Lara Ortiz-Luis

300 Pitches

Top highlightYou have been working tirelessly for weeks, months, maybe over a year, and after submitting your application to Matter’s accelerator program, you’ve been asked to come in and pitch. You walk into a conference room and there are 2 people sitting at a table. There’s a

Accelerator

Don’t set goals — prototype them

During the Matter accelerator program, the goal all our entrepreneurs work toward is the same: Demo Day. The path to get there varies team to team, but the core is common: at the end of the 20 week sprint, they will present the culmination of their efforts on stage in

Millennial Matter Five

Last week, we opened our garage door for the fifth time to welcome in six new companies and fifteen new entrepreneurs into our space to kick off the program with a weeklong design-thinking bootcamp. Over the next five months, they will be embarking on the rest of their Matter journey,

We Want You

Matter is looking for some smart, scrappy teammates to help us tell our stories and scale our impact better. Over the past six months Matter has added four new media partners and launched six more startups. Now, our incredible media and tech partners are helping us expand the scope of

Matter Four Reflects on Their Journey to Demo Day

Time at Matter goes quickly. We’re not kidding when we call it a sprint. (What seems like) not too long ago, we announced the fourth class of Matter entrepreneurs and companies, and dove deep into their missions and stories. But it’s already been eighteen weeks since the start

Be Positive & Defer Judgment

Key Takeaways from Brainstorming Collaboratively A few weeks ago, I participated in my (long overdue) first design thinking bootcamp at Matter. I‘ve been working at Matter for a little over a year now, and though I’ve immersed myself in the design thinking culture and mentality, it has mainly

The Strength of the Collective

Leveraging community and culture to think bigger I joined the Matter team in January of this year, just a couple of months ago. At the time, it was 13 weeks into the 20-week program for Matter’s second cohort, “Matter Two”. With only five weeks to demo day, I got

Make People Cry

How to conduct an effective user interview At Matter, we are all about a human-centered, prototype-driven design process. Why human-centered? Because humans are the users. They drive the desirability, and ultimately, the success of your product. Getting them on board is one of the greatest challenges, but this also makes

Entrepreneurial Athletics

In honor of GoPop’s 2.0 launch, we thought we’d share their story thus far. GoPop allows people to express themselves and communicate with each other visually, with interactive, two-sided “pops” made up of images, videos, and gifs. The team (formerly called Zeega) are alumni from the very