The Drunken Walk

Max Ventilla is the founder of AltSchool, a collaboration between engineers and educators to help build the future of education. He’s also an accomplished serial entrepreneur whose journey has taken him through Aardvark, Google and beyond.

In this talk recorded at Matter in San Francisco, he discusses building a service culture and creating systems that put your user first. Max has spoken with each of our accelerator classes, and true to form, this session is full of actionable insights for early-stage entrepreneurs.

Lindsay Stewart and Brian McNeill are the co-founders of Stringr, a startup that took part in Matter’s third class.

Stringr allows media organizations to connect with professional and amateur videographers in order to source great footage. In this fireside chat with Roxann Stafford, our Director of Program in New York, they demystify the B2B sales cycle. Lindsay and Brian are the epitome of scrappy entrepreneurs, knocking down doors and breaking barriers in order to build relationships and grow their business.

Niles Lichtenstein was inspired to found The History Project by the memory of his father, and the moments they shared together. He and his team took part in Matter's fourth class; in this episode, he talks about his startup's journey from a very personal product at Demo Day to its current position as a way for enterprises to keep track of their institutional histories. Niles is a highly focused founder with a gift for storytelling, and we're proud to support him.

Camille Hearst is Founder and CEO at Kit, a community for helping to find the best products for any new activity or experience you want to have in your life. She cut her teeth at Apple on iTunes, and then YouTube and Google. In this episode, she discusses striving for excellence under time constraints - and the power of saying "no". Entrepreneurs have limited time and limited resources, so they need to spend their time on reducing their key risks. Camille shares what she's learned in a compelling way.

Raju Narisetti is the CEO of Gizmodo Media Group. His journey is inspiring: from a dairy salesman to the head of a digital media group at the heart of Univision. He speaks with Roxann Stafford, Matter's Director of Program in New York, in a fireside chat recorded live with Matter Seven media entrepreneurs. Raju's experience speaks to what we acknowledge at Matter; there is no straight line to success and importance of being true to yourself. Everyone fails forward throughout their careers, and the risks Raju took and the things Raju wished he had done go to show that all of us can embrace imperfection, state our assumptions, test them, and learn.

Morgan DeBaun is the CEO and co-founder of Blavity. Together with her co-founders, Morgan figured out how to build a media business that isn’t dependent on a conventional advertising model while also elevating the voices of populations too often shut out of the media — all with a constant focus on mission, on the needs of her audience, and on prototyping toward success. They’ve reinvented media in the spirit of FUBU — for us by us — for a new generation. Inclusion is about more than representation of creators: it’s about owning the means of production, too.

Matt Hartman is the Director of Seed Investments at Betaworks. It's the quintessential media/tech investment firm, with an added twist: it also develops its own products in an adjacent studio. It has spun out a slew of successful media startups including Giphy, Chartbeat, and Dots, and it’s also invested in early-stage media companies such as the audio broadcasting app, Anchor, and Parlio, which was acquired by Quora last year (and in which Matter also invested).

Jessica Lessin is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, now at the helm of the in-depth business/technology subscription publication, The Information. Before she founded The Information, Jessica was convinced that a select audience would pay for under-reported, exclusive, ad-free content pertinent to their sphere of work. And she was right. Today 10 out of the 11 CEOs of the most valuable technology companies in the U.S. pay $399 a year to access one daily article along with The Information’s vibrant community.

Melissa Bell is one of the co-founders of Vox.com, Vox Media’s news and opinion website, which she and Ezra Klein first started working on in the newsroom at The Washington Post. It was later launched, in just 9 short weeks, as part of the Vox Media empire. Melissa is now the organization’s Publisher, a role that combines her strengths as both a journalist and a technologist. She sits at the heart of the discussion about what a multi-vertical company should be in a multi-platform world. She also personifies Vox Media’s experimental culture, which encourages collaboration and cross-pollination between editorial and product, and, like Matter, tries to create a safe space in which to fail.

Chloe Sladden has worked as an assistant to a literary agent, a management consultant in media, a director of documentary film, a VP at Current TV and Twitter, an angel investor and a startup mentor. She is currently on the board of Gannett. She has negotiated the intersections of media, technology, storytelling, and entrepreneurship with rare agility, working both within major media brands, and under her own steam as a founder.