that became one of his most-read pieces. He keeps "Unoffice Hours" - open calendar slots each week for anyone who wants a conversation.

Currently, Webb is co-founding Inanimate, a new hardware startup working at the collision of AI and physical products - what he calls "New Wave Hardware," a convergence of new manufacturing capabilities and new AI interfaces. In March 2026 he brought together founders at Betaworks in New York to compare notes on this emerging space. His 2024 WIRED talk on AI Agents surpassed a million YouTube views. He is, if anything, more active now than he was twenty years ago - and he was very active twenty years ago.

Webb's particular skill is synthesis: he takes ideas from cognitive science, design, physics, speculative fiction, and the street and pushes them together until something useful or delightful emerges. He thinks out loud. He makes things to understand them. He has held this posture consistently through every technology wave of the past quarter century, which is itself remarkable. Most people either stop making and start talking, or stop talking and start making. Webb does both, simultaneously, every week, in public.