In recent years, the productivity race among Silicon Valley types has given rise to myriad companies that hawk “smart drugs” online. These pills go far beyond familiar prescription stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin, long used and abused by college kids and Wall Street workers. Instead, the companies research obscure foreign powders and fill their capsules with everything from Ayurvedic herbs to krill oil.

“Look to how you can optimize yourself,” Matzner said, using one of his favorite verbs. “The body offers plenty of weaknesses that can potentially be overcome.” Midway through the presentation, he unleashed one of his favorite theories: “If somebody invented a drug that improved the brains of the world’s 10 million scientists by 1 percent,” Matzner said, paraphrasing the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, “it would be like creating 100,000 new scientists.”

He opened the floor to questions. About half the audience had already tried nootropics, but some seemed skeptical.

“If you want to be seen as more than a snake-oil salesman,” one man said, “you need to have some sort of app using video games or other tasks that we can use to test your product.”

“Hundred percent agree with you!,” Matzner exclaimed. “Already under development!”

Matzner heard the call of nootropics five years ago. He was living in New York, running a different start-up and struggling to manage everything himself. One minute he’d be coding something; the next, he’d be reading a book about advertising so he could write some ad copy. At first, he turned to prescription medications, including amphetamines and modafinil (also marketed as Provigil), an anti-narcolepsy drug. But he soon realized that what he needed was not simply wakefulness so much as the ability to learn faster.

He switched to piracetam and, after noticing improvements in his attention span and reaction time, joined online nootropics communities in an effort to hone his “stack,” or daily pill regimen. “I took it a lot further than probably most of the people there,” he told me, in his signature auctioneer-on-speed cadence. Actually, scratch that. An auctioneer speaks at 250 words a minute, Matzner explained. He figures his own pace is just north of 160. “But I hope my fidelity is high!” he added.

To select the right nutrients, Matzner wrote a web script to automatically download studies of interesting compounds, which he stockpiled in various Dropbox folders. For harder-to-get research, he emailed German libraries and corresponded with the Russian nootropics pioneer Rita Ostrovskaya.

Before long, Matzner was spending more time researching nootropics than working on his start-up. In 2014, he launched Nootroo and relocated to San Francisco, home to many of his customers and competitors.

Two of Nootroo’s rivals, Nootrobox and truBrain, have attracted millions from venture capitalists, but Matzner hasn’t taken on investors, saying he prefers it that way. He told me that Nootroo has a few thousand customers, who pay $64.95 for a 30-day supply or $54.95 for a monthly subscription, and he says his customer base is growing by 20 percent each month. He recently introduced one-hour delivery in San Francisco.