LA Venture Podcast

EPISODE 207

Mel Tang — Matter Venture Partners

September 25, 2024

Seed
Series A

Matter Venture Partners recently launched their $311M Fund I. Mel Tang was previously CFO at Ring and Demand Media. In this episode he shares why he believes the future of tech lies in hardware and how to set up systems to enable good decision making and successful growth.

Full transcript

Mel Tang is the founding operating partner at Matter Venture Partners. Matter just announced a huge 300 million dollar Fund One. Prior to Matter, Mel was the CFO at Ring and the CFO at Demand Media before that. Mel has definitely played a big role in some of the most important LA startups.

Very flattering, but just a small small piece.

Ring and Demand Media are two pretty iconic LA startups.

It's been fun to see this area really develop over the last 15 years. It's awesome.

I want to talk about your background, it is very interesting. I had Sean on the show.

I didn't see that in the library. All right.

It was a little while ago. I mean, I've been doing this for five years now.

Yeah, that's awesome. I love Sean.

What I want to hear about is you were the CFO to his CEO, right?

Yeah. So, there was a turnover at the top and Sean stepped in as interim. I was the CFO already before that and so that whole journey is interesting. I was a banker, prior to that. So when I joined Demand Media, this was back in 2006, I was sort of the first kind of finance in Santa Monica, and then a year later we brought on a seasoned CFO and really kind of grew up underneath him. He showed me the ropes and when we took it public, a year later, he retired and know I was lucky enough to get promoted.