General Partner
Matt is always seeking adventure, and he is constantly searching for travelers to join him; an ethos he brings to investing. He led white water rafting tours down the Arkansas River in Colorado. He learned to mountaineer and rock climb in West Virginia, and he spent a summer in Tanzania and safari-ed with the Maasai and slept in the wilderness with the gentle roar of lions and also in Jane Goodall’s banda on the east shore of Lake Tanganyika while trekking for chimpanzees. For each of these adventures, he always journeys with a partner, and he values long standing relationships that form during these journeys. Each year he takes an annual backpacking trip with his childhood friends from Kentucky; last year was backpacking in Zion; next up is Idaho. A common thread in his life and career has been adventure, mixed with constant curiosity and a focus on building relationships.
Matt’s career has similarly been an adventure driven by curiosity and relationships. Over the last 20+ years he has designed advanced concepts for commercial aircraft, developed renewable energy projects, invested in clean energy entrepreneurs in Africa, created policy for the UN and was a deep-tech investor Battery Ventures.
More recently, he was the first employee at Salesforce Ventures, and for 8+ years he built the global team that became one of the most successful and collaborative investors in enterprise tech. While there, he invested in and supported foundational companies with a combined market capitalization of over $100B, including companies, such as Anaplan (IPO), Gainsight (acq. Vista), MuleSoft (IPO), NCino (IPO), Snowflake (IPO), ThousandEyes (acq. Cisco), Twilio (IPO) and Zoom (IPO). Most recently he was a general partner at CRV where he invested in companies including Power Finance (acq. Marqeta) and Instil. Matt holds a BS in Materials Science and Engineering from Purdue University, and an MBA/MS in Natural Resources and Environment from the University of Michigan.
He remains curious and excited about the potential for software and enterprise technology over the next decade-plus. Companies have been investing in the cloud for some time, and the full benefits are just beginning to be realized. Advancements in managing and utilizing large sets of data are finally making it possible to automate and enable insights and productivity across entire enterprises. AI is maturing to a place that will drive amazing efficiencies in a wide range of industries, as it can now be consumed by developers through an API, similar to what cloud computing did for enterprise software 20 years ago.
Matt invests in companies that follow many of these society-altering trends: He invests in data-first applications; apps that combine data, AI/ML and automation to simplify and combine job functions; industry vertical SaaS that layers in payments and marketplaces. As a former deep-tech engineer and investor, he is also looking for software solutions that improve legacy industries such as manufacturing and tackle larger issues around climate.