Hi All,
Here is Matterport Co-Founder Matt Bell’s Facebook post today, Thursday, 9 November 2017.
Dan
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I’ve decided to leave Matterport and start something new.
Dave and I founded Matterport six and a half years ago with a vision of building a digital 3D copy of the world. We didn’t know how we’d get there, but we knew that if we made it easy for people to capture spaces in 3D and view them remotely, we’d make the lives of people in a wide range of industries easier, and that would bring a lot of value to the world.
Thanks to the effort of a large group of people (over 200 employees now, and many thousands of independent professional camera owners!) we’ve actually made a difference. Over 4% of homes on sale in the US now have a Matterport 3D model, and we’re becoming a general purpose tool used for everything from construction documentation to virtual shopping to remote experiences of travel destinations. Over 750,000 spaces have been captured in total, and we’ll reach a million before too long. 3D content is a new form of media, and we’re forming the foundation that enables app developers to build a wide range of industry specific apps that bring more value to this 3D content.
So why am I leaving then?
Ultimately it comes down to human incompatibilities. The CEO we brought in and I have had a number of disagreements over the last couple of years. These disagreements weren’t huge – they mainly centered on questions of the boundary between our roles as well as minor differences over company strategy or execution. However, they were exacerbated by work style incompatibilities that worsened over time – our two personalities turned out to be incompatible, and despite our best efforts to sort out these differences in working with a professional coach, we continued to not be able to improve. I stayed for a while because there were serious gaps in the team, and I felt I was uniquely able to fill some of them. However, at this point the team is much more built out and our product is solidly in the lead. I now feel comfortable stepping away, and I’m excited to start something new. I’m wrapping up full time work this week, but I’ll be staying on the board of directors of Matterport.
So what’s next?
I took a bit under 2 years off after my previous startup in 2009-2010. I had some amazing adventures – I traveled the world for 6 months, I learned to rock climb, snowboard, and hang glide, and I improved my diet and solved a number of health issues like the persistent insomnia I used to deal with. I also spent many months playing around with interesting new technologies, which led to the creation of Matterport.
This time I’ll be doing somewhat less travel and probably taking about 6-12 months off, but I want to enjoy the same experience of exploring what can only happen when I have large uninterrupted blocks of free time. My main goal is to become extremely knowledgeable about AI and deep learning; it’s going to affect the world even more than the internet did, and I say that without exaggeration. My next startup will come out of my experiments with AI technologies. On the side, I’d like to visit a few unusual places that are hard to reach, have some more peak experiences, and perhaps learn to paraglide. I want to do the things that will be hard to do once I have kids. Finally, I have a wedding to plan, embryos to freeze for when Helen and I have kids in a couple of years, and a lot of books I’d like to read in order to level up on various skills. It’s going to be an exciting time.
If you have suggestions of things I might particularly enjoy (whether it’s travel, skill development, social experiences etc) that involve a somewhat serious time commitment, please let me know!
(photo is from the first camera we ever delivered to a customer, in August of 2012)
Source: Facebook |