10/1973
Born in Altus, Oklahoma
The beginning of a life shaped by distance, weather, books, and a persistent curiosity about worlds beyond the one immediately visible.
Chronology
A chronology of inflection points. Some happened to me. Others were choices. Together they explain the work more honestly than any résumé could.
Overview
This is not a complete chronology. It is a record of inflection points: the moments, institutions, losses, responsibilities, and decisions after which I was no longer quite the same person.
1973–1992
Formation
12/1978
Imagined Futures
Star Trek taught me that technology could be hopeful. December afternoons were spent on the floor flying an Enterprise through a universe of Christmas tree lights and imagination.
06/1990
SWOSU Science & Math Camp
Summer meant college credits, new friendships, and a first taste of belonging among students who treated science and mathematics as shared possibility.
06/1991
The SSC notices
I returned to SWOSU the following summer and was recruited by the Superconducting Super Collider, a recognition of my grasp of science, mathematics, and the future I imagined.
05/1992
Graduated from Altus High School
Physics was the plan. The rest of life had other ideas.
05/1994
Left Oklahoma State University
College did not go as planned. The learning continued anyway.
1996–2008
The Public Internet
05/1996
Founded IXDesign
My first consultancy, created before I fully understood how much independent work would shape the rest of my professional life.
10/1996
Bought mattmcc.com & ixdsgn.com
Claimed my first domain, a small act of ownership that made the web feel personal, durable, and mine.
09/1997
Netscape
Entered the commercial web while the public Internet was still being invented in real time.
09/2001
September 11
First near-death experience. A day that permanently changed my sense of history, vulnerability, and civic consequence.
09/2004
Friendster
Worked on social networking before social media hardened into infrastructure.
10/2005
Yahoo!
Helped shape one of the Internet’s primary front doors at shallow-billion-user scale.
2009–2016
Digital Transformation
05/2009
LEVEL Studios
The hinge from public web products toward enterprise clients, digital transformation, and organizational scale.
05/2009
Boston takes hold
While embedded with Fidelity Investments through LEVEL Studios, I fell in love with Boston and Massachusetts, adding place itself to the map of future possibility.
01/2011
Evernote
Explored memory, capture, and productivity through platform work, including Windows and ecosystem design.
07/2012
Autodesk
Moved deeper into cloud services, licensing, workflows, and the complexity of professional tools.
12/2014
Cadence Design Systems
Entered the world of semiconductor design, where software, engineering, and invisible infrastructure converged.
2017–2021
Enterprise Systems
05/2017
Founded Matt McClendon & Co., LLC
Created a formal home for independent consulting, advisory work, and the practice that would eventually feed Amid the Noise.
08/2017
CA Technologies
Worked at the scale of enterprise transformation, organizational systems, and executive-level design strategy.
07/2019
Wells Fargo
Designed within enterprise AI, governance, decision systems, and the friction of large institutions.
11/2019
Gino is born
A new life entered the world, and the shape of responsibility began to change.
01/2020
Automation Anywhere
Worked inside intelligent automation as AI began changing how organizations imagined work.
03/2020
The world enters lockdown
COVID turned abstraction into atmosphere, revealing how fragile institutions, routines, work, proximity, and ordinary life could become all at once.
06/2020
My father dies
His death from prostate cancer marked another before-and-after, reshaping memory, inheritance, grief, and the unfinished conversations parents leave behind.
01/2021
Dremio
Moved into data infrastructure, where architecture, access, and decision-making became part of the same design problem.
08/2021
Chose to become Gino’s father
Not a formal milestone, but one of the most important decisions of my life.
2022–2026
Collapse & Reinvention
01/2022
Founded Amid the Noise
Created a place for writing, research, systems thinking, and the questions that would not fit neatly anywhere else.
04/2022
Sepsis
Second near-death experience. Survival became less abstract.
02/2024
Automobile collision
Third near-death experience. Another reminder that a life can divide cleanly into before and after.
04/2025
Chose a different future
The turning point was not what happened. It was the decision that followed.
07/2026
Punchcut
Returned to professional design with a different sense of time, responsibility, and what work can mean.
07/2026
Returned to university
Began the mathematics and statistics path I once thought required being eighteen again.