A successful Birmingham entrepreneur is stepping up as Techstars' local managing director while former managing director Nate Schmidt moves into a new role.
That entrepreneur is Matt Jaeh, who co-founded ProctorU and made an exit of over half a billion dollars in 2020.
Schmidt, who served as managing director for three years, also founded InstaGift, worked as a consultant for Cloverly and served as Velocity Accelerator's managing director at Innovation Depot. Now, he will serve as GM of America's East and head of product and founder experience at Techstars, where he will be responsible for managing Techstars programs from Alabama to Maine as well as advancing Techstars' accelerators.
"I'm really excited to step up into a leadership role in the larger organization and have an opportunity to influence change in the organization," Schmidt said, adding that he is also looking forward to expanding Techstars into new markets on the East Coast and beyond.
"These last three years at Techstars have been pretty amazing," he said. "It's a case where Alabama Power, to their great credit, really planted a flag and said, 'We're going to be a leader for energy tech in the state of Alabama.' And that wasn't the case prior to Techstars coming here. We now have a national reputation of being a place for energy tech, and in many ways, we spoke it into existence. ... We started building resources around energy tech. Those resources include the teams that we're bringing into town every year for the accelerator and then just a nationwide community of mentors, investors, corporate partners and supporters that support what we're doing here."
Jaeh, who attended the University of Florida and studied computer science and engineering, began delving deeper into entrepreneurship when he moved to Los Angeles with his band years ago.
"We packed everything moved out to Los Angeles to make it big. So that was that was my first business mistake," Jaeh said. "I've learned that you don't just abandon all the fans and the relationships and all of the goodwill that you have developed in a particular region, and then think that you can go out to a brand new thing and make that success happen."
There, Jaeh began getting involved in startups, which he said were all unsuccessful except for his ed-tech company ProctorU, which he grew for over a decade with Jarrod Morgan before selling the company.
Now, Jaeh, who has lived in Birmingham for over a decade, said he wants to give back to the entrepreneurship community.
He has served as the 2022 Velocity Accelerator EIR (entrepreneur in residence) for the Techstars Alabama EnergyTech Accelerator, advisory committee member for RC3 Cyber Innovation, secretary and treasurer for the city of Pelham Commercial Development Authority and launch adviser at Alabama Launchpad.
Jaeh said the first thing he noticed when he walked into the Techstars building was its mantra: give first.
"That is pretty much exactly what I'm trying to do," he said. "Give first without any expectation of return. Then over the course of the 13 weeks, working alongside Nate and Brooke (Gillis) and helping with the cohort, it became readily apparent that the secret sauce that makes Techstars great is the passion that the managing director and the program manager put into supporting these companies. It truly is founder first, and they were living that mission."
His time there solidified his determination to make an impact locally through Techstars.
Jaeh said he enjoys living in Birmingham due to its natural resources as a triathlete, but also for its startup community.
"In regards to the startup community, I think that there's a lot of energy here," Jaeh said. "This whole region is just overlooked when it comes to the talent and the potential that exists within this ecosystem alone, and I think it's just gonna take the right people and resources to kind of surface some of this. I'm really bullish on what I see in regards to what's happening downtown."
There are key differentiators that make Birmingham unique, he added.
"First and foremost, I don't know if it's Southern hospitality, but it is a lot easier to get hold of people that can help you grow and succeed in this particular market as opposed to your larger metropolitan areas," Jaeh said. "The people are just way more inviting and there's more access. Secondly, there's the cost of living and the cost of doing business in this particular region. It is much cheaper than I would say in other areas."
"I'm super excited about leveraging the Techstars brand and being able to bring even more visibility to Birmingham and the surrounding region that just started getting on the map," Jaeh said. "I think a lot of people are working very hard to do that."
A Birmingham native is also taking the helm as program manager of the Techstars Alabama EnergyTech accelerator.
Rae'Mah Henderson, 22, stepped into the role Monday, Feb. 27, which was vacated by Brooke Gillis in December when she became CEO of Innovation Depot.
The accelerator is supported by Alabama Power, the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama, the Alabama Department of Commerce, Altec, PowerSouth, the University of Alabama, Southern Research and Hardware Park.
