Boredom can lead to many things. For a fourth-grade Matt McKnight growing up in the 1980s, it led to hacking a school computer program and replacing its serious academic exercises with playful jokes.
“I went in and figured out where all the code was and edited it to use silly words,” he recalled, “so that when they tried to use it in class it would bring up still appropriate but kind of absurd sorts of things.”
Before that, a 7-year-old McKnight cured boredom by making a math-based simulation game using the stats on the backs of baseball cards. Finally, an uncle who worked as a C programmer at General Electric convinced McKnight’s parents it was time to get him a personal computer. They bought the Commodore Amiga 1000. History regarded the desktop as a commercial failure in the U.S. But for McKnight, it lived up to its name ⏤ becoming a friend, in a sense, for a boy who needed more to explore after flying through the school workbooks meant to keep the rest of the class busy for the whole year.
Today, and for more than two decades now, McKnight has found his cure to boredom through doors opened by the ever-advancing pace of technological innovation. He’s launched businesses, formed and solidified partnerships with government customers, and applied emerging technologies to solve problems ranging from geospatial operations planning to counterterrorism.
For him, the work is so interesting he relishes nightfall when the best ideas seem to work themselves out. Only now, he’s doing so much more than hacking school computer programs to pull the sorts of jokes that amuse 9-year-old boys.
“Technology never gets boring because there’s always something new to learn,” said McKnight, now the chief technical officer for advanced security and risk intelligence solution provider Seerist. “Even if you’re not the one coming up with it, there’s so many people out there working on this stuff.”
At Seerist, McKnight is intently focused on leading the platform’s risk intelligence data revolution that combines machine learning and human expertise to set new industry standards. And he’s excited to be working with the company at a time it has bolstered its capabilities with the recent merger of Geospark Analytics and Control Risks’ Core platforms to deliver what he said is a solution capable of using the best of human and artificial intelligence to deliver insights for better, faster decisions.
On McKnight’s Background and Experience
McKnight brings a broad background of experience to his role. Early in his career, around 1996, he worked at TASC on natural language processing, geospatial information systems, software development and customer-focused applications. He also got the opportunity to travel the world installing and customizing the software.
Following that experience, McKnight transitioned to Booz Allen Hamilton where he worked to build a passport control system, traveled to help with installation, helped build an identity tracking database for counterterrorism, and began to understand the intricacies of government contracting.
Eventually, he formed a business with two other partners who had similar experience as he did of working billable jobs from 9 to 5 then going back to the corporate office every night to work on business development tasks. In 2005, they launched LMN Solutions to deliver higher quality software more rapidly to U.S. government customers.
For around eight years, McKnight worked to build up the business — including learning diverse new skill sets. If he thought he would be a software developer forever, he soon found himself learning cybersecurity, large network data streams and intelligent workflow systems. Accounting, human resources and business development were other areas he had to learn. But the experience also reinforced the value of partnering with other people who had skills that didn’t come as easily to him, like sales and marketing.
On the technology side, there was always an endless volume of new material to learn. He was drawn to natural language processing and loved the pace of the work and being part of something that moved forward so quickly.
When McKnight hires today, he looks for individuals who know more about the subject that he does — so he can learn from them.
“I think that’s the beauty of being in this world and having so many smart people out there you can learn from,” he said. “I want to build a company where we’re bringing all those people in, and ideally everyone that we bring in knows something new or different than any of the other people that we have and the rest of us can learn from them.”
Eventually, through private equity funding, LMN became involved in a merger that formed National Security Partners where he served as vice president.
That company was later acquired by Noblis where McKnight worked briefly before setting out on his own again. In 2015, he founded DeepSequence, a consultancy focused on machine learning decision sites and analytics. Later, he founded another company — Osparna — that conducted due diligence to evaluate startups being courted by investors and built AI decision support software for investing in startups.
“I was getting a chance to look at a lot of developing companies in the space,” he said. “In particular, there were advancements in technology around transformational architectures back in the 2018 timeframe. And so I started trying to figure out how I could take advantage of those and was looking around for companies that were well-poised to do that.”
Through a friend he had worked with before, McKnight solidified his foothold in the AI world, consulting with Geospark Analytics and applying technologies to solve customer problems for security operations centers. About nine months later, he joined the company as its chief data scientist. In 2022, Geospark underwent a transition that eventually resulted in the formation of Seerist where McKnight now serves as CTO.
Looking Ahead
“Now, we’ve started to turn the focus from just ‘here’s all this relevant content’ to applying it more specifically to solve customer problems and become part of their workflow,” he said. “We’re diving in a lot more deeply with our customers trying to understand the particulars of what they’re trying to accomplish and going deeper on all the jobs.”
This year has been focused on taking the technological innovations Seerist has and deftly applying them to solve customer problems from building intelligence reports to giving them more relevant alerting.
McKnight is especially excited about some of the capabilities in AI. In a world of deepfakes and hallucinations, “A lot of where our company’s value has come in is being a reliable and trusted source of analysis and foresight and insight into what’s coming up next and generating things that have built trust,” he said. “That trust is an asset that we want to preserve.”
Plus, they provide the ability to consume data more quickly, gain insights and quickly summarize and draw out relevant information.
“I think we’re at a very exciting point,” McKnight said. “There’s a lot of amazing technology already here and on the horizon. We have a really good set of customers. I think probably one of the most exciting things about this company from our perspective is all the great commercial and government organizations that we’re working with. And I think we’re really looking forward to the opportunity to do more for those customers and to be able to get deeper into their problems and help them get ahead of what’s going to happen.”