Matt Arbesfeld

Matt Arbesfeld and Ben Edelstein co-founded AppHub. Rough Draft Ventures writes that AppHub was born out of the Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It received its charter from Massachusetts in 1861, admitted its first students in 1865 and moved from Boston to its present campus in 1916. As of October 2025 it had 11,816 students, and it counts 106 Nobel laureates among members of its community.Open the full entry (MIT) and Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry and builds tools that help developers build, debug and update apps faster, and that Rough Draft Ventures welcomed the two founders into its portfolio; AppHub’s original product, AppHub Deploy, streamlines app updates and is used by companies including NBCNBCNBC (National Broadcasting Company) is an American national commercial broadcast television network. It was founded by RCA in 1926, began as a radio network and later developed television. With ABC and CBS it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it passed to General Electric with RCA in 1986, merged with Universal to form NBCUniversal in 2004, has been controlled by Comcast since 2011, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry, Twist, Refinery 29 and SoundCloud.⁠[1]

The same article says that in 2015 the two received funding from Rough Draft Ventures and Matt Arbesfeld was accepted into the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, and that the two then left school to work on AppHub full time.⁠[1]

He recalled that in their senior year they launched “sort of our predecessor to LogRocket” and used that traction to raise their first round of funding. The Product Growth episode page writes that they reached about $5,000 in monthly revenue while still in college, after which he learned they could raise capital.⁠[2][3]

In a 2020 Mixergy interview he said that AppHub let developers push app changes straight to users and brought in about $5,000 to $6,000 in monthly recurring revenue; because the practice was in a gray area and they saw no long-term way to avoid AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry shutting them down one day, they pivoted. He also said that before building LogRocket they had raised $700,000 on the strength of AppHub’s traction.⁠[4]

In 2016 he and Ben Edelstein founded LogRocket, which provides front-end monitoring and analytics for web and mobile apps.⁠[5][6]

Accounts of the origin differ in emphasis. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote in 2019 that after college both moved to San Francisco and worked as front-end application engineers, and that the idea came from their frustration at how much time manual error-tracking took. On Software Engineering Radio he recalled that one summer both were interning in San Francisco, decided to live together and went home after work to brainstorm ideas on a whiteboard. On the Stack OverflowStack OverflowStack Overflow is a programming Q&A website and the company that runs it, founded in 2008 by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood; it builds technical knowledge through community questions and answers and sells knowledge-management, data-licensing and advertising products to businesses. Prosus acquired it for $1.8 billion in 2021.Open the full entry podcast he said that at work his chief executive kept forwarding user issues to him, which originally inspired them to start LogRocket. In a 2020 Mixergy interview he said that as an intern at a San Francisco company he was in charge of building the signup flow, and that when signups failed his chief executive would forward him screenshots of the error messages customers sent.⁠[7][8][2][4]

The Product Growth episode page says that he worked at Meteor, a JavaScript framework company, where he was exposed to the front-end development problems that later led to LogRocket. In the Mixergy interview he also said that he learned about the front-end developer space at Meteor, and he mentioned Clara Labs, a Y Combinator-backed company building an AI assistant, saying that this was the experience that inspired them to build LogRocket.⁠[3][4]

The Product Growth episode page writes that while living together the two took the product from concept to a working minimum viable product in one summer, with the core idea of recording and replaying user sessions to diagnose problems; that a launch on Hacker News brought thousands of signups even though there was only a beta list; and that the first formal investment, from Matrix PartnersMatrix PartnersMatrix Partners, now branded Matrix, is a US early-stage venture capital firm with roots in Hellman, Ferri Investment Associates, established in 1977. Matrix was founded in 1982 and invests in technology companies from the idea stage through Series A.Open the full entry, gave them runway to work on LogRocket full time. In the Mixergy interview he said that it took two years of building to get the product off the ground, a period he called “the dark ages”; when host Andrew Warner mentioned that an earlier Hacker News post of theirs had been flagged and killed, he confirmed it.⁠[3][4]

Rough Draft Ventures calls LogRocket “a DVR for bugs” that lets engineering and support teams replay logs and videos of user problems as they happened in the user’s browser, and writes that LogRocket was then in beta with engineering teams at CARFAX, UserTesting and AOLAOLAOL is an American internet brand offering a news portal, email, and membership services. Its history dates to an online-services company founded in 1985.Open the full entry. The LogRocket Blog’s author page lists his post “LogRocket Preview Release,” dated September 30, 2016.⁠[1][9]

On June 21, 2016, the Thiel Foundation announced that it had accepted 29 new members into the 2016 class of Thiel Fellows; he was among them. The announcement lists him with Cambridge, MA, the project AppHub and the field Developer Tools, and says that he co-founded AppHub, a company that builds tools that let app developers deploy and update software applications easily and instantly, with the mission of empowering engineers by eliminating tedious, redundant and time-consuming work. Introducing him in 2021, Software Engineering Radio host Adam Conrad also described him as a Thiel Fellow.⁠[10][8]

