From Unhoused to Onchain with sober companion services in-between

On a Wednesday night in West Hollywood, in a living room that could have been the setting for a book club or a startup pitch night, a handful of people gathered under a banner of unlikely words: Entrepreneurs in Recovery.

The premise was audacious in its simplicity. What if the restless energy of addiction, the hustle, the scheming, the obsession could be redirected into something generative? Businesses. Communities. New lives.

Among the circle was a man named Matthew Meakin. He was tall, bright-eyed, compulsively curious, the kind of person who filled silence with a flood of ideas: new ventures, new projects, new ways to connect people. He was the kind of person who, given the right environment, might build a company that could change the world. There was just one problem. Matthew was addicted to fentanyl.

For two decades, he had been cycling through an exhausting loop: more than thirty treatment centers, more overdoses than he could count, a pendulum swinging between hope and despair. At his lowest, he pitched a tent in downtown Los Angeles, a place where heroin and fentanyl weren’t just drugs, but the currency of survival. His parents, Leslie and Marcus, had already emptied their pockets and their patience trying to save him. All they had left was grief.

This is where most stories of addiction end: another young man lost to the statistics. But in 2019, Matthew crossed paths with Alex Shohet. At first, Matthew asked him to be his sponsor. Then he began attending the Red Door Entrepreneurs in Recovery meetings. Alex saw something most people had long since stopped noticing, Matthew’s intelligence wasn’t dulled by fentanyl. His vision, his drive, and his spark were still intact, waiting for someone to take them seriously.

When Red Door relocated from a modest house in West Hollywood to a larger facility in Bel Air, Alex made Matthew an offer: a one-year scholarship covering detox, housing, food, and trauma-informed care. It was a bet not just on his sobriety, but on his potential.

Of course, it wasn’t a clean story arc. Matthew relapsed. He lied. He experimented with psychedelics.   And yet, unlike so many other programs, Red Door didn’t throw him out for relapsing on fentanyl or experimenting with ways to overcome his years of substance abuse. Relapse was met not with punishment, but with understanding and support. That subtle difference, trust instead of abandonment, changed everything. Slowly, honesty replaced deceit. And honesty gave recovery a fighting chance.

With medication-assisted treatment, trauma therapy, and Red Door’s twelve-dimensional model of health, Matthew began to stabilize. He earned a commercial driver’s license. He launched Overdose LA, handing out Narcan on Skid Row, at Pride, and at music festivals. He co-founded Mitra Wellness, helping people taper safely off prescription drugs before pursuing psychedelic therapy. Red Door Life's sober companion services company employed Matthew, where he traveled the world as a sober companion, earning more than he’d ever imagined. “At one point,” Alex remembers, “Matt was making more money than I as CEO. And I couldn’t have been happier.”

Something fundamental had shifted. He wasn’t taking anymore, taking from the streets, from his parents, from the system. He was giving back. Narcan. Mentorship. Ideas that might one day reimagine how recovery is measured and supported.

By 2024, Matthew and Alex had co-launched Onchain Wellness, exploring how blockchain and cryptocurrency could support individuals in recovery, particularly those struggling with gambling and financial addictions. A year later, Matthew moved to Playa del Carmen with his girlfriend, Natasha, a professional pole dancer and instructor, to immerse himself in programming.

He had been coding for just five months when he applied to a hackathon at the Onchain Summit in San Francisco. He got in. With support from Ibriz, a team of developers from Nepal, Matthew built a concierge app for Coinbase’s Base network. Claudia Haddad, BASE’s product manager for agents, was so impressed she had him deploy it at BASE Camp 2025 in Vermont and gave the application the name “Rocky.”

Rocky wasn’t just an app; it was proof. Proof that AI agents could facilitate real-world community connections, autonomously performing transactions on the blockchain. Proof that someone once written off as hopeless could stand on a stage beside some of the brightest minds in crypto.

From the tents of Los Angeles to the spotlight of BASE Camp, Matthew’s journey illustrates a different kind of success story. Not abstinence, not perfection, but transformation. From dependence to independence. From consuming to contributing. From barely surviving to shaping the future.

And that, in the end, may be the real lesson of Red Door Life: recovery is not about returning people to who they were before. It’s about betting, again and again, on who they might become.