What's Your StORy? Matthew Brady

Name: Matthew Brady

Employer: Volley Solutions and University of Colorado Leeds School of Business

Job Title(s): Founder & CEO and Instructor

INFORMS member since 2021

Using technology to help people. From the first code camp that I went to in elementary school to working on a variety of technology projects. My career interests were really formed during my higher education. The core concepts of the business that I founded two years ago were originally formulated at Purdue University, based on a project commissioned by the Dean of Students Office to assist the disabled student population. The crux of the solution was a decision engine tuned for supply  and demand matching, based on various quantitative and qualitative criteria. This solution emerged as an important framework to solve myriad organizational problems at Purdue.

Throughout my career, I have seen world-class organizations make decisions based on intuition, tradition and the “path of least resistance.” During my undergraduate and graduate studies, I had the opportunity to pursue a very specific area of OR/MS that focused on leveraging decision science and behavioral economics, and the result is Volley Solutions. I have helped run and co-founded other startups that were successfully acquired, and now I am building an organization from the ground up to be the leading platform for collaborative decision optimization.

No. I completed the sale of the company that I was running, after two successful exits in the prior seven years. I took some time off around the time that COVID-19 became global; my wife did as well, so we both incorporated businesses and began pursuing our passions. Those events reinforced our sense that nothing is certain. I wanted to “bet on myself” at some point in my career, and this was the time to do it.

Finding actionable insights that help ... “faith” that data has tremendous value when used correctly.

There is significant overlap even now, and that will continue as industry takes on more of the responsibility of funding education, and academia puts more emphasis on strategic and applied training (borrowing from the “bootcamp” model).

From the online content … written, video, etc. Shortly after I joined, I registered for the 2022 INFORMS Business Analytics Conference and submitted a proposal to present, which was accepted. It has been an excellent experience thus far, and I look forward to the Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, and then welcoming everyone to Denver in 2023!

The breadth and depth of resources are remarkable. OR/MS Today and the many specialized journals are a significant value. As an entrepreneur and educator, I think it’s critical to foster the overlap and collaboration. Ultimately though, it’s about the people.

My talk addressed real-world examples of leveraging decision science in startups, nonprofits and higher education. The use cases included deciding who to hire, when a phase-gate has been achieved, and which project to resource next. I included aspects of behavioral economics that explain why it’s so common to rely on intuition (otherwise known as habits, biases and group-think), even when making material decisions. Finally, I provided ways to elevate decision-making in organizations – to decide using information. To decide better.

I was interested in math and science, but also in helping people and making a difference in the world. Those interests and passions have carried through being a parent. I was able to coach my daughter Alexandra’s sixth-grade Lego robotics club and I have included concepts of deductive reasoning and First Principles in the college curricula that I have developed. I love applying technology to inspire and improve peoples’ lives.

I believe that I set the world record for the longest paper airplane flight. My fifth-grade science teacher can vouch… it was approximately 2.5 minutes of flight time according to his stopwatch. But it wasn’t documented, and Guinness only allows for indoor measurements. I used this on my application to Google. That story, and about 15 interviews at their Mountain View headquarters led to a job offer, which I proceeded to turn down. But someday I might work there, or may try to go back to my elementary school gym and get my science teacher to help me set that record. And I love that the movie “Paper Planes” was made as an inspirational story to others. We all have to believe that we are here for a purpose … something meaningful and unique.

Give, Save, Spend. We have been teaching our kids to do that from an early age, and we have practiced that for quite some time. With the money that I spend, I think that we would get a lake house in Indiana, so that we could gather all of our family and friends for holidays.