In the 2020 Mixergy interview he said that the fellowship was $100,000 for him, over about two years, and that the biggest thing it gave him was the community.⁠[4]

On May 17, 2017, writing as LogRocket’s chief executive on the company blog, he published “LogRocket: DVR for JavaScript apps,” describing LogRocket as “a new type of developer tool” that works like a DVR for web apps, recording everything that happens on a site: it instruments the DOM to record the HTML and CSS on the page, recreating pixel-perfect videos of even complex single-page apps, and records console logs, JavaScript errors and stack traces, network requests and responses with headers and bodies, browser metadata and custom logs; it integrates with React, Redux and Angular to log actions and application state and offers a GraphQL API. The uses the post lists include fixing bugs, understanding the impact of errors, linking front-end sessions to back-end errors, supporting users through an Intercom integration and finding user-experience problems.⁠[11]

On March 21, 2019, LogRocket, then based in Cambridge, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry, announced an $11 million Series A led by Battery VenturesBattery VenturesBattery Ventures is a global venture capital and private equity firm focused on technology companies, investing from seed-stage startups through growth investments and buyouts.Open the full entry with participation from its seed investor Matrix Partners; with an earlier, unannounced $4 million seed round, the company had raised $15 million in total. TechCrunch writes that within 18 months of its founding the company had 25 employees and about 500 customers, including RedditRedditReddit is an online platform that organizes content and discussion around interest-based communities, founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. Users take part in communities by posting, commenting, and voting; its operating company, Reddit, Inc., listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024.Open the full entry, IKEA and BloombergBloomberg L.P.Bloomberg L.P. is a global financial technology, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. It began by providing terminal services that deliver data, analytics and news to financial professionals, and launched Bloomberg News in 1990. Michael Bloomberg has pledged the vast majority of the company’s profits to his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.Open the full entry; Built In Boston writes that more than 500 companies had adopted its technology, including Reddit, IKEA, Brex, Kaplan, CarGurus, FDNY and Waste Management.⁠[7][6]

TechCrunch writes that LogRocket records the HTML and CSS involved in problem moments rather than full video, and that the data can be viewed in the LogRocket dashboard or in help-desk software such as Zendesk. In the article he said that LogRocket would “capture a recording in real time of all the user activity,” that it looked at the user’s “frustrating moments,” and that the company’s goal was to “get out to a much wider audience and build a mature sales and marketing organization.” Built In Boston writes that the money would go toward tripling the headcount, mainly in sales, engineering and marketing, and toward platform stability.⁠[7][6]

On November 7, 2019, LogRocket announced a $15 million Series B and launched LogRocket Metrics, a front-end application performance management platform. Built In identifies him as chief executive and writes that in the just over seven months since the Series A the customer base had doubled to more than 1,000, including AirbnbAirbnbAirbnb is a travel platform for booking stays, experiences, and services, co-founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk and headquartered in San Francisco, United States; its Class A common stock trades on Nasdaq under the symbol ABNB. The business began with hosting guests in the founders’ home in 2007, then joined YC’s Winter 2009 batch, and gradually expanded into local experiences, services, and boutique hotels.Open the full entry, Bloomberg, Reddit and IKEA, and that the company planned to more than double its headcount. He said: “More and more we’re seeing that every company is now a software company, relying on software for their core business.”⁠[12]

On November 20, 2020, Mixergy published Andrew Warner’s interview with him, “A developer tool that sees you rage clicking.” In it he said that LogRocket was about five years old and had been on the market for about three and a half years; he declined to share revenue but said that the company had more than 1,500 customers.⁠[4]

On February 27, 2021, Software Engineering Radio published episode 448, in which host Adam Conrad talked with him about how a software engineer can start a software company, covering finding a co-founder, working on problems one cares about, hiring the first team members and the downsides of starting a company. In the episode Adam Conrad mentioned that LogRocket had raised $30 million; asked how big the team was, he said the company had 80 people.⁠[8]

On June 21, 2022, LogRocket announced a $25 million Series C co-led by Delta-v Capital and Battery Ventures. TechCrunch writes that the company had raised $55 million in venture capital to date and planned to grow its team from 130 to about 180 people by the end of 2022, using the money for R&D and team growth; Built In Boston writes that the research spending would focus especially on machine learning, with part of the money going to go-to-market efforts.⁠[5][13]

The two reports give different customer counts: TechCrunch writes that the company had 2,600 paying customers, including large U.S.United StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry state governments and agencies, and monitored 3.5 billion app sessions and 300 billion user interactions a year; Built In Boston writes that customers had grown from 1,000 in 2019 to 2,500, growth he attributed mainly to the pandemic’s acceleration of digital adoption. TechCrunch also writes that LogRocket had recently launched a mobile app monitoring product and a Conditional Recording feature, and names FullStory, Quantum Metric and Contentsquare as its direct competitors.⁠[5][13]

TechCrunch paraphrased him as describing a “seismic shift” in the industry. He said: “We founded LogRocket to help front-end engineers and product managers build better digital experiences by surfacing and identifying the root cause of the most impactful problems in their software products.” In the Built In Boston article he said: “Customers don’t need more data, they need more actionable insights from their data.”⁠[5][13]

