Pat Matthews
Hi, I'm Pat.
I'm an entrepreneur turned investor who's spent my entire career starting, scaling, and investing in startups.
In 1999, I dropped out of Virginia Tech to launch a dot-com with a few of my best friends and college roommates. After the bubble burst and years of doom and gloom, we started to notice a shift, businesses were beginning to demand software delivered over the internet. SaaS was becoming real, and we went all in.
From 2002 to 2007, we built a $10M ARR SaaS company on just $500K of outside capital. We bootstrapped to our first $1M in recurring revenue, raised a bit of money, and built a great team and culture. We hosted email for tens of thousands of businesses around the world, all from a small college town: Blacksburg, Virginia.
In 2007, we were acquired by Rackspace, our hosting partner at the time. Rackspace, based in San Antonio, was one of the fastest-growing tech companies of that era, with $300M in annual revenue when we joined. A year later, August 2008, we went public, right as the financial crisis hit. Going public is wild. Going public during a global meltdown is even wilder.
I stayed at Rackspace for six years, longer than any other founder they acquired, and I loved it. I was drawn to the culture of fanatical support, our positioning in a crowded market, and the challenge of building at scale. I ended up running the fastest-growing parts of the business, SaaS and cloud computing, and helped grow the company from $300M to $1.5B in revenue, profitably.
After Rackspace, I spent a couple years investing, advising, and figuring out what I wanted to build next. I loved working with early-stage founders but didn't want to be a passive investor. So in 2017, I combined my operator instincts with my investor mindset, and started Active Capital.
Active Capital is a venture firm focused on pre-seed investing in the future of enterprise software & cloud infrastructure. We back ambitious, technical founders, often in underdog cities across America, who are building software & AI products to solve real business problems. We invest $500k to $1M in small pre-seed rounds and reserve capital to write bigger checks in future rounds.
Today, I live in San Antonio with my teenage son. I spend a lot of time in Austin and on the road visiting the cities where our founders are building. I love traveling the world, spending time with great people, and having fun along the way.
