Mathew Samuel
Expert at Primary Venture Partners- Claim this Profile
Click to upgrade to our gold package
for the full feature experience.
Topline Score
Bio
🦬Marc Cenedella
I worked with Mat for 7 years at Ladders, most of which time he directly reported to me after I promoted him over others. He’s moving on after taking a break and I can’t possibly recommend him highly enough. Mat is an outstanding hands-on product-driven technology leader. Mat understands how technology needs to service the end goals of the user, as expressed through product. He’s not building tech for tech’s sake, but ably helps choose the right tool for achieving the user-focused end. Mat prioritizes speed in an extremely effective way. Mat is extremely entrepreneurially minded and knows how and when to prioritize speed-to-market. The good solution today is often much better than the perfect solution next year. Mat balances
Jeff Zinn
I had the good fortune to work with Mathew Samuel at Hearst. The mobile e-reader apps developed by my team relied heavily on services programmed by Mathew's group, and he consistently ensured that his developers delivered quality services in a timely manner. It was clear that his team respected him as a leader, and looked to him for guidance. Beyond his skills as a tech leader, Mathew was always ready and willing to jump in and assist with troubleshooting urgent customer-facing technical issues, putting in time after hours and on weekends as necessary. On more than one occasion, he was able to identify the source of an issue and implement a fix on his own. Mathew also demonstrated considerable skill in bridging the communication gap between dev and product; he proved himself capable of appeasing demanding product owners while protecting his development team from unrealistic deadlines. Lastly, I appreciated Mathew's willingness to share his knowledge and experience in technical management. His advice on topics ranging from Agile planning to employee performance improvement has helped me to be a more effective leader for my team. I would not hesitate to recommend him as a technical leader for any organization.
🦬Marc Cenedella
I worked with Mat for 7 years at Ladders, most of which time he directly reported to me after I promoted him over others. He’s moving on after taking a break and I can’t possibly recommend him highly enough. Mat is an outstanding hands-on product-driven technology leader. Mat understands how technology needs to service the end goals of the user, as expressed through product. He’s not building tech for tech’s sake, but ably helps choose the right tool for achieving the user-focused end. Mat prioritizes speed in an extremely effective way. Mat is extremely entrepreneurially minded and knows how and when to prioritize speed-to-market. The good solution today is often much better than the perfect solution next year. Mat balances
Jeff Zinn
I had the good fortune to work with Mathew Samuel at Hearst. The mobile e-reader apps developed by my team relied heavily on services programmed by Mathew's group, and he consistently ensured that his developers delivered quality services in a timely manner. It was clear that his team respected him as a leader, and looked to him for guidance. Beyond his skills as a tech leader, Mathew was always ready and willing to jump in and assist with troubleshooting urgent customer-facing technical issues, putting in time after hours and on weekends as necessary. On more than one occasion, he was able to identify the source of an issue and implement a fix on his own. Mathew also demonstrated considerable skill in bridging the communication gap between dev and product; he proved himself capable of appeasing demanding product owners while protecting his development team from unrealistic deadlines. Lastly, I appreciated Mathew's willingness to share his knowledge and experience in technical management. His advice on topics ranging from Agile planning to employee performance improvement has helped me to be a more effective leader for my team. I would not hesitate to recommend him as a technical leader for any organization.
