Matt Britton

He turned curiosity into a category.

Right now Matt Britton runs Suzy, an AI-powered consumer intelligence platform that does something deceptively simple: it asks real people real questions and hands brands the answers in minutes, not months. Netflix, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Nintendo all use it to find out what you want before you finish wanting it. The pitch fits on a napkin - faster truth - and that napkin has pulled in more than $110 million in venture capital.

The name is the tell. Suzy sounds like a person because it is meant to feel like asking a sharp friend rather than commissioning a study. That instinct - make research feel human - is the through-line of a 25-year career spent in the same seat: watching how the next generation buys, works, and lives, then selling that read to everyone who needs it.

In May 2025 he published Generation AI, a field guide to Generation Alpha - the first cohort born into a world where AI is a constant companion rather than a novelty. It debuted at #1 on Amazon's business list and became a national bestseller, then carried him onto the stage at the CNBC CEO Council Summit to explain, with the calm of someone who has done this before, why the age of AI will change everything. He has, in fact, done this before. Ten years earlier he wrote YouthNation, the playbook on Millennials and Gen Z that also hit #1. Two books, a decade apart, same job: tell the grown-ups what is coming.

Before the software, the agency

Britton did not arrive at consumer insight through a research lab. He arrived through hustle. As a senior at Boston University in 1997 he founded The Magma Group, a college marketing firm, and somehow talked Yahoo!, Lycos, eBay, and Sony Music into being clients - a roster that now reads like a museum exhibit of the early internet. Entrepreneur Magazine put him on its "30 Under 30" list before he turned 26.

In 2002 he co-founded Mr Youth with Paul Tedeschi and spent nearly a decade growing it from a one-person startup into a 500-person global marketing shop. The work was good enough to make him a recurring guest expert on The Daily Show in 2005 and 2006, brought on to translate youth culture for everyone over thirty. In 2011 he sold Mr Youth to LBi International, which Publicis Groupe later absorbed, and the agency became MRY - running campaigns for Visa, Coca-Cola, Bayer, and Neutrogena.

But the more interesting move happened the same year as the sale. Britton spun out Crowdtap, a social-marketing software platform, which raised a $7 million Series A from Foundry Group. For years it ran alongside the agency life. Then in 2017 he stepped in as CEO, rebranded it Suzy, and in 2018 executed the spinoff that became his main act. The agency man had quietly become a software founder - and this time the product was the thing he had been doing by hand for twenty years: asking people what they think and selling the answer.

Why people keep handing him a microphone

Britton has delivered more than 500 keynotes across five continents and consulted for over half of the Fortune 500. The appeal is not prophecy for its own sake. It is that he sits on a live feed of consumer opinion - Suzy is, by design, a permanent finger on the pulse - so when he says people are now asking AI what to buy instead of typing it into a search bar, he is reporting from the data, not guessing at it. "Consumers are simply asking AI what to buy and getting personalized, instant answers in return," he notes, and then goes and builds the tools to measure exactly that.

His backers tell their own story about reach. Suzy's cap table includes Foundry Group, H.I.G. Capital, and Bertelsmann alongside two names that do not usually share a footnote: fashion designer Kenneth Cole and NBA star Kevin Durant. It is a fitting roster for a founder whose entire career has lived at the intersection of culture and commerce - the place where what is cool becomes what sells.

The keynote work is not a side hustle bolted onto the company; it is the same job in a different format. On stage he walks executives through how AI is rewriting consumer behavior, education, work, and the way Generation Alpha will grow up, then points them back at the uncomfortable part: the playbook they spent careers building is already out of date. He frames AI not as a feature to add but as a foundation to rebuild on, which is a harder thing to hear and a more useful thing to say. The same argument runs through Generation AI, where he treats Generation Alpha - children being raised alongside conversational machines - as the leading indicator for where every market eventually heads.

The arc is unusually clean for an entrepreneur. Most people pivot. Britton refined. The Magma Group, Mr Youth, Crowdtap, Suzy - four companies, one obsession, sharpened over a quarter century until it fit inside a piece of software that answers in real time. He started by reading youth culture for brands. He is ending up reading the whole AI era for everyone. Same instinct, bigger canvas.

There is a tidy symmetry to how he got here. The kid who once cold-called Yahoo! from a Boston University dorm built his reputation on being early - early to youth marketing, early to social, early to calling AI a foundation rather than a feature. Being early is only valuable if you can prove it, and proof is exactly what Suzy manufactures: a live stream of what people actually think, sold to the companies that need to know first. Britton has spent his whole life answering one question on other people's behalf, and he finally built a business whose only product is the answer.