StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Matt Hartman

Director of Seed Investments, betaworks · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

Matt Hartman is the Director of Seed Investments at betaworks. He previously co-founded ReferBoost and built the technology platform for Trammell Crow Company prior to its acquisition by CBRE.

13statements → 6claims → 2claims resolved → 3.46/5average certainty → 1.77/5average debate potential → 4.1/5argument clarity · the sources → 16said about them ↓

2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 4 assertions · 1 opinion · 4 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Matt argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Product Hunt originally started as an email newsletter
“A bunch of people at Betaworks were on the early on an early version, I think it was an email before it was even a website.”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 12:23 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.1 / 5 directness 4.3 · coherence 4.2 · precision 4.1 · compression 3.6

answered every one of 17 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

270 words/min while actually speaking · 21.4 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,261 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 3/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10
setup questions received 80%

Everything Matt Hartman said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hartman predicts Gimlet Media has the potential to become an enormous company
“One is I think that Gimlet could, has the potential to be enormous.”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 21:32 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks
Insight
Hartman: Network architecture drives Twitter to news and Facebook to friends
“The difference between Facebook and Twitter is a bi-directional arrow, basically. So if the follow versus friend model actually creates these totally different ecosystems, it's kind of like DNA replicating, and it turns into a different type of organism. Well,…”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 8:06 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks
Insight
Hartman: Ephemerality is a design pattern lowering friction to post
“On the ephemerality side, I think that that actually, think about that not as a feature, but as a design pattern. What has ended up happening is that it lowered the friction to post. So I know that it's not going to everybody, and I know that it's going to dis…”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 8:57 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks
Disclosure
Hartman: Betaworks requires weekly recurring user activity for early investments
“That is one of the key things that we look for in our investments is we were very introspective with our early companies that were working with that haven't launched yet. The only thing we have is kind of our view of how we're using the product and how it fits…”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 10:00 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Betaworks used Twitter network analysis to identify Product Hunt's Ryan Hoover
“I remember when we first started talking to Ryan from product time, one of the things that we had done was this network analysis with our data. I had sat down with our data scientists and started mapping out the networks of this on Twitter. Because it's so pub…”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 11:06 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks
Opinion
Hartman: Meerkat executed one of the best recent product launches
“I thought that that was sort of in retrospect now, one of the best product launches I've seen in a while.”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 14:14 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hartman: The competition between Meerkat and Periscope is not over yet
“I don't think it's over yet.”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 14:56 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks
Insight
Hartman: Native audio app design must enable eyes-free usage
“What's native about something like an audio app, you know, is that probably you want to make sure that, that the experience is native, that you can look at it, use it without looking, and so things like that.”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 18:31 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks
Insight
Hartman: Demand for Great Podcasts Exceeds the Supply of High-Quality Shows
“So I think at the moment there's not as many great podcasts as there are people looking for great podcasts. There are a lot of podcasts, not necessarily great ones.”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 19:52 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hartman: Podcasting Monetization Is Straightforward Due to Existing Audio Ad Ecosystems
“In, in the case of podcasting, there are, there's already an established ecosystem of how to do audio ads. And so I think there's actually, in that sense, it's much further along and in many ways can be monetized in a very straightforward way.”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 21:59 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks
Assertion Supported
Product Hunt originally started as an email newsletter
“A bunch of people at Betaworks were on the early on an early version, I think it was an email before it was even a website.”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 12:23 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks
Disclosure
Hartman: Betaworks Uses Product Hunt for Deal Sourcing and Investments
“I use product hunt as a way to find investment. We've made investments that were initiated on product hunt.”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 23:36 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks
Assertion Supported
Hartman: Betaworks studio built 19 companies, currently hosting 10 startups
“I think we've done about, built about 19 companies from the ground up in various stages, and they, they're, if you come into our office, we have, there's probably a hundred, over a hundred people here. All working at the moment on 10 different companies”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 5:00 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks

The other half of the tape: Matt Hartman's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 15 times in 4 episodes on 20VC. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 7Mike Mignano 6Ryan Hoover 2

Statements about Matt Hartman, by other people (1)

Assertion Supported
Mignano: Factorial innovates venture by funding independent angel investors
“Matt's brilliant. So Matt has innovated on a completely new model of venture where he arms angel investors. These are not scouts. These are angel investors. He arms them with additional funds on top of their own capital, which then factorial, obviously then, y…”
Mike Mignano Jul 6, 2026 ▶ 1:03:46 Why Now is the Time for the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Mike Mignano, USV · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
004182201520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodesmentions
012201520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodes it came up in
003162201520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodesmentions per episode
2026 6 mentions in 1 episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
2015 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks Oct 12, 2015 19m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more