Welcome to the OpenHome team spotlight series, where we highlight the people building the next era of human-computer interaction.
We’re thrilled to chat with Bradyn Mack, who leads developer relations at OpenHome! A veteran community builder and creative technologist, Brady has spent over a decade working at the intersection of technology, culture, and community.
A former Coinbase team member, he has since founded platforms supporting creators, launched open-source tools, and helped people navigate new technologies. You may have seen him in the OpenHome Discord or on our livestreams, where he helps bring our growing developer community together.
We recently sat down with Bradyn to discuss how to turn emerging technologies into opportunities for people to create, connect, and build. Brady shares what it takes to make new technology accessible to everyone, why hands-on learning and mentorship matter, and what brought him to OpenHome.
Let’s dive in!
You’ve worked across technology, creative strategy, and community building. How did you find your way into this work, and what has that path taught you about bringing people together around new ideas?
I’m a history buff, and monetary history is what pulled me in. The Bitcoin white paper lit a fire in me. That took me to Coinbase, first in ops and then compliance, and then to building with Ethereum smart contracts.
Along the way I gravitated to ETHDenver, because it kept crypto’s original builder ethos alive through the hype cycles and the pump-and-dump casino nonsense. I’ve been there since the very beginning: hackathons, mentoring, art and music performances, and helping build the makerspace. I still show up.
Here’s what that path taught me.
First, money should be earned, not bought. That's why I built StreamTide, quadratic funding for the arts. It's the friendlier welcome mat I wish I'd found when I first got into crypto.
Second, bring technology to people instead of dragging people to technology. Games, livestreams, music, and communities beat asking someone to understand a new protocol.
Third, soften AI's blow with art and creativity. As a musician who vibe-codes apps, I sometimes feel like a taxi driver watching a self-driving car pull up.
You’ve spent years helping people navigate unfamiliar technologies, from decentralized tools to entirely new ways of creating and collaborating. What have you learned about making new technology feel accessible, and what does it take to help someone go from curious observer to confident builder?
Bounties and grants make sense for people with proven track records. Otherwise they’re a wide-open door: everyone walks in, and most walk out the same way they came. That was crypto’s real problem, signal to noise, and AI is repeating it.
Hackathons are the juice. The aha moment almost never comes from reading about something. It comes from getting your hands dirty, grinding out an MVP in a short time at events like ETH Buenos Aires, ETHGlobal, and ETHDenver.
The missing piece is mentorship. Hackathons have it, but it’s informal and rushed, built with sticks and twigs instead of a real platform.
That’s where I want to be the bridge: sitting down with builders and bringing them under my wing with time-tested structure, then inviting the ones who genuinely cooked into an accelerator, like Gitcoin’s Kernel. Like Woz, being a mentor is the primary thing I want to do.
The real product isn’t the tech — it’s the next person who teaches someone else. Support people, not platforms.
Community and developer relations sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and the people using the technology. How do you turn what you hear from developers into meaningful improvements to a product, and what drew you to doing that work at OpenHome?
Every day I'm answering Discord questions, QA-ing features, and hearing feedback I can't fix on the spot. I'm trying so hard not to make mistakes while I'm holding all of this at once: the community, the mission, the developers, leadership, the investors, my own blind spots. Every one of them pulls on me equally. Sometimes it's my own mistake, like linking the wrong partner account with five hundred dollars of ad spend behind it, and I'm up on those sleepless nights that feel like sandpaper on my eyeballs half the time.
But then I find an app a young budding developer created that reminds me of my best friend's birthday and his favorite ice cream without me having to prompt it — and I go, oh shit, I forgot. That's ambient intelligence that's truly yours, and it isn't going to sell your data so you spend a week staring at strawberry ice cream ads. Ask one of those so-called smart speakers that don't have an open development community to put strawberries on your to-do list, and it says, sure, playing Strawberry Fields Forever. That's the gap.
And that's what makes it worth it — seeing that confident young developer build something genuinely useful that illustrates why ambient intelligence you truly own, and can build on in an open ecosystem, brought me to OpenHome.
AI is opening up new possibilities for how people interact with technology. What possibilities are you most excited about, and what do you think developers will be able to create with voice interfaces that weren't practical before?
Voice finally gets to stop being a remote control. For a decade, "smart" speakers have been glorified kitchen timers. What excites me is voice that actually listens: it catches context mid-sentence, answers the moment you stop talking, and remembers what matters to you.
That unlocks entirely new use cases and genres, and I'm building one: AquaPrime, a PvP collaborative storytelling adventure made for Twitch. You captain a ship across a shared map, and every tile hands you a story and a choice: be kind or be ruthless. Every tile belongs to good or evil. Win three turns for your side and it's yours, until someone sails in and takes it back. You build, characters move in with goals of their own, and a narrator tells you what went down while you were gone.
You can play it entirely by voice. The screen is optional but fully interactive: a live map, your ship and the story playing out on stream, with chat in the middle of it. A step towards getting people off screens with entirely new genres of what I believe will be more ethical voice first gaming models.
None of this was held back by imagination. It was held back by closed platforms. Give builders an open one and they'll surprise all of us.
Join us in building the future of AI
At OpenHome, we’re building a future where AI is freed from chat to become an ambient intelligence layer woven into everyday life. OpenHome provides the hardware, platform, and community that enable developers to create voice-first experiences for the physical spaces people work and live in.
Through our open-source Voice SDK, local models, sensor layer, and DevKit, OpenHome turns a home device into an intelligent, conversational interface that can listen, sense, understand, and act in the real world.
To learn more, join our Discord, read our blog, and check out our developer docs.