After a decade on the east coast, I’m excited to announce that I’ve returned back to the west coast as an early stage investor with Matrix Partners in the Bay Area. I’m beyond excited to be joining this incredible team to help invest and support the next wave of bold entrepreneurs.
The last ten years in Ithaca and then NYC have been transformative. I’m lucky to have had the opportunity to learn at a couple of great schools and then learn some more at the first few stops on my career journey. Most recently, while working in the High-Tech and Fast Growth Tech practices as McKinsey, I worked with a dozen companies on everything from marketing & sales to customer success to go-to-market strategy. It was rapid-fire exposure to many of the key challenges founders and management teams face in the early stages and as they scale.
While I enjoyed this experience immensely, I found myself wanting to work with founders earlier in their journey and over much longer periods of time. Being there with the entrepreneur as an advocate through both good times and bad is what makes a successful outcome all the more rewarding. So when the opportunity at Matrix opened up, I knew I had to go for it.
Matrix Partners has been quietly but consistently racking up wins for four decades over ten funds—a deep track record that few firms in the venture business can claim to have. In the early days, Matrix invested in the likes of Apple, SanDisk and FedEx. More recent investments include: Acacia Communications, HubSpot, Oculus and Zendesk. And there are some great companies in the portfolio well on their way like Lever, Namely, Quora and Activehours, among many others. The firm is also very well positioned internationally with presences in both India and China.
More important than this track record though, the team at Matrix is full of high quality people. The group has a diverse set of skills and a wide range of expertise (check them out here), but they share one thing in common: a deep commitment to supporting the visionary entrepreneurs who join the Matrix family all the way. And they do this with integrity, class and style.
I’m pumped to be joining this team, making the move back to CA and beginning to meet the founders and operators building the companies of tomorrow. If you’re embarking on this journey – let’s chat!
You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter and Quora. I also actively write about technology, startups and investing on my personal blog here.
Allen Miller 