Pat Matthews
Founder of Active Capital
Pat Matthews
Founder of Active Capital
San Antonio, Texas Metropolitan Area
Overview
Work Experience
Founder & CEO
2017 - Current
Active Capital is a venture firm focused on leading pre-seed rounds for business software and cloud infrastructure companies. We invest in ambitious founders who are building at the intersection of SaaS, cloud, and AI. We love founders who are willing to stay super scrappy until finding true product market fit. Our initial check size is typically in the $500k-$1M range and we will invest significantly more as companies grow and our relationship develops. We like to invest early and prefer to be a material part of the first $1-2M raised.
CEO
2015 - 2017
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Senior Vice President, Corporate Development
2012 - 2013
• Moved into corporate development role after integrating the cloud computing business into the broader Rackspace core business offering • Maintained my role in the Rackspace senior leadership team as one of its longest standing members • Lead the acquisition and integration of four tech startups and strategic investments in three other companies • Maintained P&L responsibility for several entrepreneurial teams across Rackspace, which added up to more than $100 million in annual revenue and 20% year over year growth. I was the only senior leader in the company with material end-to-end P&L responsibility as the rest of the company was structured in functional units
Senior Vice President, Cloud Computing
2010 - 2012
• Relocated from Blacksburg to San Antonio to lead all cloud computing products and business units, including mail • Promoted to Senior Vice President and joined the Rackspace senior leadership team as its youngest member in 2011 • Maintained responsibilities for cloud computing division as well as corporate marketing and several remote offices including Austin, San Francisco, and Blacksburg. This gave me responsibility for more than 2,000 Rackers. • Lead these groups through a massive growth stage with some products growing as fast as 20% per month at times; these units, including mail, were on a $60 million run-rate in 2010 and more than $250 million run-rate by the middle of 2012 • Consistently had top leadership engagement scores personally and throughout the organizations I lead • Came up with the name Openstack in the weeks leading up to its launch
Vice President, Email & Apps
2007 - 2010
• Continued to run the email hosting business inside of Rackspace from our startup headquarters in Blacksburg, Virginia • Successfully launched Microsoft Exchange hosting in addition to the mail service we created as a startup; many customers used both platforms • Lead the mail division through rapid growth going from $10 million run-rate in in 2008 to $35 million in 2010 • Recognized inside the company as one of the leaders with the highest employee engagement scores across the company
CEO & Co-Founder
1999 - 2007
• Dropped out of school in 1999 to start a dot-com with college friends; raised nearly $100k to build and launch our initial idea—a search engine for local events, powered by user-generated content (we also gave away free email accounts to users that signed up for our service) • Quickly realized our ideas were flawed and pivoted the business, turning the tech we built into a custom content management system that we sold to newspapers on a subscription basis (we also allowed newspapers to give away free email accounts to users that signed up for their services) • During our failure and figure it out years my co-founder and I took turns going back to school and getting our degrees while still running the business and working side jobs. I graduated from Virginia Tech with a bachelor of science in finance in May of 2002 • While gaining modest traction selling our software-as-a-service platform to newspapers, we started getting lots of inbound interest from companies that simply wanted us to host their email. So in 2002 we pivoted our business again, this time focusing 100% on hosting email for businesses • Lead our fledgling startup from $100,000 in revenue in 2002 to a run-rate of nearly $10 million in 2007 after only raising $500,000 from outside investors • Continuously received local and regional awards for being the best place to work in southwest Virginia • Recognized as #217 on the Inc. 500 fastest growing private companies in America in 2007 • Successfully sold the company to Rackspace in September of 2007 in a stock deal worth nearly $50 million. Rackspace was private at the time of our sale but went public one year later.
Education
Bachelor of Science (BS)
1995 - 2002