Matt Straz kept moving his desk. At Namely, the company he founded to make employee information easier to use, the chief executive declined the private office and periodically installed himself among a different department. A corner office might have offered a better view of New York. Straz wanted a better view of the company.
He described the arrangement in 2016 as a way to hear what people actually experienced at work. Familiarity, he argued, would eventually make colleagues forget an executive was sitting beside them. There is something quietly comic about a CEO trying to become part of the furniture. There is also a serious question underneath it: how much can a founder know about the place he has built?
That question gives Straz’s career its shape. He came from advertising, helped create a business acquired by AOL, then moved into the unglamorous machinery of employment. He sold a vision of more accessible workplace information. As Namely grew, his own access to everyday working life became harder to maintain. The larger the company became, the further its founder risked sitting from it.
Before the employee database, the advertising pitch
Before Namely, Straz spent seven years as a senior partner at the global media agency MEC. His later personal biography called them “seven glorious years.” The adjective suggests a certain affection for a business whose central tools include knowing the right people and persuading them to take your call.
He subsequently co-founded Pictela, an advertising technology business acquired by AOL in 2010. In his own account, Pictela initially tried selling into public relations. The team spent a year pursuing an audience with limited budgets for new technology before adapting the product for advertising. An idea could be useful and still be knocking on the wrong door.
Retail became a more promising opening. Brands already had catalogs full of images; Pictela could help turn that material into digital advertising. Straz later described the practical work behind the pitch: sorting images, handling different products and prices, building reporting, accommodating publishers’ technology. The attractive demonstration had to become something a customer could actually run.
That experience complicates the tidy description of Straz as an advertising executive who switched industries. He had already encountered a recurring software problem: a compelling interface gets attention, while the less visible work determines whether anyone keeps using it. The next business would take him into a different department, with considerably more employee records.
A company sold on foot
Straz dated the founding of Namely to 2012 in his public interviews. His explanation was personal and practical. Across large businesses and startups, he had struggled to get useful information about people and teams. The employee database held consequential information, yet the tools around it made that information difficult to reach.
He wanted a system that employees would find approachable enough to use routinely. Selling that intention meant going door to door in New York, pitching potential customers and investors. The difficult early recruitment was its own sales exercise: asking people to join a business that still existed largely as an idea. An offer letter can contain a salary. It cannot contain proof of the future.
Namely salesman Colin Specter later remembered Straz and an early colleague selling the idea to agencies before there was a product. Specter’s account is useful because it places persuasion at the center of the founding work. Clients, investors and recruits needed different things, but each had to believe that this small team could deliver.
“Always be raising.”
Matt Straz, on the founder’s responsibility to keep the company funded, 2016
The line sounds like a fundraising slogan. In Straz’s explanation, it also meant maintaining relationships before money was urgently needed and using investor conversations to test whether the business made sense. Selling gave him an audience that could say no. For a founder surrounded by a vision of his own making, that is a useful service.
When the company became the assignment
By October 2015, Namely had passed 200 employees. Straz said it had more than doubled headcount that year, hiring at the pace of a person every business day across New York and San Francisco. The software company was becoming a substantial workplace of its own.
A historical milestone, reported by Straz at the time
His account of reaching that size was notably administrative. He had delayed hiring a finance chief and technology chief, then found the company could not keep scaling without them. Onboarding and training became necessities. Meetings multiplied. The founder who once feared that a complete management team would leave him little to do discovered the calendar had other plans.
His daily reminder was that the company itself had become his product. It was an admission that the work had changed. Designing a useful service and designing an organization capable of delivering it required different attention. Straz also introduced new-hire buddies and asked executives to meet one another regularly, as well as meeting him. The routes between people needed deliberate construction.
In that 2017 conversation, Straz disclosed a less corporate part of his background: he had studied fine arts and design and played in a punk band when younger. He also described public writing as a way to stay connected with employees. A post could reach colleagues who might leave a company email unread. The audience for the founder’s public voice was sometimes sitting inside his own office.
His other workplace was the page
Straz wrote extensively about work. By the time he finished his MediaPost column in November 2013, he counted more than 100 articles over more than two years. Leaving advertising technology for HR technology, he decided it was time to hand the column to someone else. The move between industries was sufficiently complete to require a change of byline territory.
His later writing returned repeatedly to the relationship between employees and managers. In a 2015 essay, he proposed treating employees with the attention businesses reserve for valued customers. Recruiting, onboarding and retention belonged to one continuous experience. Feedback deserved a response before an employee decided to leave, rather than a hurried examination after the resignation arrived.
Another essay that year tackled monitoring and micromanagement. Straz argued for giving employees ownership of their work and connecting individual goals with the company’s wider purpose. Performance conversations should spend time on development and solutions. The managerial appeal is clear: a workforce that understands its job requires less hovering. Hovering is an expensive use of an executive salary.
In 2016 he also challenged the suggestion that software could make HR professionals unnecessary. Tools could distribute information and collect feedback; people still had to listen, mediate and act. For someone selling HR technology, it was a useful boundary to draw. Installing a communication channel did not settle the question of what management would do when somebody used it.
The distance between advice and authority
Straz’s leadership writing became more specific about delegation. In October 2016 he described two familiar founder habits: staying tangled in operational details, or handing too much away. He recommended regular conversations with executives, learning from their knowledge and inviting feedback on his own performance. The objective was to remain informed without becoming the person through whom every decision had to pass.
That distinction matters to his story because proximity can be deceptive. Sitting beside a department may reveal frustrations. It does not automatically resolve reporting lines, incentives or accountability. A founder can hear more and still need other people to exercise authority. The desk is a good observation point; it is a limited management system.
Straz’s tenure at Namely ended in May 2018 when the board dismissed him as CEO. The company said it had determined that his actions were inconsistent with its expectations of leadership. Board member Elisa Steele took charge of the Office of the CEO. That decision belongs in any account of his career, alongside the growth and the management advice. It cannot be made incidental by a pleasing story about office furniture.
Another seat at the table
Straz went on to found Bennie in 2019. He also became a co-founder and partner at FiDi Ventures, a New York investment firm associated with operators backing early businesses. Its stated approach favors follow-on investing without minimum ownership requirements or ambitions for board seats. Its focus includes HR technology, financial technology and infrastructure.
The connection with his earlier career is straightforward: workplace technology remained part of his professional world, while investing introduced another way to participate in company building. The fund’s emphasis on operating experience places the messy business of running a company inside its pitch to founders. Experience supplies examples. It also supplies mistakes worth remembering.
On July 15, 2025, Bennie announced that Brett Davis, previously its chief revenue officer, would become CEO and Straz would move to chairman. Straz thanked the senior team and described the transition as a continuation of their work together. Davis had spent six years building the company’s revenue operation. The change put a long-standing colleague in the chief executive’s chair.
It is an apt later chapter for a founder who spent so much time writing about how a job changes as a company grows. Straz’s record includes an acquisition, a software startup that grew into hundreds of employees, a board-imposed departure and another company’s planned leadership handoff. The chairs have changed. The recurring problem remains close at hand: what does the organization need its founder to do now?