Matt Cynamon

Matt Cynamon has said he spent his entire career in and around tech startups in the United States and abroad: he launched two companies and joined another startup, helping it grow from a handful of employees to a sale of more than $400 million. He moved to New York in 2009. USV describes him as having taken part in company building as a founder, an early employee, and an operator helping businesses scale, as well as through work shaping government policy on startup ecosystems.⁠[1][1][2]

In the fall of 2018, he was consulting the French government on how to attract American growth-stage talent to work at the most promising French startups; outside of work, he taught a class on how to get a job at a startup.⁠[1][1][1]

After reading a post by USV’s Bethany Crystal about the launch of the USV Talent Network, he sent a cold email to USV and was then hired as its new Network Programs Manager, responsible for launching programs connecting USV’s extended network of talent, alumni, partners, and others with its portfolio of more than 75 companies.⁠[1][1][1][1]

As USV’s network team marked its tenth anniversary, Cynamon reviewed his first year: by the end of 2019, the job board and talent network USV had launched drove more than 12,000 clicks on portfolio jobs and signed up 1,500 candidates, and the team was making more than 30 high-quality introductions a month; more than 10,000 people had worked at USV-backed companies, and through dinners in New York and San Francisco and other efforts the team reconnected with more than 200 alumni, over 70 of whom became network event speakers.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

In May 2020, using data from 83 portfolio companies on USV’s job board, he analyzed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on hiring: open positions fell from a peak of 1,553 on March 1 to 871, and excluding a few large companies whose hiring held steady, open positions at growth-stage companies fell by more than 60%. An August update showed open positions back above 1,000 but still 33% below the February high, with remote jobs rising from 3.5% to 10.5% of the total.⁠[4][4][4][5][5][5]

Cynamon co-wrote, with Tom Dils and Calder Zwerling, a post presenting a compensation survey that Variant and USV conducted of web3 companies in their portfolios, drawing on more than 1,000 data points from employees at 32 web3 startups. The post found that most respondents said the bear market had not changed their hiring plans, but that web3 talent commanded a premium over web2 firms and that traditional equity was becoming as important as tokens.⁠[6][6][6][6][6]

At USV’s annual summit of about 100 portfolio company chief executives, Cynamon paired up 16 of them for unscripted on-camera conversations, producing the eight-part video series “Edge Cases.” The first episode featured Ben Leventhal and Seth Goldstein, with a new episode released each Thursday thereafter on USV’s newly launched YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel.⁠[7][7][7][7][7]

As of October 2026, Cynamon serves as head of media at USV, listed on its platform team; USV describes this as his third new role at the firm, after launching its talent function and its AI initiatives, and he now helps portfolio companies tell their stories.⁠[8][8][2][2]

Union Square Ventures: Official website: https://www.usv.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

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