What's new |
About me |
mlent (a blog) |
Social media |
Contact details
What's new |
About me |
mlent (a blog) |
Social media |
Contact details
I've (finally) made a blog! Check out my first post.
I'm currently co-founder of Keeper, a new app where friends play matchmaker. We're backed by Tandem Capital, and if you like what we're building, we're raising money.
I sometimes angel invest in startups. My current investments include the following companies:
Status: Since I invested in 2012 via a convertible note, Aperia raised a $5.7m Series B, and $6.75m Series B-1, with more news to come soon :) Omaze has likewise recently raised additional capital since their seed, a $9m Series A. Process Street hopefully won't be needing capital for awhile.
I currently own some multifamily properties in Providence, RI, a city in need of some love. The Wall Street Journal likes it at least.
I also co-founded Wattadu - an iOS app where making plans is as simple as drag and drop. It's available on the Apple App Store, if you're curious.
I was raised in Springfield, VA, in Fairfax County, and am the son of a public high school mathematics teacher and IT training specialist / project manager. My parents worked hard to send my sister and me to some of the world's best public schools, and get us involved in extracurricular activities. As a kid I was heavily involved in Scouting, where I achieved the rank of Eagle Scout. While I was a freshman in high school, my amazing sister, Natalie Bruss, had to up the ante and get into Harvard. Thanks, sis!
(Fun fact: My sister and I are a testament to American upward mobility: We're first-generation college students (on my dad's side), while my mother was born in Cairo, Egypt, and immigrated to the US with nothing after the Nasser regime began nationalizing businesses in the 1950s-60s).
From 2004-2008, I attended Brown University, concentrating (translation: majoring) in Economics, and Applied Math-Biology (translation: Applied Math with focus on biological applications), where I took photos for the Brown Daily Herald, sang in an a cappela group, and built an amazing Beirut table.
In 2006, co-founded BearPaw Tutors, which specialized in providing 100% subsidized tutoring for low-income students in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Washington DC, Virginia and North Carolina, finally wound-down in 2012 due to national Title I policy changes.Our program had some amazing results, with the median student realizing a full extra grade level increase in mathematics, due to our 1-on-1 tutoring primarily provided by amazing college students from Brown, Georgetown and other universities.
In 2009 started my career at Deutsche Bank doing Technology Investment Banking, where I worked with some amazing folks for a brief but formative time helping cool hardware and solar companies raise debt and equity capital on public markets.
In 2010, I was lured to Google, where as part of the People Analytics and Compensation Group, I helped improve processes related to their stock based compensation program, and wrote internal hiring tools. While at first I primarily built spreadsheets, but I later was influenced by my colleague Mattias Granlund to learn to code, at first on my own. Google paid for a couple Stanford courses which I used to get into graduate school, where...
In 2012, I attended the University of Cambridge, where I was part of the Computer Laboratory (translation: Computer Science Department), where I received a Master's degree. I wrote my thesis on Detecting Anomalies in Insider Trading.
Fun fact: My academic genealogy: my thesis adviser was Ross Anderson, and according his website, his was Roger Needham; his was Maurice Wilkes; then it
runs back through Jack Ratcliffe, Edward Appleton,
Ernest Rutherford,
JJ Thomson, Lord
Rayleigh, Edward Routh, William Hopkins, Adam Sedgwick, Thomas
Jones, Thomas
Postlethwaite, Stephen Whisson, Walter
Taylor, Roger
Smith, Roger Cotes, Isaac Newton, Isaac Barrow and Vincenzo Viviani to Galileo Galilei.
Well, those a pretty legit people. As for me following in their academic footsteps? Past performance does not necessarily predict future results.
In 2013 after Cambridge, I briefly worked at Invitation Homes in Dallas, TX, helping the world's largest owner of single family homes get a grip on its tech situation. While there I moonlighted and began work on Wattadu, which caught the attention of Tandem Capital, who funded my latest venture, Keeper.
I enjoy guitar, drinking beer, riding bikes and hiking
I live in San Francisco, CA, where investors actually take risks, and accordingly, things get built. It's a gold rush right now, but this time, everyone is creating things to make the world better. The original gold rush people were digging up some element from one spot underground and moving it into a vault elsewhere... also underground.
I am a dog lover. After I went to the UK, my folks took watch of my Australian Cattle Dog, Lawrence, but he still holds a special place in my heart.
Email me: matthew.lent@gmail.com and for the nerdy/paranoid: my PGP Key
Send a letter: Matthew Lent, 8301 Lindside Way, Springfield, VA, 22153, USA; That's a stable mailing address... but I live in SF
A note on this website's design (or lack thereof): I'm focusing on function, not form, and decided to go with a vintage look. Happens to be much easier to maintain, and web one-dot-oh is never going to change! Credit to my thesis advisor, Ross Anderson for the design inspiration.
