Matt Fisher

by | Aug 11, 2020

Matt Fisher

Venture Partner

Matt is a seasoned operator with 15+ years of experience as a senior-level executive across sales and operations.  Currently, Matt serves as COO / Executive Vice President at Tristar Products, managing sales and operations with P&L responsibility.

Prior to Tristar Products, Matt served as EVP, U.S. Sales at LiveOps, a cloud-based contact center and labor marketplace, where he directed sales for the enterprise solution division.  Prior to LiveOps, Matt was in Product Management at Lycos and he started his career as an engineer at Netscape.

Matt received BS in Applied Mathematics from UC Davis and MBA from UC Berkeley.

 

What was your first job in technology?
I joined Netscape during the first dot com boom as a QA engineer working on the browser and javascript which was called mocha at the time.  I worked with incredibly talented people, and the network I built from my time at Netscape is something you can’t recreate. 

Having grown up in the SF/Bay Area, and worked in technology your entire career, what has changed and what has stayed the same?
The amount of talented people who come to the SF/Bay Area has really made the area flourish.  What used to be orchards are now office buildings.  Boulevard is still one of the best meals in the Bay Area and I still go to the same Yank Sing for Dim Sum.  The culture is always evolving but San Francisco is still one of the most progressive and diverse areas in the country.  It’s been this way since the goldrush.  Season of the Witch is an amazing book that describes the evolution of San Francisco.

What are the biggest challenges you faced as an enterprise operating executive?
I joined what was then CallCast, which became LiveOps following the merger between the SaaS call center software business of CallCast and the virtual call center business of LiveOps.

I experienced many challenges first hand, including the friction that develops when you combine two different business models (a high margin SaaS business and a lower margin outsourced BPO) and the resource allocations to fund both businesses.

Focus is so important at a startup, as you have limited time and resources.  It is hard enough to do one startup.  We grew LiveOps into a $100M+ year revenue company that included some marquee F500 customers.

Having such great customer logos, though, also presents challenges, as invariably, some customers have a certain vision of your product that does not necessarily align with the overall company product roadmap.  Put another way, it is imperative for startups to not get sucked into the “consulting” business trap, where you are spending a lot of engineering resources to build one-off features for a large potential customer, that may in turn not translate into meaningful revenue.