Matter Nine

About our Program

Our program kicks off with an intensive bootcamp focused on building scalable media ventures with a human-centered, prototype-driven design process. Throughout the program, workshops, weekly speakers, and monthly design reviews build up to demo days in SF and in NYC.

$50,000
We invest $50k to give you five months of runway to do needfinding with your customers, prototype your solutions, and build traction with your audience.

SF + NYC
Matter is the intersection of innovation and media, which is why our program is interwoven in both San Francisco and New York City communities. Your team will be based in one location, but gain exposure in both.

20 Weeks
Immerse yourself in a creative, collaborative culture designed to help you be human-centered, prototype-driven, and fail quickly to succeed sooner.

Overall, we are looking for multi-disciplinary teams building scalable media ventures ready to move to SF for this 5-month, intense, collaborative experience combining design thinking + entrepreneurship + media. We define media loosely and think of it more like “the connective tissue of society” rather than content. We are a great fit for both pre-seed and seed-stage ventures, and have investment structures that work for each.

You are mission-driven
Matter supports early-stage media entrepreneurs building start-ups that make society more informed, connected, and empowered.

You have a solid team
Our target ventures are existing teams of 2-4 co-founders with skill sets covering technology, business, design, and storytelling. We like teams who have a history of working together. Start-ups are a roller coaster and we want to have some assurance that your team won’t blow up for preventable human dynamics reasons like most other start-ups do.

You are a for-profit venture
You are not a project, non a non-profit, not a team at an existing institution. What media needs more than anything else is business model innovation — and we’ve set up our constraints to help drive that innovation. You are pursuing a sustainable, scalable, for-profit business strategy and have built an early stage prototype of their product or service.

You will commit to working in SF full-time
All co-founders must work full-time out of the Matter space in San Francisco for the full five months of the program and attend the kick-off bootcamp and retreat, weekly speaker series and workshops, and monthly design reviews.