Village Ventures

Matt is the co-founder and Managing General Partner of Village Ventures, focusing on financial services. Some of his key investments include BlueTarp, Consumer United, Dwolla, iSend, On Deck Capital, Simple, TxVia and Zipmark.  Matt is also the Managing Director of Bain Capital Ventures focusing on same sector. Earlier in his career, Matt worked at Bain Capital in the private equity group.

The central theme of most of Matt’s investing has been the secular trend of increasing penetration of non-financial institutions into the financial services industry.  Much of that thesis is laid out in this blog post (http://mattftw.com/financial-services/in-defense-of-banks-and-bankers-aka-tldr/), but the basic idea is that banks and other FIs are becoming more and more like regulated utilities, leaving lots of space within payments, lending, capital markets and insurance for entrepreneurial companies to take market share.  If you’re working on something that plays on these themes, Matt would love to hear from you.

Matt went to Williams College, graduating in 1994 with a degree in Political Economy.  Matt was the Captain of the Williams College Rugby Club for his junior and senior year, which as you can imagine consumed nearly all of his spare time.

Outside of work, Matt is delighted to spend time with his wife, Jessica, and their two children.  He is the Chairman of the Board of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, a regional theater associated with Williams College.  He is a Senior Advisor to Endeavor, an organization leading the global movement to catalyze long-term economic growth by selecting, mentoring and accelerating the best high-impact entrepreneurs around the world.  Matt is obsessed with military history, and some day will write a book connecting the strategy and tactics of insurgency with what he has learned about entrepreneurship.