Senior Lecturer, Finance

Matthew Rhodes-Kropf is a Senior Lecturer in the Finance Department at MIT Sloan where he teaches entrepreneurship. Rhodes-Kropf is also a managing partner at Tectonic Ventures. He is well known for his expertise in venture capital and entrepreneurship. For almost 30 years Matt has been an entrepreneur, an investor, and a professor. He has taught entrepreneurship and venture investing at Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, and is now a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He has helped start numerous companies ranging from a biotech firm to a quantitative hedge fund. Matt has also forged a successful investing career that began with buying a bar in college and evolved into investments in Rackspace, Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, Axioma, Voyage.ai, Omni.ml, Simbe Robotics, Merama, and Forta Health, among others.

Matt founded Tectonic Ventures with help from Juan Leungli, who joined Tectonic from General Catalyst, and Morris Miller, a co-founder of Rackspace. 

Rhodes-Kropf was formerly the CFO of Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, where he played a pivotal role in launching the firm and the world’s first Alzheimer’s imaging agent. He also helped launch a multi-strat hedge fund as the COO and advised in the creation and growth of the quantitative venture capital firm Correlation Ventures and the deep-value fund Stonehouse Corporation.

Matthew is passionate about teaching entrepreneurship and fintech in the Finance Department at MIT. His research on venture capital and exits has been published in leading finance and economics journals. Previously a faculty member in the Entrepreneurial Management department at Harvard Business School, he taught VCPE and published numerous HBS cases. He was also a finance professor at Columbia University, where he taught Entrepreneurial Finance.

Rhodes-Kropf’s work has been profiled in the Financial Times, The Economist, the MIT Sloan Management Review, Kauffman publications, Institutional Investor’s Alpha Magazine, PeHub, and many others. He is regularly quoted in major print media like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and has appeared on television networks including CNBC, BBC, and CNN. Matthew frequently gives talks worldwide on the financing of innovation.

A graduate of Duke University, Professor Rhodes-Kropf holds a BA in computer science and economics and a PhD in game theory. He serves on the board of Duke University’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative, was the previous Chair of Duke’s Graduate School, and is a board participant at several Tectonic portfolio companies, including Auterion, Butlr, Neighborhood Trust, Rendered.ai, Tifin.ai, Vecna Robotics, Wyebot, and Xenex.