Speaker Profile

Matt Thomas (@movingwithmat) is USA’s first Chessboxing World Champion, an international keynote speaker, and a peak performance coach focussed on mindset, resilience, and state change management.

Matt’s career started in technology as the 22nd employee at SalesLoft ($2.3B exit), and 7th employee at Roadie ($580M exit). He founded a 501(c)3, Brawl for a Cause, that has trained, equipped, and inspired over 300 first-time-fighters to fundraise 7-figures for over 150 non-profits.

While exploring over 50 countries, he became a certified yoga instructor (300 YTT), studied various martial arts, and built a fitness concept called Fight and Flow, which combines basic bodyweight calisthenics with yoga.

In 2018, Matt “The Matador” Thomas won the 90kg division at the Chessboxing World Championship in Kolkata, India. He founded United Chessboxing, the sport's first agency responsible for regulation, sponsorship generation, and managing Team USA. The founder of Chessboxing, Iepe Rubingh, called Matt the “Voice of Chessboxing” before his passing in 2020. In 2022, he partnered with Chess.com and Ludwig Ahgren to host the biggest chessboxing event in history. In 2024, the IOC hired Matt to commentate its Chessboxing exhibition as part of the Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony.

Matt's clients include the NBA, lululemon, Mizuno, Andreessen-Horowitz, Anheuser-Busch, and BlackRock. He has spoken at MIT, the Olympics, and the United Nations. His work has been featured in Entrepreneur, Forbes, and CBS 60 Minutes.

Matt’s life mission is three-fold: 1) Generate over $1B of philanthropy for causes worth fighting for, 2) Fuse ancient eastern wisdom with modern western science to unlock peak human performance, and 3) Grow the sport of Chessboxing into an Olympic-caliber, main-stream sport.

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