Matthew Finlayson
CTO
Matthew Finlayson is CTO at ActivTrak, where he leads engineering, security and support for a platform serving 9,500+ customer organizations and more than one million users worldwide. He oversees a 65-person organization while staying hands-on: roughly 1/3 of his working hours go to developer tools, and he writes and ships code nearly every day.
Matthew brings 26 years of technology experience across QA, development, consulting and leadership. The thread running through all of it: learning the work from the inside, and building technology worth using himself. That has taken him from a social software company through its IPO, to a cloud cost management startup that helped create an industry category, to a workforce intelligence company now defining how organizations measure the impact of AI on work.
At Jive Software, Matthew served as Principal Engineer on Cloud Management and Infrastructure Operations. He helped scale the platform from $46 million to $204 million in revenue while serving 15 million users across 600+ enterprise customers, including HP, SAP, T-Mobile and UBS. He developed the public cloud hosting environment that accounted for 59% of product revenue during the enterprise social software category's peak years, supporting Jive's NASDAQ IPO in December 2011, which raised $161.3 million.
At Cloudability, Matthew joined a 20-person team and helped build it to 50 as the platform grew to manage more than $9 billion in enterprise cloud spending across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud for 250+ enterprise customers. He helped formalize the FinOps discipline, bridging finance and engineering to manage cloud costs more effectively — work that has since become an industry category with its own foundation and certification program.
Matthew studied at a technical school with serious liberal arts coursework, including serving as the editor in chief of the college newspaper. He treats writing as a thinking tool and credits that habit as the fastest path to getting people aligned. His leadership style follows the same logic: kindness is underrated in technical leadership, and how a decision is communicated is as consequential as the decision itself.
As ActivTrak's technical leader, Matthew drove the engineering organization through 26% revenue growth in 2025. That year, ActivTrak secured a strategic investment from Francisco Partners, bringing total funding to $77.5 million across Francisco Partners, Elsewhere Partners and Sapphire Ventures. Those who work with Matthew describe him as a listener who is mindful about how decisions land and a leader who pushes organizations to operate as one team rather than separate functions.
Matthew is an expert in cloud infrastructure, engineering leadership at scale, AI adoption and measurement and FinOps. He has spent 26 years building and leading technology organizations from startup to enterprise scale. He also serves as an Operating Advisor at Elsewhere Partners.
Matt's thought leadership has been featured in top tier media including Fast Company, Dataversity, Aerospace Trends and more.
Matthew brings 26 years of technology experience across QA, development, consulting and leadership. The thread running through all of it: learning the work from the inside, and building technology worth using himself. That has taken him from a social software company through its IPO, to a cloud cost management startup that helped create an industry category, to a workforce intelligence company now defining how organizations measure the impact of AI on work.
At Jive Software, Matthew served as Principal Engineer on Cloud Management and Infrastructure Operations. He helped scale the platform from $46 million to $204 million in revenue while serving 15 million users across 600+ enterprise customers, including HP, SAP, T-Mobile and UBS. He developed the public cloud hosting environment that accounted for 59% of product revenue during the enterprise social software category's peak years, supporting Jive's NASDAQ IPO in December 2011, which raised $161.3 million.
At Cloudability, Matthew joined a 20-person team and helped build it to 50 as the platform grew to manage more than $9 billion in enterprise cloud spending across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud for 250+ enterprise customers. He helped formalize the FinOps discipline, bridging finance and engineering to manage cloud costs more effectively — work that has since become an industry category with its own foundation and certification program.
Matthew studied at a technical school with serious liberal arts coursework, including serving as the editor in chief of the college newspaper. He treats writing as a thinking tool and credits that habit as the fastest path to getting people aligned. His leadership style follows the same logic: kindness is underrated in technical leadership, and how a decision is communicated is as consequential as the decision itself.
As ActivTrak's technical leader, Matthew drove the engineering organization through 26% revenue growth in 2025. That year, ActivTrak secured a strategic investment from Francisco Partners, bringing total funding to $77.5 million across Francisco Partners, Elsewhere Partners and Sapphire Ventures. Those who work with Matthew describe him as a listener who is mindful about how decisions land and a leader who pushes organizations to operate as one team rather than separate functions.
Matthew is an expert in cloud infrastructure, engineering leadership at scale, AI adoption and measurement and FinOps. He has spent 26 years building and leading technology organizations from startup to enterprise scale. He also serves as an Operating Advisor at Elsewhere Partners.
Matt's thought leadership has been featured in top tier media including Fast Company, Dataversity, Aerospace Trends and more.
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