Diana Kimball Berlin’s Post

Demo night at Matrix is a wrap! Loved seeing into the future with this crew—Meshcapade Infinity AI (YC W24) Hedra & 🤫…

If you’re a startup founder trying to help an early-career star run their own race and make the most of their time on your team, please introduce them to me! I have lots of stories to share and always enjoy those conversations. I’m easy to find at diana@matrix.vc. Looking back on my time as a PM at Quip and SoundCloud, I can see now how impatient I was for growth. The urgency I felt was fuel, but the truth is that everything went better when I was channeled that urgency into growing the company rather than growing my career. I remember a conversation with our cofounder at Quip, Kevin Gibbs, where I was trying to figure something out about how to get to where I wanted to be. And he said, in the kindest way possible, something like “I don’t know how to say this exactly, but in my experience, the thing that matters most in a product career is what you can point to personally doing and building with world-class engineers who will vouch for you.” In my work now as an early-stage investor at Matrix, I can finally see how true that was. When I meet someone who’s been at a startup for a while and try to get a sense of them as a future founder or investor, two things matter most to me: 1) what they can point to personally doing and building 2) who will vouch for them. Those factors impress me more than any title, award, or management experience. I wish I’d been able to trust that back then! But I can say it definitively now, and I’ll happily share it 1:1 with folks as long as I have the time. Pics from the good old days at Quip of some of the engineers I was so lucky to work with, feat. a double helping of Daniel Jackoway. Miss you all. ❤️

Day 2 of #Config2024! Steven Fabre and I have a contest going to see who can hand out more Liveblocks merch today. Who do you think will win?

Ready for day 1 of #Config2024. Come say hi!

Excited for #Config2024 this week! Any sessions you’re especially looking forward to? Personally, I’m counting down to the Mihika Kapoor + Marcin Wichary double feature on Thursday at 3pm—a deep dive on the new ~mystery feature~ Mihika hinted at on Lenny’s Podcast, plus Marcin on pixel fonts (as nature intended). How about you?

A very fun summer opportunity for a business-minded product person.

When I was weighing the opportunity to join Matrix, I spoke to founders in the portfolio, founders outside the portfolio, former team members, and of course all the current team members. The feedback was remarkably consistent: with Matrix, what you see is what you get. Three and a half years into my time here, the observation still rings true. And now, our identity reflects it, too. Proud to be a part of this team and to work with founders the way we do.

I woke up this morning with that holiday feeling because today, Liveblocks 2.0 is out. And so is the news: it’s my latest investment at Matrix. As one of the first PMs at Quip, I remember sweating every detail of collaborative text editing, comments, and notifications with our incredible designers and engineers. We debated every nuance and wouldn’t rest until we got it all right. This meant…we didn’t rest much. There’s so much that goes into making multiplayer experiences feel the way they should. The good news is, Liveblocks does all that and more. This team is simply relentless, and their quality bar is off the charts. Seeing behind the scenes on this launch brought on waves of nostalgia for the good old days when I got to be a part of a special product team building something the right way. If you’ve been looking for a way to make your product multiplayer, look no more: Liveblocks is it. And if you’ll be around San Francisco for #Config2024 in two weeks, I hope you’ll let me know—I mayyy be walking around with some limited edition swag in my pockets. Deep thanks to Steven Fabre and Guillaume Salles for the chance to be part of their story and to Ellen Chisa at boldstart ventures for connecting us. And high fives and big hugs to the whole team for this launch—you did it!