The whole story

I’m Diana Berlin, an early-stage investor at Matrix Partners. I like tools that make work better, apps that change the way lots of people spend lots of time, and systems that scale emotional labor. Around the edges, I make a podcast called Should We.

In high school, I wrote poems; joined a band; did Science Olympiad. Then, I graduated and moved back to where it all began. At Harvard, I studied 20th-century U.S. history, with a focus on world’s fairs. While there, some friends and I started an internet culture conference called ROFLCon. What the history of world’s fairs made clear to me was that technology is always the future; what ROFLCon made clear to me was that the future so far is complicated and fun. Pairing that clarity with my lifelong love of computers, I decided to be a part of building what would come next.

I decided to be a part of building what would come next.

With a history degree, I found it tough to break into technology. Most companies wanted to see a computer science degree before even talking to me. Microsoft, though, was willing to hire liberal arts grads into program management roles and set them up for success, so I spent a summer in Seattle and then a few years in Silicon Valley working as a program manager for Office Graphics and then PowerPoint. After Microsoft, I spent two years at Harvard Business School broadening my perspective; in the middle, I joined Kickstarter for a summer. From there, I moved to Berlin to join SoundCloud, where I joke that I ended up “designing my own rotational program.” What that really means: as a generalist at a high-growth startup, I worked with my managers to continuously revisit my responsibilities and point them toward impact and learning.

After a while, I took a step back and realized that I missed rolling my sleeves up. I moved into a product role at SoundCloud, and eventually realized that I was ready to return to the U.S. Looking for my next role, I found Quip :  a startup led by product thinkers I admired, seizing the opportunity to redefine productivity. I jumped at the chance to shape a product still in its early days, and joined the team in January 2016. Seven months later, in August 2016, Salesforce acquired Quip, creating the opportunity to see an acquisition up close. Over the next four years, I grew with the team—ultimately leading a group of product managers, user researchers, and data scientists as VP Product.

In 2021, I joined Matrix Partners as an early-stage investor. I realized that I like to learn and I like to help, and VC is a career where I get to do both every day. I’m excited to help write the next chapter in Matrix’s 40-year history.