Matt Venables Email & Phone Number

Boston, Ma, Us

As Co-Founder and CTO of Catena Labs, I am part of an incredible team dedicated to developing delightful consumer experiences in AI and the decentralized identity spaces. Our work is focused on bringing bleeding-edge technologies to mainstream audiences through intuitively obvious user experiences. We are backed by some of the worlds best investors, such as Breyer Capital, Pillar, Circle Ventures, CMS Holdings, CoinFund, and a notable array of angel investors.

I build and operate several high traffic web and mobile apps focused on Music and Fitness under the Blendist name.Some notable projects include:jog.fm: Launched in 2010 as a tool to make my workouts less boring, the service has grown to consistently attract several hundred thousand athletes every month. jog.fm has been featured in several prominant books, magazines, and newspapers including: Wired, Scientific American, Washington Post, Men's Health, People, SHAPE, Runner's World, Health, Real Simple, and many others.SongBPM: Launched in 2011, the single-purpose service has attracted even more fanfare than jog.fm, consistently bringing in over half a million unique users per month. SongBPM has been featured in several books, magazines and newspapers including: TIME, The Today Show, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, Washington Post, Women's Health, Men's Journal, Men's Health, SHAPE, Real Simple, LifeHacker, Marie Claire, Huffington Post, ADIDAS and many others.

As an Angel Investor, I bring my rich industry knowledge and experience to support early-stage software companies. My focus is on identifying and nurturing innovative startups by offering ongoing mentorship and guidance to help these enterprises navigate their unique growth trajectories. The goal of my investment strategy is not only to fuel technological innovation, but also to foster a happier, healthier, more efficient future for everyone.

As the founder of M2 Labs, a Web3 Product Development consultancy and studio, my focus has been on creating innovative and practical digital experiences across all blockchains for a broad spectrum of clients. Our proudest achievements include building the decentralized identity standard Verite, which is now used by major blockchain firms such as Block, Polygon, Circle, Ledger, and others. Outside of writing smart contracts and building dapps for our clients, we bootstrapped several Web3 products including the analytics platform usdc.cool. This platform received notable recognition, featuring in esteemed publications like the Wall Street Journal.After several successful product launches, we decided to fundraise and merge M2 Labs into Catena Labs

Miami, Fl, Us

After witnessing first-hand how employee stock option compensation can be mismanaged, I founded Vested In 2019 with the goal of helping employees understand and maximize the value of their equity based compensation. Backed by Underscore VC and Boston Seed Capital, my team and I built innovative non-recourse financing solutions powered by dynamic AI-powered decision engines and apps to enable employees at any private company to exercise their stock options efficiently while minimizing tax burdens.Our fundamental principle at Vested was to make stock option compensation understandable and accessible to everyone, empowering employees to fully benefit from their deserved compensation. By successfully blending education, transparency, and finance, Vested emerged as a pioneer in championing the rights of employees, and has successfully helped employees realize millions of dollars from their equity.

Remote First, Us

Remote First, Us

As an early contributor and key executive at Circle (backed by Goldman Sachs, IDG, Breyer Capital, Accel, General Catalyst and more), I played an instrumental role in scaling the startup from a six-person team to an over 300 person organization with a $3 billion valuation.Leading the product/engineering teams for our suite of consumer products, I was responsible for building, growing, strategizing, and hiring the best talent in the world. Early in my tenure, our team launched the Circle for Bitcoin app (later Circle Pay), one of the worlds first crypto wallets, providing users ease and security in buying, selling, and transferring bitcoin across multiple platforms. We scaled that business to millions of transactions handling instant cross-border FX and payments across USD, GBP, EUR, and BTC.In tune with the company's exponential growth, I also steered the development and GTM for Circle Invest - our second consumer product, which introduced customers to simple and accessible investment opportunities in a wide selection of cryptocurrencies. Navigating the company's expansion through strategic acquisitions, I was part of the M&A team that acquired the worlds leading cryptocurrency exchange, Poloniex, in 2018 and led the acquisition of several smaller companies to enhance the Poloniex platform.Building on this, in 2018 I was privileged to be part of the small team that built and launched USDC - now the industry's most trusted stablecoin.

Newburyport, Massachusetts, Us

Following Brightcove's IPO, I was hand picked to help build Circle's first products via Rocket Insights.Shortly after starting these projects, Circle acquired our company to build their products full-time.

Boston, Massachusetts, Us

While on a long-term full-time contract with Brightcove from Cantina, I was part of a select team entrusted with the development and continuous enhancement of Brightcove's no-code mobile app development platform, called AppCloud. This innovative product was one of the first large-scale no-code offerings, and significantly increased the reach of it's customers (large media companies) by making their content more accessible across devices with minimal effort.

Boston, Ma, Us

I was brought into Cantina Consulting after meeting them at BusRadio. As a rapidly growing consultancy, I was tasked with a a wide array of projects, leading the firms Ruby on Rails practice. While at Cantina, I developed significant products for organizations like Philips, CJP, and the Concord Consortium. These tools were instrumental in promoting education, equality, and acceptance, reflecting the shared values of me, my team, and our clients. Beyond my project engagements, I founded and organized the Boston Ruby on Rails meetup, often serving as a speaker.

Needham, Massachusetts, Us

As the lead Software Engineer for BusRadio, a CRV-backed startup focused on safety and entertainment for students, I was focused on building high quality consumer offerings, including parental tools to track bus timing and safety (driving speed, etc), as well as a safe, inclusive, and secure social network designed for students.After seeing inefficiencies between sales, distribution, and support, I also spearheaded the development of a distributed sales and CRM tool, tailored for on-site sales and technician work. This tool significantly increased operational efficiency and streamlined workflows. In addition, I developed the software used for managing our live shows and intaking our call-ins (VoIP), giving our on-air team the tools to manage a more dynamic offering.

Waltham, Ma, Us

At Rocket Software, I was focused on implementing cryptographic algorithms for IBM Mainframes, specifically for AS/400 systems, for use in backend banking software. Alongside my cryptographic work, I helped write the Windows drivers for Western Digital's external hard drives, and worked directly with Microsoft on improvements to their 64-bit driver interfaces. This work was part of an initiative tom expand Rocket Software's service offerings beyond IBM Mainframe software development.

Cinemetrix was a boutique agency building high-quality, innovative onboarding experiences for early internet companies, including some of the first internet banks. As the primary software engineer at the firm, I guided our strategy to move away from pure Flash-based experiences to leverage ActionScript to provide much more dynamic user experiences. While at Cinemetrix, I invented an adaptive rendering engine that allowed dynamic content to be loaded or rendered based on the end-users connection speed, the unique capabilities of their device, and other network conditions. This engine was used across highly-trafficked properties such as AT&T (att.com).