Patrick Malatack
Partner

Patrick Malatack

CURRENT PROJECTS

Common Ground, Courier, Hookdeck, Objective, Ampersand, Propel Data

ON HOW I GOT HERE

My whole life I have been interested in how things work.

As a kid, I would constantly take things apart and put them back together just to see what makes them tick.  Taking apart lego scenes gradually morphed into taking apart computers. One thing led to another and by 5th grade, I was the go-to computer nerd of my home town outside of Philadelphia helping travel agencies and realtors adapt their businesses to this new thing called the internet.

Fast forward a few years, I made my way through undergrad and grad school at Carnegie Mellon, spending time doing a mix of design, coding, psychology, and business.  I really liked being a jack of all trades/master of none because it meant I was constantly learning. When it was time to get a job, I did what all bad designers and developers do.  I became a PM :)

After a few years at Microsoft, I was fortunate to join the team at Twilio in 2011 leading the SMS product.  Going from a 100,000 person organization to a small team of a few dozen people was quite a shock. While there, I witnessed the dramatic impact everyday decisions had on the company, both for better or worse.  When a company doubles every 6 months, learning happens much more rapidly and everyone is forced to wear different hats. While there were plenty of ups and downs along the way, it was clear I wanted to be spending my waking hours helping build teams and go after “just crazy enough to work” ideas.

ON WHY I INVEST

I am still the same curious person I was as a kid.  After 7 years at Twilio, I was looking for a way to expand my learning to a more diverse set of topics.  I believe progress is generally non-linear. Fundamental changes happen and then rapid progress follows.  I am interested in these non-linearities, in founders and ideas that are not making incremental progress on top of an existing path but rather ideas and approaches that buck the status quo.  The more contrarian the idea, the better. I also love building.  Having built products and teams myself, I understand what it takes and the challenges encountered along the way. Building, especially in a hypergrowth environment, requires regularly re-inventing yourself to deal with the next level of scale or the next customer problem or the next organizational challenge.  I’m eager to put my past experiences to work with future founders.

Venture investing fuels my innate curiosity and allows me to continue to learn from others.  I am interested in what you are building, why it matters, who is going to use it and how the world will be different.  I want to learn from your unique perspective and distinct approach.

EXPERIENCE

Microsoft

Twilio

EDUCATION

Carnegie Mellon University

B.S., Cognitive Science, Human-Computer Interaction

Carnegie Mellon University

Masters in Human-Computer Interaction