# Matt Pelc

> Matt Pelc is the co-founder and CEO of Plane, the all-in-one people platform (formerly Pilot) that helps fast-growing startups pay and manage employees and contractors in 100+ countries. A Cambridge-trained computer scientist who got his start writing Ruby and building Slack bots, he went through Y Combinator's Winter 2017 batch and has spent the better part of a decade trying to make a worker's location irrelevant to whether a company will hire them.

- **Role:** Co-founder & CEO at Plane
- **Organizations:** Plane, Pilot (Pilot Platform Inc.), Y Combinator (W17)
- **Nationality:** Polish
- **Education:** BA, Computer Science, University of Cambridge, MA, University of Cambridge
- **Known for:** Co-founded and leads Plane (formerly Pilot), positioned as the #1 easiest-to-use payroll for startups, Built a platform paying employees and contractors in 100+ countries, Graduated Y Combinator's Winter 2017 batch

## Career timeline

- **2011** — Speaks at EuRuKo on Machine Learning and Sentiment Classification in Ruby
- **2016** — Building bots for Slack and running Pilot Tech Talks; Pilot appears on a London marketplace-startups panel
- **2017** — Goes through Y Combinator's Winter 2017 batch with Pilot, co-founded with Staszek Kolarzowski
- **2020-2022** — Pilot scales global payroll through the remote-work boom; frequent podcast guest on international hiring
- **2023** — Rebrands Pilot to Plane to end confusion with other 'Pilot' companies
- **2024-2025** — Speaks on payroll economics and global hiring strategy as Plane's CEO

## Achievements

- Co-founded and leads Plane (formerly Pilot), positioned as the #1 easiest-to-use payroll for startups
- Built a platform paying employees and contractors in 100+ countries
- Graduated Y Combinator's Winter 2017 batch
- Helped 1000+ startups run their people operations
- Built and ran payroll operations with a deliberately lean team via software-first design

## Latest updates

- **2025** — Speaking on panels about the real cost of payroll and global hiring strategy as Plane's CEO
- **2023** — Completed the rebrand from Pilot to Plane

## Links

- Website: https://matt.tm/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matid/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/matid
- GitHub: https://github.com/matid
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW4EuQUgJDQ

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/matt-pelc
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-22