Matt Bilotti got exposed to entrepreneurship and business through a student organization that shaped his career trajectory.
One decision changed Northeastern University graduate Matt Bilotti’s career trajectory.
While attending the student organization fair upon starting at Northeastern University, one particular club caught Bilotti’s eye: the Entrepreneurs Club. The group had spaghetti towers on its table and Bilotti thought it was “interesting.”
He ended up talking with the organization’s then-president and joining the business-focused student group. From that one fair, Bilotti unknowingly set himself on his career path where he works for and with startups.
“I love the energy that founders have,” Bilotti said. “I love the excitement and optimism of being a part of an early team. The challenges are always different and they’re ever evolving. I love working with founders that have big ambitions, and if the thing that they’re building works, then there’s some significant impact on some part of society in some sort of way.”
Bilotti came to Northeastern from his hometown in Staten Island, New York, as a marketing major, having never considered business before coming to the Boston campus. But by his second year, Bilotti had switched his major to entrepreneurship. By his third year, he was the president of the Entrepreneurs Club and the founding managing partner of the Boston team of the Dorm Fund, a fund for students to invest in other student-run companies.
“I knew about startups but I’d never really been around them,” Bilotti said. “Being around the people that were involved in the Entrepreneurs Club and were building companies on the side … that was my starting point.”
Joining the Entrepreneurs Club helped Bilotti also make connections that led to jobs and co-ops. He did three co-ops while at Northeastern, the first being at a startup he connected with through the then-president of the Entrepreneurs Club and the second being at HubSpot when the founders were initiating an IPO.
Bilotti also did a co-op as a presidential global officer — one of President Joseph E. Aoun’s first two student ambassadors — traveling to 26 cities across 19 countries and five continents on behalf of Northeastern to meet with startups, students and graduates around the world to find co-op and other expansion opportunities for the university.
Through this, he helped kickstart a Northeastern alumni chapter in Jakarta and made connections around the globe.
“It was a true once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he said. “I feel so fortunate and so lucky. I met so many incredible people: alumni, friends of the university, parents. I got to meet so many students abroad and connect with all different startup people, whether it’s founders or people that ran startup accelerators or funds in different cities. I got to build a really strong appreciation for the different pockets and culture of entrepreneurship throughout the world. It gave me a broader view of entrepreneurship and the culture of startup communities.”
After graduating from Northeastern in 2015, Bilotti’s connections from his co-op at HubSpot told him about Drift, a startup software company that his colleague was co-founding. Bilotti became one of the first employees there and stayed on until the company was acquired for over a billion dollars six-and-a-half years later.
For the last three years, he’s worked as a product lead on the investor platform for AngelList, a company that works with private markets and startups.
“AngelList is the perfect cross section of things I knew, like product management, and things I wanted to learn about the investing world,” Bilotti said.
Before the Drift acquisition, Bilotti dabbled in angel investing through the Dorm Room Fund and a local venture capital firm, but the money he received from Drift’s acquisition allowed him to begin investing more actively, as well as begin advising startups.
In his spare time, Bilotti serves as an angel investor and adviser with a particular focus on burgeoning marketing and technology companies.
“Startups generate positive impact in a lot of ways,” he said. “Generally I try to get involved with startups where I think that if it works, there’s some very real meaningful impact. I just love being a part of that and I love the ‘figure it out’ mentality.”