Pat Matthews
Hi, I'm Pat. I'm an entrepreneur turned investor who's been starting, scaling, and investing in startups my entire career.
In 1999 I dropped out of Virginia Tech to start a dot-com with some of my best friends and college roommates. After the dot-com bubble burst and years of doom and gloom, we started to see the IT landscape shift. Customer demand for software delivered over the internet became real. This gave rise to Software-as-a-Service and we went all in on it.
From 2002 to 2007 we built a $10 million SaaS company on just $500k of outside capital. We bootstrapped the company to $1 million in annual recurring revenue before raising money from investors. We built an amazing team and culture. We hosted email for tens of thousands of businesses all over the world. And we did it all in the tiny town of Blacksburg, Virginia, the home of Virginia Tech.
In 2007 we were acquired by Rackpace, our hosting partner at the time. Based in San Antonio, Texas, Rackspace was one of the fastest growing tech companies of that era generating $300 million in annual revenue when we were acquired. We went public a year after our acquisition—in August 2008! Being public is crazy but going public during a global financial crisis is even crazier!
I spent six years at Rackspace, longer than any entrepreneur we ever acquired—and loved every minute of it. I was fascinated by our culture of fanatical support, our differentiation in a crowded industry, and our product-market fit at such a scale. I was also put in charge of the fastest growing parts of the business—SaaS and cloud computing. It was an amazing time in the industry, for Rackspace, and for me. In six years we grew from $300 million in revenue to $1.5 billion and were always profitable!
After leaving Rackspace I spent a couple of years consulting, angel investing, and thinking through what I wanted to do next. I loved certain aspects of angel investing but it wasn't fulfilling enough to do full time. And I wanted to work closer with founders than most angels get to do. So I decided to combine the investor in me with the entrepreneur in me and in 2017, Active Capital was born.
Today I continue to live in San Antonio with my teenage son. I spend a lot of time in Austin and all the cities where we have portfolio investments. I love traveling the world, spending time with awesome founders, and having fun along the way.
