The Georgist Who Ships Apps

An Ontario builder makes language games, curling games and apartments, and wants to rethink how people come to own their homes.

Matt is an independent developer and property operator from York Region, Ontario. He publishes apps under Moo Labs and manages rental apartments through Liahona Properties. He holds a degree in Computer Science with a second major in Geography from Laurentian University. Before settling into software, he worked in carpentry and general contracting, confined space rescue and food distribution, and as a university teaching assistant. He speaks English, German, Portuguese and French, and has deep personal and professional ties to Brazil. That connection runs through much of his work.

The apps

Matt specializes in progressive web apps and works mostly in JavaScript, alongside PHP, Vue, Three.js and Node. He builds, ships and markets his apps himself.

Curling Ice is a curling game with online multiplayer. It's built for a sport with roughly two million players worldwide, an audience most game studios ignore.

Vocabi is a language-learning app developed with input from linguists. Its mini-games cover vocabulary, verb conjugation, spelling and sentence building, and it includes alphabet tracing for scripts like Georgian and Cyrillic. It supports 15 languages and counting, from Portuguese and Romanian to Georgian and Kyrgyz. Vocabi has just launched on Google Play, starting with Brazil. Its Instagram series, Latin, left behind, tells the story of how the Romance languages grew apart.

The mind behind it

Matt's defining trait is that he wants to know how things actually work, not how they're supposed to work. When he looked into the science of forest bathing, he went straight to the gap between controlled lab findings and what a person really absorbs walking through the woods. When he studied commercial real estate, he asked why large landlords avoid running businesses inside their own malls.

He has little patience for structures that moralize instead of function. A charter that mandates good behaviour interests him less than one designed so good behaviour is the natural result. He also prefers being challenged to being agreed with. When he wrote a simulated debate between Karl Marx and Henry George, he produced two versions: one that dismisses Marx, and one that makes the strongest possible case for him.

The worldview

Matt is a committed Georgist. He applies Henry George's ideas about land, rent and monopoly to subjects ranging from pharmaceutical pricing to Gulf petro-states. His Marx-versus-George debate was published as a period-style Brazilian Portuguese newspaper, O Arauto d'Economia.

The idea he considers potentially his life's work is a perpetual housing fund. Residents would gradually buy ownership of the homes they live in, and rental income would go into improving the property rather than being extracted from it. He has already put part of the principle into practice by converting an abandoned medical facility into four apartments. A related concept applies the same structure to a perpetual charitable endowment funding hospitals around the world.

What ties it together

Matt moves from framing walls to app store compliance to institutional fund design without changing gears. He has taken multiple products through Google's publishing process on his own, which is harder than it sounds. The thread connecting a curling game, a language app and a housing fund is the same question asked in different places: how do you design a system so the people inside it end up better off? If his housing ideas get the same hands-on execution as his apps, that's the work people will remember him for.