About Me

Hi, my name is Matt Venables. I'm a dad, husband, software engineer, angel investor, and entrepreneur living in Boston, Massachusetts.

I have spent my career building companies from the earliest stages, working up and down the tech stack, from writing cryptographic algorithms for IBM Mainframes powering big banks, to running Product/Engineering at a high-growth IPO-bound consumer product company, to successfully fundraising for several of my own startups, investing in many more, and everything in between.

I am obsessed with solving real pain points for real people with delightful, fluid product experiences for the web and your phone. I love to build amazing teams, strategize growth plans, and to write the code to make it all possible. I have had deep experience in all aspects of starting, building, growing, and running software businesses, with millions of people worldwide using my software.

My decade-long immersion in the fintech world has allowed me to contribute substantially to influential crypto products, such as the USDC stablecoin and Verite, the decentralized identity protocol. These projects have grown to be some of the most important cornerstones of the global Web3 ecosystem.

I love to write software that helps people live happier, healthier lives. In my free time, I created jog.fm and songbpm.com, which help over a million unique people per month improve their health and fitness. There's plenty more on the way there.

In 2022, I co-founded Catena Labs where I am CTO. We are a product studio building tools to help bring AI to every app. We have built out one of the most amazing teams I've ever worked with (and we're hiring!).

Prior to that, I founded M2 Labs, a web3 dev shop dedicated to building out cross-chain dApps to help demystify crypto. We co-authored the Verite decentralized identity standard which is being used by Block (formerly Square), Polygon, Circle, Ledger, MetaMask, Coinbase, Solana, and many others.

I also founded Vested, a successful secondary market for private company stock, to help employees understand and maximize the value of their equity compensation.

Before that, I was an early executive of Circle, where I helped grow the company from 6 people to a multi-billion dollar powerhouse. At Circle, I was responsible for all consumer-facing products, including our highly successful Circle Pay and Circle Invest apps, as well as helping to create the USDC stablecoin.

Most of all, I am always learning, evolving, and trying to be 1% better every day.

You can learn more about what I'm doing right now on my "now" page (thanks to Derek Sivers for the inspiration), or read what I've been thinking about lately.

Or you can DM me on X, or get in touch with me some other way.