Executive Ventures was founded in 2008 by high technology entrepreneur and venture investor Matt Oberdorfer to assist passionate entrepreneurs in funding their companies and diligent investors in discovering high-ROI opportunities.

Matt Oberdorfer was born in Germany’s south west corner, close to the borders of France and Switzerland. His parents named Matt (short for Matthias) after his prominent great grand uncle Matthias Erzberger who was Germany’s vice chancellor and finance minister that signed the armistice (Treaty of Versailles) ending World War I.

Matt began his business and technology career as an early enthusiast at the age of 15. His first business, a software company was launched at the age of 18, featuring the world's 1st automated BASIC to C Transpiler. After running the company for four years, at the age of 22, he started to work concurrently as a journalist and staff writer for DOS International, Borland Magazine and Microsoft System Journal.

In 1992, while running his profitable company and writing, Matt boot-strapped another non-technology, high-margin start-up that took advantage of the end of the cold war, by taking European design furniture, manufacturing it in former eastern block countries and distributing it through whole sales channels.

Simultaneously, from 1992 to 1995, Matt wrote a number of best selling books published by International Thomson and Addison-Wesley. In 1995 he also finished his studies of computer science and architectural design at the University of Stuttgart and received a masters degree for his thesis using artificial intelligence in autonomous robots to navigate through unknown terrains.

In 1995 Matt sold his companies and joined Hewlett-Packard's European marketing headquarters as a worldwide product marketing manager. After a few years in marketing, he moved into sales as the global account manager for SAP located in Walldorf, Germany. In 1999 Matt accepted HP’s offer to take on the US-based role as business unit and marketing manager for HP's Scalable Computing in Fort Collins, Colorado. Matt and his team launched the world's first utility-computing-on-demand solution in 2000.

In 2002 Matt left HP and founded Engineered Intelligence Corporation (now called Gear6) in Silicon Valley,  California. As CEO and president Matt raised several rounds of venture capital from US Venture Partners and Interwest Partners. Matt filed several patents for supercomputing technologies for high-performance clusters including the 1st software-based parallel operating systems for the entertainment, financial and energy industries.  EI entered into business agreements and OEM relationships with IBM, HP, DELL, SGI, SUN and was awarded with the “Innovation Quotient Award for Information Technology” and “2004 Excellence in Cluster Technology” of ClusterWorld.

From 2005 to 2008 Gear6’s products and technology enabled an even bigger market opportunity than technical computing: Caching for the Internet/Enterprise Data Center. Horizon Venture joined as an additional venture investor. Gear6 was the winner of  “Eighth Annual eWeek Excellence Award” and of “2008 Red Herring 100 North America Award”.

Matt left Gear6 and started Executive Ventures but still serves as a member of Gear6’s board of directors. He also volunteers some of his time and expertise as an advisor to the Science Castle, an online children’s school that uses story telling as an educational method to teach science.