🦬Marc Cenedella
I worked with Mat for 7 years at Ladders, most of which time he directly reported to me after I promoted him over others. He’s moving on after taking a break and I can’t possibly recommend him highly enough. Mat is an outstanding hands-on product-driven technology leader. Mat understands how technology needs to service the end goals of the user, as expressed through product. He’s not building tech for tech’s sake, but ably helps choose the right tool for achieving the user-focused end. Mat prioritizes speed in an extremely effective way. Mat is extremely entrepreneurially minded and knows how and when to prioritize speed-to-market. The good solution today is often much better than the perfect solution next year. Mat balances
Jeff Zinn
I had the good fortune to work with Mathew Samuel at Hearst. The mobile e-reader apps developed by my team relied heavily on services programmed by Mathew's group, and he consistently ensured that his developers delivered quality services in a timely manner. It was clear that his team respected him as a leader, and looked to him for guidance. Beyond his skills as a tech leader, Mathew was always ready and willing to jump in and assist with troubleshooting urgent customer-facing technical issues, putting in time after hours and on weekends as necessary. On more than one occasion, he was able to identify the source of an issue and implement a fix on his own. Mathew also demonstrated considerable skill in bridging the communication gap between dev and product; he proved himself capable of appeasing demanding product owners while protecting his development team from unrealistic deadlines. Lastly, I appreciated Mathew's willingness to share his knowledge and experience in technical management. His advice on topics ranging from Agile planning to employee performance improvement has helped me to be a more effective leader for my team. I would not hesitate to recommend him as a technical leader for any organization.
🦬Marc Cenedella
I worked with Mat for 7 years at Ladders, most of which time he directly reported to me after I promoted him over others. He’s moving on after taking a break and I can’t possibly recommend him highly enough. Mat is an outstanding hands-on product-driven technology leader. Mat understands how technology needs to service the end goals of the user, as expressed through product. He’s not building tech for tech’s sake, but ably helps choose the right tool for achieving the user-focused end. Mat prioritizes speed in an extremely effective way. Mat is extremely entrepreneurially minded and knows how and when to prioritize speed-to-market. The good solution today is often much better than the perfect solution next year. Mat balances
Jeff Zinn
I had the good fortune to work with Mathew Samuel at Hearst. The mobile e-reader apps developed by my team relied heavily on services programmed by Mathew's group, and he consistently ensured that his developers delivered quality services in a timely manner. It was clear that his team respected him as a leader, and looked to him for guidance. Beyond his skills as a tech leader, Mathew was always ready and willing to jump in and assist with troubleshooting urgent customer-facing technical issues, putting in time after hours and on weekends as necessary. On more than one occasion, he was able to identify the source of an issue and implement a fix on his own. Mathew also demonstrated considerable skill in bridging the communication gap between dev and product; he proved himself capable of appeasing demanding product owners while protecting his development team from unrealistic deadlines. Lastly, I appreciated Mathew's willingness to share his knowledge and experience in technical management. His advice on topics ranging from Agile planning to employee performance improvement has helped me to be a more effective leader for my team. I would not hesitate to recommend him as a technical leader for any organization.
Experience
-
Primary Venture Partners
-
United States
-
Investment Management
-
1 - 100 Employee
-
Expert
-
Aug 2023 - Present
As an Expert, I provide strategic advice and guidance to founders and operators within the Primary portfolio and broader network. Experts enjoy access to early stage businesses, emerging trends and technology, and an expanded network of exceptional leaders, and resources through a top-tier seed-stage firm. Primary is New York City’s premier early stage venture firm working alongside founders to build unicorns like Alloy, Chief, Electric, K Health, Slice, and many more. As an Expert, I provide strategic advice and guidance to founders and operators within the Primary portfolio and broader network. Experts enjoy access to early stage businesses, emerging trends and technology, and an expanded network of exceptional leaders, and resources through a top-tier seed-stage firm. Primary is New York City’s premier early stage venture firm working alongside founders to build unicorns like Alloy, Chief, Electric, K Health, Slice, and many more.
