SpeakerText Founder Matt Mireles on Becoming Famous Overnight, Fundraising, and Why He's Soon Ditching New York for Silicon Valley
For Matt Mireles, 29, life after graduating from Columbia University in 2008 was “hard and lonely,” he says. “I was on my own, trying to make things happen” for his startup, 18-month-old SpeakerText, a Web application that lets users navigate and search through video. Then, in January, Mireles began writing about launching the startup at his blog, the Metamorphosis. First came an attention-grabbing two-part series titled “How to Start a Company in a Recession” that was republished by Silicon Alley Insider, where Mireles once moonlighted as a writer. Last month, Mireles wrote a newer post titled, “Face It: NYC Is Not the Best Place for a Startup,” which “caused quite the shit storm,” as one commenter on Metamorphosis noted, adding that from now on, he'd be reading Mireles's writings. By this past weekend, Mireles’s newest piece, “How I Judge Investors” had practically become required reading for tech reporters, entrepreneurs and, seed-stage investors, the latter of whom wondered what Mireles might say about them this time.
