Founder & General Partner, Progression Fund
Writing first checks in founders building AI-native consumer products - before the hype cycle, before the consensus, before anyone else knows the name. Based in Oakland. Betting on the generation no one else is watching yet.
Matt Lee — Progression Fund, Oakland, CA
The check is $150,000 to $250,000. Small by Sand Hill Road standards. Big enough to matter. Matt Lee has built an entire investment philosophy around the moment before everyone agrees something is a good idea - writing first checks in consumer founders who are building for a generation that, statistically, most of their contemporaries have not yet met.
His thesis is clean: consumer motivations do not change. Generations do. The technology they grow up with shapes how they expect the world to work, and the investors who understand that shift before it becomes consensus make the returns that rewrite their careers. Lee has been applying this framework since before Perplexity AI was a household name - and Perplexity AI is in his portfolio.
Progression Fund, the firm Lee co-founded with Alex Hofmann and JJ Aguhob - both alumni of musical.ly and TikTok - is the direct product of a 2016 encounter. That year, musical.ly was sitting atop the App Store. Lee was in the Bay Area building his VC career; Hofmann was running growth at the app. They watched ByteDance absorb it, watched musical.ly become TikTok, and took one core lesson: if you can identify the platform that reshapes a generation's relationship with content, commerce, and connection - before it reshapes them - you can build a fund around what comes next.
Consumer motivations remain constant while external variables shape consumer behavior.
- Matt Lee, Progression FundLee arrived at this conviction through an unusual route. He is an engineer by training, graduating from the University of New South Wales in Sydney with a degree in Telecommunications Engineering. He added a Master of Commerce, two MBAs - one from London Business School, one from NYU Stern - and a consulting career that took him through Macquarie Group and Capco before he found his way into venture capital.
That engineering background matters. When Lee talks about Gen Alpha - children born after 2010, the cohort he believes will be the richest consumer generation in history - he is not making cultural observations. He is reading infrastructure. Voice AI, 5G, AR/VR: these are not gadgets to Gen Alpha, they are the default layer of reality. Ninety-eight percent of them use some form of technology before they can read. They grew up talking to Alexa. They have never known a world without the App Store. They watched COVID reshape every institution adults told them was permanent.
"They are hackers," Lee says, "and they're using technology at a very young age because their millennial parents also adopted technology early." That compression of technical fluency across generations is not incidental - it is the market.
Lee describes his career trajectory the way he might describe a startup's fundraising stages. His associate role was his pre-seed: learn the mechanics, build a network, understand what failure looks like. Moving to the Bay Area in 2016 and joining Sierra CM - later renamed ChinaRock Capital Management - was his seed round: he eventually became a partner and helped raise a $67 million fund over three years. And founding Progression? That was product-market fit.
The $67 million fund taught him something uncomfortable about pace. "The early investments weren't matched to fund size," he noted in a 2020 interview, describing the ownership misalignment that comes from writing small checks when the fund grows larger than expected. Progression was designed to solve that problem from the start - tight check sizes, disciplined focus, first-in.
The portfolio now spans consumer tech, gaming and entertainment, social platforms, live-stream commerce, digital health, Web3, and AI infrastructure. Forty-plus tech companies, thirty-plus pure consumer plays, more than seventy total. The geographic reach is global - Lee traces deal flow through Europe, the United States, China, and Australasia - a reflection of a career that never stayed in one timezone for long.
Each new generation inherits a different technological baseline. Gen Alpha was born with voice AI, AR/VR, and infinite content. Lee's fund bets that building for their instincts - before the mainstream figures out what those instincts are - is the defining consumer investing opportunity of the decade.
Progression writes first checks in products built for AI as infrastructure, not AI as feature. The distinction matters: the best consumer products of the next decade will be designed from scratch around machine intelligence, not retrofitted. Lee is looking for founders who cannot imagine building any other way.
Having tracked consumer tech across the United States, China, Europe, and Australasia, Lee sees patterns that US-only investors miss. China's live-stream commerce, gaming culture, and social commerce all preceded Western equivalents by years. He uses global trend spotting as an early-warning system for domestic deal flow.
70+ active and former portfolio companies across consumer tech, AI, gaming, entertainment, digital health & more
"Your product has to be simple, straightforward, look beautiful, and be easy to share with your friends."
On building for the next generation - Founders Network"Everything has to be Instagrammable. Your product has to be functional and look beautiful."
On Gen Z product design"They're growing up talking to Alexa and Google, so technology has to be more human to them."
On Gen Alpha's technology expectations"Gen Z is what everyone's talking about, but we're already starting to think about Gen Alpha already."
On staying ahead of generational cycles - The One Percent Project, 2020"The graduation to my Series A was starting my own fund, going through the process of fundraising myself."
On founding Progression Fund"Gen Alpha are growing up in a COVID environment; they are hackers, using technology at a very young age."
On the defining traits of Gen Alpha consumersGraduate and undergraduate degrees - two MBAs (London Business School + NYU Stern), a Master of Commerce in Finance, and a Bachelor of Engineering in Telecommunications, all from UNSW Australia. He applies all four, somehow.
His personal Twitter handle is @powerbog. The fund's is @progressionfund. Exactly as niche and curious as you'd expect from someone who bets on consumer culture before it becomes culture.
The floor of his check size. In a venture world of multi-million dollar rounds, writing $150,000 first checks is a deliberate choice - it keeps him early, keeps him disciplined, and keeps him in deals where conviction, not capital, is the differentiator.
The percentage of Gen Alpha children who use some form of technology - a stat Lee cites when explaining why he never worries about total addressable market when backing consumer tech founders building for that cohort.
The year Matt Lee moved to the Bay Area, met the musical.ly team as the app sat atop the App Store, and set in motion the chain of events that would produce Progression Fund four years later. Timing, in venture, is everything.
The global share of the population that Gen Alpha represents. Lee does not describe this as an opportunity - he describes it as inevitability. The question is only whether you got in early enough to matter.