Rebecca Radnaev

Design Thinking

Why entrepreneurs love our program.

Shared by Nadya Lev, CEO of Aconite, part of Matter Six. Going through Matter was one of the most intense, rewarding experiences of my life. With Matter’s guidance, my co-founder and I were able to take a deeper dive than ever before, both into our own personal aspirations, and

Startup

🎧 The Drunken Walk, S1-E6: Matt Hartman— Partner, Betaworks

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that, as an early stage entrepreneur, the better you know how investors think, the better you’ll know how to pitch to them when you’re fundraising. That’s why we have Matt Hartman, Partner at Betaworks, on this final episode of our first

Media

🎧 The Drunken Walk, S1-E5: Jessica Lessin— Founder, The Information

Our guest on this episode is an incredible example of a journalist turned media entrepreneur: Jessica Lessin, 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

Media

🎧 The Drunken Walk, S1-E4: Melissa Bell — Publisher, Vox Media

We’re back with another incredible media entrepreneur whose story of scrappiness and tenacity shows that, with the right mindset, anything is possible. 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

Media

🎧 The Drunken Walk, S1-E3: Chloe Sladden— Founding Partner, #Angels

Welcome to the next installment of our 6-part podcast series sharing the personal stories that illustrate the tumultuous journey of the media entrepreneur. Our guest this week, Chloe Sladden, has worked as an assistant to a literary agent, a management consultant in media, a director of documentary film, a VP

Startup

🎧 The Drunken Walk, S1-E2: Peter Koechley— Co-founder, Upworthy

We’re excited to have you along for the next episode in our The Drunken Walk podcast series. This time our guest is Peter Koechley, the co-founder and co-CEO of Upworthy. You know how that hockey stick curve, up and to the right, is the holy grail of startup growth?

Startup

🎧 The Drunken Walk, S1-E1: Danielle Morrill — CEO, Mattermark

Welcome to The Drunken Walk, a new podcast series exploring the journey of the media entrepreneur! At Matter, we know that success doesn’t happen because of a perfect plan. Hypothesis-testing, action, learnings, and adjustments are all a necessary part of innovation. And sometimes the dead-ends and changes of direction

Media

Matter invests in NewsWhip’s $6.4M Series A

Andrew Mullaney (CTO) and Paul Quigley (CEO) co-founded NewsWhip six years ago. Mullaney spent six months as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Matter’s San Francisco office.We’re pleased to announce that Matter is making a follow-on investment in the trending stories platform, NewsWhip. The Dublin, Ireland-based company has raised $6.

Crowdfunding

Matter startup Huzza is acquired by Kickstarter

Justin Womersley and Nick Smit of Huzza built and launched Kickstarter Live, a livestreaming feature based on HuzzaHuzza, the livestreaming platform for musicians and artists that was accelerated as part of our Matter Five cohort, has been acquired by the global crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter. Last year co-founders Justin Womersley and

Startup

“You’re borrowing time now to get more time later.”

Top highlightDanielle Morrill practices radical candor. “I got into Y-Combinator as a solo female founder, probably with the only launched product that had revenue. So I was like feeling like a bada** motherf*****. But then it turned out that [referrals] is a terrible business.” She closed down her YC-backed startup,

360 Video

As Easy as Pie

The Pie team: co-founder Guillaume Sabran, co-founder Ceci Mourkogiannis, Lead Mobile Engineer Luis Grimaldo, and co-founder Jacob Trefethen360 video is the medium for immersive storytelling, and thanks to Pie, anyone can do it. The Matter 5 company has just announced its seed round and launched an iOS app that allows

Media

2016: the year of “we did it”.

Our plucky entrepreneurs go through “the garage door” on their first day of Bootcamp, and of the Matter Six program, in San Francisco (June 13th, 2016)Every year of Matter’s history has ushered in landmark achievements, but 2016 has had more firsts than most. As the entrepreneurs of our

Entrepreneurship

On being bicoastal.

