A B.A. in Buddhist psychology, three companies sold, and a calendar with nothing scheduled before lunch. The arithmetic of a quiet operator.
Most people who study Buddhist and Western psychology at Naropa University do not end up writing sales-tracking software. Matthew Bellows did - and then he did it twice more, in fintech and in marketing AI. He is the founder who keeps the quota and the meditation cushion in the same bag, and somehow neither one apologizes for the other.
Today Bellows is Acting CEO of Averi, a New York company that calls itself a content engine built for startup speed. The pitch is blunt and the way he tells it, almost obvious: marketing is a $500 billion category that still, in his words, "runs like it's 2012." Averi's answer is not to replace the marketers. It is to put AI agents and a curated marketplace of human experts in the same workspace, with billing and project management stitched in, so a small team can ship growth without drowning in tools.
He arrived at the role from the investor's side of the table. As a General Partner at Grit Capital, he helped lead Averi's $3 million seed round, then stepped into the operating seat - the rare investor who decides the best way to back a company is to go run it. The thesis is the kind he has bet on before: experienced operators, a real product people use daily, and a problem big enough to matter.
Before Averi there was a pattern, and the pattern is the story. Bellows has founded, led and sold three companies. The first was WGR Media, a bootstrapped media business covering the games industry - an early, slightly inconvenient bet that mobile games would matter. CNET Networks bought it in 2004, before that bet looked smart to anyone else.
The second was Yesware, the one most people know. Founded in 2010, it was built to solve a problem Bellows had lived as a sales manager: salespeople hate entering data, rarely do it accurately, and feed their managers numbers that mean nothing. Yesware turned the inbox itself into the tracker. It grew into a platform used by 500,000 customers at companies like Groupon, Yelp, Salesforce, Twilio, Acquia and Zendesk, with revenue that climbed roughly 1,300% in a single year. He handed off the CEO chair in 2018 and stayed on as chairman until the company was acquired by Vendasta in 2022.
Then he did the hardest thing a serial founder can do: start over.
The third was BodesWell, founded in 2019 to bring digital financial planning to people who never had access to it - partnering with banks and retirement companies to reach tens of millions of customers. American Express acquired it in 2022, the same year Yesware found its home. Two exits in one year is not luck. It is what happens when someone has spent two decades learning where the gaps are.
Here is the detail that explains more than any org chart: Bellows holds a "no meetings before noon" policy. He wakes at 5:30 for email, exercise, reading and thirty to sixty minutes of meditation. He aims to be asleep by 10:30. For a man who has run four startups, this is a quiet rebellion against the "120 hours a week" gospel that startup culture loves to preach. He rejects it outright. Focus, he argues, is the asset. Rest protects it.
The meditation is not a productivity hack he picked up from a podcast. He was introduced to sitting practice at the Naropa Institute in 1990 and has logged many months of solo and group retreat, mostly in the Shambhala tradition, which he left in 2019. He teaches meditation. He once gave a talk at Business of Software with a title that doubles as a personal motto: "Mind the Gap: The Case for Mindfulness at Work."
He is also honest about the times he got it wrong. Early on, he tried to outsource work that should have stayed in-house. It backfired immediately, and the shame of it became a rule he never broke again: never lie to a customer. He likes a co-founder's phrase - "you tell lies until they come true" - but quietly rewrites it into something he can live with: "imagining steps to realize a dream."