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’
Entrepreneurship If you want exponential growth, forget linear thinking. Top highlight We repeat it every day here at Matter: the success of any media startup depends on its ability to match top-down trends with a bottom-up user point of view. That formula — easier to say than to achieve — has burnt millions of entrepreneurial neurons throughout history. But digital technology
Entrepreneurship What does it really mean to be an entrepreneur? The entrepreneurs of Matter Six explain (creatively!) what entrepreneurship is all about“I want to be an entrepreneur.” I hear these words constantly on my college campus. And I can’t help but cringe each time. Over the past decade, entrepreneurship has become the “new hot thing.” As a social
Podcast “Our product is to surprise you.” Top highlight For our first time hosting a guest speaker in our New York City [https://news.matter.vc/matter-has-launched-in-nyc] 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 [https://gimletmedia.com/
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
Theatre Discovering stories that Matter. Jamie stood in the centre of the room, examining the dusty walls as her eyes adjusted to the dim light. Where she stood had power. Power for challenge, expression, questions and connection. These were no ordinary four walls. > This was a theatre. This theatre could be anywhere. One of
Startup No Plan, Best Plan Four years ago I found myself about to jump out of an airplane (with a parachute) in the middle of the Namibian desert, after I thought I was just going to spend my day at the beach. During a year at sea with an experiential education school called Class Afloat
Entrepreneurship The “Drunken Walk” of the Summer Intern “So what are your summer plans?” …The dreaded question for any college student, second only to inquiries about post-college career aspirations. Most students must either fabricate an impressive-sounding façade for bumming around at the beach or be prepared to explain precisely how their internship will translate to real-life skills and
Media What IS media, anyway? What is media? At Matter [http://matter.vc] we ask ourselves this question a lot. Entrepreneurs ask us this question a lot. It’s led to fascinating discussions with our partners and mentors. It’s the question that comes up time and time again at the talks we give about
Startup 300 Pitches Top highlight You 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
Startup How to know you’re ready to leave ‘traditional’ journalism for the media startup world Top highlight Motherly’s Liz Tenety and Jill Koziol listen to feedback from panelists at a Matter Design ReviewThe upcoming deadline for the sixth class of Matter, a design thinking accelerator for early stage media companies in SF and NYC [http://matter.vc], has me thinking about all the reasons
Accelerator Don’t set goals — prototype them During the Matter accelerator program [http://matter.vc/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
Entrepreneurship Defining Change Media for Good Across three years and 49 startups, Matter, its teams, mentors, and partners have worked to “change media for good”. Like the rest of the team, it’s why I joined. It’s what we’re passionate about. It’s what gets us out of bed. It makes us feel like
Entrepreneurship Meet Nikita! Top highlight Matter is the kind of special community and place that compels someone to quit their first job out of college in 6 months. Of course, by someone I mean me. Three years ago, I was a sophomore at UNC-Chapel Hill with strong opinions about what I wanted to
Startup Looking Back At Matter Lots of memories and post-its in this place.When we began our journey with Matter, either 19 weeks or a lifetime ago depending on how you measure time, we knew nothing — especially not how little we knew. That only became apparent over time, as each passing day brought crucial lessons
Startup Sprinting for the finish line. Top highlight Much like life, entrepreneurship has often been described as “a marathon, not a sprint [http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylewong/2014/11/12/startups-are-a-marathon-not-a-sprint-run-at-your-own-pace/] .” But no one said a marathon can’t be made up of sprints — those short, sharp bursts of energy that bring you closer to
Media Taking stock, and a look ahead. It’s the end of a jam-packed year at Matter, a year that will see twelve companies complete two twenty-week accelerator programs back-to-back. That pace is pretty mind-boggling to me, Matter’s greenhorn storyteller, newly onboarded. Since I joined ten days ago, I’ve learned a stack about what this
Startup What We’ve Learned In a Month (and a Year) Plus, an Announcement about Beta Testing! One year ago today, we were just embarking on this adventure, laying the groundwork for what would become Verbatm. The concept was murky and the company was months away from being established, but a general semblance of goals and structure was emerging. We worked
Media The Next Chapter Almost exactly two years ago, my Co-Founders and I joined the first class of companies at Matter in San Francisco, a mission-driven accelerator focused on transforming media and culture. Today, GoPop has been acquired by BuzzFeed. This means I am starting a new job leading product for BuzzFeed’s core