Expanding from San Francisco to New York City has always been on Matter’s roadmap. Ever since our first class in 2012, Matter One, we’ve held Demo Days on both coasts, seeking to unite the capital of innovation with the capital of media. In February of this year we

Media

Our first European partner.

Tamedia’s headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland.Matter is excited to announce that Switzerland’s largest private domestic media group, Tamedia, is joining as our eleventh partner — the first based in Europe. This is a huge opportunity for us to scale our impact on the European continent by collaborating with a

Media

“We ended up launching Vox in 9 weeks.”

“I’m so proud of Vox.com,” says Melissa Bell, welling up slightly. “They’re just so talented and they’re doing such incredible work and it’s so different from what we pictured it to be in so many different ways.” Bell helped co-found the news vertical of the

Startup

“We don’t do a lot with atoms. We’re much more interested in electrons.”

Betaworks is a hybrid beast. Part VC firm, part incubator, part workshop, its core business is the “studio” where new consumer internet companies are built from scratch. Every line of code is written by a Betaworks employee. After a product is released into the world, if it gets positive traction,

Media

“For some reason it’s kind of a ‘bad thing’ to just write kick ass articles.”

Some said it was too expensive. Others said it would never scale. But Jessica Lessin ignored the naysayers and stuck to her convictions. Almost three years ago, the former Wall Street Journal tech reporter founded The Information, an in-depth, online-only publication that combines rigorous investigative journalism with technology and business

Entrepreneurship

A couple of pivots, lots of pitches, and a party.

We’re more than halfway through our 20-week program in San Francisco and New York City. Our teams have survived an intense design thinking bootcamp and three design reviews. They’ve heard 7 inspiring speakers. They’ve participated in workshops and shareouts. They’ve learned how to analyze top-down trends,

Startup

“Getting to product/market fit AND being differentiated — that’s what’s hard.”

The term “growth hacker” first gained momentum in 2013. Back then, it might have seemed like a fad; now it’s ubiquitous in Silicon Valley. But what does it really mean to “hack” growth — and can you do it sustainably? Andrew Chen, a member of the growth team at Uber

Media

“If a million people saw this story, would it make the world a better place?”

In February, 2011, 19 year-old University of Iowa student, Zach Wahls, spoke before a Iowa House of Representatives public forum to oppose an anti-marriage-equality measure. Later that year, an intern at MoveOn, a progressive advocacy organization, suggested sharing the video of his speech on its site. One catchy headline — “Two

Media

“Relentlessness is my middle name.”

We take User-Generated Content for granted as part of TV news coverage today, but that trend had to start somewhere. Chloe Sladden had a major role to play in its genesis: at Current TV, she became the first person to integrate tweets into a live broadcast. The breakthrough almost didn’

Bill Simmons

“I said, listen, I will recite the Jets’ season record from the last 5 years.”

Top highlightThe first thing that strikes you about Dheerja Kaur is her energy. She’s like a highly focused tornado that can spin an audience into a state of excited attention within moments of starting to speak. We were thrilled when Kaur agreed to join our New York-based class for

Journalism

Listen up! Hearken’s got something to say

SO MUCH GOOD STUFF that I almost don’t know where to start. Good thing, then, that we’re going to hear all about it from chief awesome lady boss herself, Jennifer Brandel. Jenn and co-founder Corey Haines went through our program more than a year ago, as part of

Podcast

“Our product is to surprise you.”

Top highlightFor our first time hosting a guest speaker in our New York City location, we had a clear vision: to bring in inspiring entrepreneurs from a mission-driven, venture-backed NYC media startup. Alex Blumberg and Matt Lieber, co-founders of Gimlet Media, the 2 year-old Brooklyn-based podcasting company behind titles including

Entrepreneurship

Matter’s Lucky 13

[Update: the final number of teams to complete our program was 12, after This. sadly closed down at the end of July, 2016.] Who says 13 isn’t a lucky number? At 10 a.m. on June 13th, the 13 teams in our sixth class met each other for the