On January 10, 2023, Stack Overflow published episode 525 of its podcast, “From CS side project to the C-suite,” hosted by Ben Popper and Matt Kiernander, with him as guest in his role as LogRocket’s chief executive and co-founder. He explained that LogRocket is a front-end tool rather than a traditional observability tool and that it records changes to the DOM over time to replay what users saw instead of recording video; that the company then had more than 3,000 customers plus perhaps another 4,000 to 5,000 on the free plan; that the product focused on session replay for its first four or five years before expanding into error tracking and product analytics, with mobile support launched about a year earlier; and that because watching replays by hand does not scale, the company built Galileo to surface patterns such as errors that hurt conversion rates.⁠[2]

In the episode he said that failing as a student carries little risk and that side projects teach more than the curriculum, which he called “five, six years behind.” He compared AI coding tools to self-driving cars, arguing that the last mile is hard.⁠[2]

On May 12, 2025, Aakash Gupta’s Product Growth podcast and newsletter published an interview with him, “15 Steps to Build a $100M+ AI Company (From Someone Who Has Done It).” The episode page describes him as “Founder & CEO of AI Startup LogRocket”; the page’s description uses the phrase “hundreds of millions of dollars” in referring to LogRocket, while the episode summary says that he built a “$1B+” AI product company. The page says that he raised four rounds over the course of LogRocket’s history.⁠[3]

On recruiting he said in the episode: “Once you have 10 great people, the 11th person who sees that team is compelled to join.” On hiring executives he said: “These are your partners. It should be almost like a marriage.” He also said: “There’s a constant stress of starting a company because you’re bombarded with problems every single day.”⁠[3]

As of November 2026, the host page of PodRocket, LogRocket’s podcast, lists him as LogRocket’s chief executive and co-founder and as one of the podcast’s hosts, saying that he has hosted eight episodes. The LogRocket Blog’s author page also describes him as LogRocket’s chief executive and lists his 2026 posts, including posts introducing Ask Galileo on March 6, the LogRocket MCP on June 2 and “self-improving software” (LogRocket finds issues, agents fix them) on June 23. LogRocket’s website lists its headquarters in Boston and an office in New York City.⁠[14][9][15]

He grew up together with Ben Edelstein. He recalled that the two were born about a month apart and that their parents were best friends who “introduced us basically in the hospital”; the two went to preschool together and then through elementary, middle and high school together. Rough Draft Ventures writes that their parents set up their first playdate when they were one month old; TechCrunch wrote in 2019 that the two had been friends since birth and grew up together in the Boston suburbs; Built In Boston wrote in 2019 that the two had been best friends since first grade.⁠[2][8][1][7][6]

He recalled that in third grade he and Ben Edelstein invented a duct-tape water-bottle holder that sat on a desk and kept bottles from falling off flip-up desks, and that after school they would install one for classmates in exchange for their lunch.⁠[8][4]

He said that in middle school he was eager to build games and tried three to five times without success, because setting up compilers and reading books on C and C++ was too complex and no one in his family or life could help; he first started programming in an AP Computer Science class in high school. In the Mixergy interview he said that his high school projects included a paper recycler and a guitar auto-tuner.⁠[2][4]

Rough Draft Ventures writes that he went to MIT and Ben Edelstein to Columbia University; in 2021 Software Engineering Radio host Adam Conrad introduced him as having studied computer science at MIT. On the Stack Overflow podcast he said that in college he spent most of his time in his dorm room coding side projects.⁠[1][8][2]

He recalled that in college he and his friends started two LLCs for the mobile apps they were building, one an app that let several phones play audio together and the other a company making mobile games; a mobile game he made with a friend reached a few million downloads; his app Cluck, meant to turn delayed texting into a real-time text conversation, failed because no one used it. In the Mixergy interview he said that they launched the mobile game Marble Drop in “sophomore year of high school or college,” and that it got a few million downloads but netted them maybe $5,000.⁠[8][2][3][4]

Accounts of the two founders’ work before LogRocket differ: Rough Draft Ventures writes that both had spent hundreds of hours supporting users of their earlier SaaS products and that both had been developer interns at GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry; Built In Boston described them in 2019 as two former Google engineers; on Software Engineering Radio he said that that summer he was interning at a startup while Ben Edelstein was at Google; in the 2020 Mixergy interview he said that he had once been an engineer on Google’s team and the Google Chrome team and used that experience to build the first version of the software.⁠[1][6][8][4]

On Software Engineering Radio in 2021 he mentioned being in Boston and said that his partner is a chemical engineer. In November 2020 he said in the Mixergy interview that they had just got a Labradoodle puppy, which he was trying to teach to play Frisbee. In January 2023 he said on the Stack Overflow podcast that he was “in my late twenties.”⁠[8][4][2]

LogRocket: Official website: https://logrocket.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

X: Public account: https://x.com/M_Arbesfeld (opens in a new window).⁠[2][8]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-arbesfeld-04b5429b/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]