-
-
-
Ladders
-
United States
-
Staffing and Recruiting
-
1 - 100 Employee
-
VP of Technology & Product
-
Mar 2022 - Jan 2023
• Led engineering organization to make strategic long-term technology decisions for sustainability/scale• Led product development, set direction of future products, helped hire future VP of Product• Built AI/ML prototypes for efficient improvements in operations, innovative products • Automated bot protection, saving 15% on infrastructure costs, engineer time• Helped foster product ownership culture throughout engineering organization
-
-
VP of Engineering
-
Jan 2019 - Mar 2022
• Head of engineering organization with 30+ engineers• Progressed quickly from Team Lead to Director to VP, with success at each level• Hired 25+ engineers (local/remote), and managers to be part of several small product teams• Migrated from local data center to 100% AWS cloud-based servers• Optimized AWS spend from $160k to $28k (570% savings), without any capacity loss, through a combination of savings plans, reserved instances, Kubernetes, and shutting down of lightly used resources• Transitioned email vendors, saving the company $276k/yr• Collaborated closely with Product/Design to align Engineering to deliver on product goals• Built new subscription payment system to replace original Perl-based system while offloading credit card data to a PCI compliant vendor to reduce compliance burden• Drove adoption of Accelerate metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR) across organization to measure engineering productivity• Changed culture of engineering organization to be product centric, breaking down silos and creating a DevOps product ownership culture• Drove investment in CI/CD, going from monthly deployments to multiple deployments daily with increased stability• Managed all vendor relationships and negotiated contract renewals, saving the company money Show less
-
-
Director Of Engineering
-
Jan 2018 - Dec 2018
• Led all consumer facing teams working on services and front ends• Co-led entire engineering org until VP was appointed• Made hard decisions about cutting initiatives that weren’t aligned with business goals
-
-
Team Lead Engineer
-
Jan 2016 - Jan 2018
• Technical Lead for two agile teams working on the consumer facing site.• Revamped deployment process and git workflow to ensure 100% regression-free automated deployments• Made homepage load 4x faster with optimizations.• Contributed as a full-stack engineer to major features on the site (resume tools, search listings, job listings)• A/B tested several conversion strategies using Google Experiments/Optimize• Recruited engineers for several teams across the company
-
-
-
Hearst Magazines
-
United States
-
Media Production
-
700 & Above Employee
-
Director, Software Development
-
Mar 2012 - Sep 2015
Shared Applications • Managed a staff of 13+ engineers • Responsible for back-end CMS, front-end sites, circulation/marketing acquisition, e-commerce, back-end services for iPad apps • Transitioned 100% of servers to the cloud (AWS) • Load tested AWS configuration to identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks – 600% improvement • Optimized client's AWS EC2 configuration for a 500% capacity increase with no increase in costs • Saved over $75k+ annually by scaling down lightly used AWS resources • Managed multiple internal/external client relationships • Introduced and implemented Agile Scrum process • Implemented transition to a Git-based deployment DevOps workflow • Updated e-commerce software and processes to comply with PCI requirements Show less
-
-
-
Morgan Stanley
-
United States
-
Financial Services
-
700 & Above Employee
-
Vice President
-
May 1995 - Jan 2012
Private Wealth Management 2008 – 2012 -- Technical lead manager for a team of 10 engineers; managed requirements, timelines, and delivery quality. -- Hired a new team, including 5 engineers, and a manager, to jump start an office in Glasgow. -- Responsible for PWM public web portal that provides online access to a client's account information, electronic statements, e-Delivery preferences, etc. -- Optimized back-end services (C++/ksh scripts) to improve batch processing of client data by a factor of 3-4x, enabling the business to scale up to a larger client base. -- Redesigned the web portal using AJAX/Ext.js, improving the user experience. -- Involved in designing the next-gen ultra high net worth platform for the larger Morgan Stanley Smith Barney joint venture Prime Brokerage IT 2007 – 2008 -- Managed an 11-person team of developers, maintaining a core suite of applications for Prime Brokerage, used for trade capture and reporting. -- Designed the next-generation architecture for legacy applications by leading group discussions with team members, managers, and peers. Debugged memory leaks in existing Java web applications, saving the operations team needless restarts of the web containers; worked directly with hedge fund clients to troubleshoot issues. Enterprise Application Infrastructure Change Management Team 2005 – 2007 -- Managed a 10-person on-shore/off-shore hybrid team to develop and maintain a suite of applications used firm-wide to control application change for regulatory (SOX, BASEL II) and risk purposes. Show less
-
-
Education
-
Columbia University
B.S., Electrical Engineering -
New York University
Master's degree, Computer Science
Community
