matthitchman.com

I'm Matt. Originally from the UK, now in New Zealand, working at Microsoft.

I've had a fairly eclectic career across finance, tech, and businesses I've founded. After studying Philosophy at the University of Exeter, I spent a lot of my 20s importing garden furniture from China and selling it at country fairs around the UK. Good introduction to selling and running a business. After exiting that I started Ivybird, an electric scooter company. The scooters were 50cc-equivalent, electric, with a heavy removable battery. A lot of fun to nip around London on. I'd seen them on a trip to China and thought they would land well at home and beat the congestion charge. Not the best financial outcome as businesses go: the battery technology was not quite there yet back in 2009.

In 2011 I moved to New Zealand, did a stretch in finance, and founded Vitally, a personalised vitamin subscription. I later sold it, and Vitable absorbed it.

Vitally was the start of my move into tech. It was a digital-first consumer brand, so I had to learn fast across every front: the website, the app, an AI-powered recommendations engine, and a CRM driving personalised comms and the user experience. Classic startup: a bit of everything, from designing packaging to pitching for investment, running digital campaigns, and packing orders in the warehouse, while leading an awesome team. That experience led to consulting work for other supplement brands in New Zealand. The biggest was Lifestream, where we refreshed the brand, redesigned the packaging, repositioned the product for a younger audience, and reworked how the team operated internally.

That led to Microsoft, where I have been for five years. I started as strategic partnerships lead for New Zealand, then moved into enterprise account work. Now I am working with software companies across Asia, helping them build AI into their products, rebuild the user experience around it, and grow through Microsoft.

In my spare time I am learning to build the thing I sell. I passed AI-102 recently and have a few projects underway.