Matt Hightower
CEO at UKON
Denver, Colorado, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMatt Hightower is a mission-driven CEO and founder with eight years of cross-industry experience building repeatable operating infrastructure that scales businesses sustainably. He currently leads UKON, where he’s turning cyber insurance from a reactive placement into a managed Cyber Practice Operating System for independent agencies and MSPs, embedding underwriting discipline, structured workflows, and AI-supervised infrastructure. Previously he grew Class2Class into a global education network spanning 759 universities in 84 countries and drove go-to-market and partnership expansion in XR, digital identity, and adtech. A retired kernel driver developer and electrical engineer by training, Matt retains deep hands-on experience in embedded systems—contributing reliability and memory-management fixes to the widely used ESP8266 Arduino core. He combines product-minded engineering chops with a founder’s focus on building infrastructure over headcount, and brings a practical global perspective from scaling partnerships and marketplace distribution. Based in Denver, he’s betting that closing the Cyber Protection Gap is a distribution and ops problem that the right platform can solve.
8 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree, Leadership and Development with Business Minor, Bachelor's Degree, Leadership and Development with Business Minor at Texas A&M University
Github Skills (9)
memory-management10
embedded10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
sys10
arduino10
esp826610
assembly8
wifi7
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
esp8266/Arduino
Aug 2019 - Jan 2023
ESP8266 core for Arduino
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:96 reviews, 61 commits, 82 PRs in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Matt made significant contributions to the ESP8266 Arduino core, focusing on memory management and system stability. Their work involved improvements to the umm_malloc memory allocator, including optimizations to reduce interrupt off time, address fragmentation, and handle potential memory corruption issues. The contributions included changes related to handling WPA2 Enterprise connections, fixing flash address conflicts, improving IRAM utilization, and adding support for hardware watchdog timer stack dumps, all of which indicate a focus on improving system reliability and performance within the context of an embedded system.
platformioesp8266esp32arduino
mhightower83/misc-bash
Dec 2017 - Nov 2024
Contributions:35 pushes, 1 branch in 6 years 11 months
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