Matthew John Brady
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Professional background

Matthew John Brady, Professional background

Matt Brady is an entrepreneur and educator. He leads Volley Solutions®, a decision optimization platform, and WorksBetter™, which makes public records actionable for taxpayers. He is an ASST Teaching Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder's Leeds School of Business, and through HumanCentered he develops courses that build ethics and empathy into innovation.

The last three companies where he held an executive role were acquired by strategic buyers and private equity firms. He is based in Denver and Boulder, and his personal background covers family, education and life in Colorado.

Matt Brady seated on a stone wall in front of evergreen trees

Executive Leadership

  1. 2020 – Present

    Founder & CEO, Volley Solutions®

    Present

    Great decisions blend intuition and data.

    Volley is a decision optimization platform that helps organizations combine data and intuition to make better decisions. Leaders gather input from every stakeholder, weigh it against criteria set in advance, and reach decisions they can explain. Teams align faster and move with more confidence.

    • At the core is Volley's Decision Engine, which handles one-time choices, open-ended decisions, and the recurring decisions every organization makes. Volley is research-driven, human-centered and focused on outcomes.
    • Volley also teaches the method. DECIDE BETTER® is a decision science program for leaders, delivered through Vistage and directly to teams.
    • Mirage, Volley's impact reporting tool, links field reports to the stories donors and boards read, so organizations can verify the impact they report.

    Decide better with Volley.

  2. 2026 – Present

    WorksBetter™

    Present

    You own this state. You can ask why.

    WorksBetter™ makes public records actionable for taxpayers, starting with Colorado. It shows where public money goes, what pending bills would do, and what the records reveal. Every figure links back to its public source, and when the records can't answer a question, WorksBetter™ says so instead of guessing.

    • 2,660public pages, free to read
    • 1,425public projects tracked
    • 7,310bills across 16 legislative sessions
    • 136public data sources

    Figures as of Nov. 3, 2026, read from WorksBetter™'s public data.

    • Projects: gives each of 1,425 state and local public projects its own page.
    • Bills: has read 14,098 fiscal notes on 7,310 bills since 2016 to show what proposed laws would cost.
    • Ask the data: 513 pages, each explaining one public figure, such as a department's operating budget, with its sources.
    • Cities: local sections for Aurora, Colorado Springs, Denver, Fort Collins and Lakewood.
    Map of the 50 states ranked on the Taxpayer Shareholder Index, from WorksBetter
    Explore the 50-state map on WorksBetter.orgThe 50 states ranked on eight topics from federal figures alone. Every figure sourced or left blank.

Successful Exits

  1. 2017 – 2020

    CEO & Board Member, AbsenceSoft

    Acquired

    Software that helps employers manage leaves of absence under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and related laws. Its AbsenceTracker product raises productivity, improves compliance and lowers costs.

  2. 2015 – 2017

    Co-Founder & CTO, Opolis

    Acquired

    At the time, Opolis was a curated marketplace that connected people with career opportunities through trusted advisors.

    • Led product innovation, with direct responsibility for marketing, technology and operations.
    • Ran a full brand launch and expanded marketing automation, which raised lead volume ninefold and produced the company's best sales results three months in a row.
    • Owned the product roadmap and designed a “Kevlar quilt” architecture of more than 12 best-of-breed systems.
    • Led key parts of the effort to cut $1M from the annual operating budget.
    • Shaped the strategic direction, every personnel decision and investor relations.

  3. 2014 – 2015

    COO, 2lemetry

    Acquired

    2lemetry was an Internet of Things (IoT) platform that connected people, processes, data and devices, and turned raw data into real-time intelligence that teams could act on.

    • Ran operations across product, pricing, sales enablement, consulting, finance and accounting, and go-to-market.
    • Managed outside counsel, banks, the benefits and HR provider, facilities and vendors worldwide.
    • Played a central role in the capital raise, including a significant investment from Salesforce Ventures, and in the acquisition by Amazon Web Services that followed.

Technology Investments

Thought Leadership

  1. 2023 – Present

    Speaker, Vistage Worldwide

    Present

    Vistage runs peer advisory groups for CEOs and senior executives around the world.

    See his speaker profile and the Vistage events page, or book a session for your leadership team.

  2. 2021 – Present

    ASST Teaching Professor, University of Colorado Boulder – Leeds School of Business

    Present

    Leeds pairs theory with hands-on practice to prepare students for the future of global business.

    Matt is an ASST Teaching Professor in the Organizational Leadership and Information Analytics (OLIA) division at Leeds. His faculty profile has more detail. His awards and recognition include:

    CU Boulder students can register for his courses as BAIM 4230 (Customer Success with Salesforce CRM), BAIM 3210 (Low-Code for Citizen Developers) and BAIM 3300 (AI & Automation for Tomorrow's Societies).

  3. 2020 – Present

    Strategic Advisor, V2

    Present

    V2 is Matt's advisory firm and the company he uses to launch new ventures. V2 advises leadership teams in three areas:

    • Mergers and acquisitions – grow through a mix of organic expansion and acquisitions: map the strategic landscape, gather data, evaluate scenarios and carry out the plan.
    • Product strategy – build several recurring revenue streams through design thinking, human-centered technology, scalable SaaS products and high-margin subscriptions.
    • Operational excellence – align the organization, deliver the initiatives that matter most, and measure progress against goals and key performance indicators.

    V2 also develops Matt's curriculum, which he teaches at Leeds and publishes at HumanCentered. Each course covers business technology and digital transformation, built around customer and stakeholder value.

The courses are open to advanced undergraduates and serve students in information management, business analytics, leadership, strategy and entrepreneurship, operations management, finance and marketing. Together they make up the Enterprise Integration track within the Information Management emphasis of the Management & Entrepreneurship concentration at Leeds.

Boulder startup community events

  • Colorado Impact Challenge™ – Matt launched this event as the CU Low-Code Hackathon when he joined the faculty. It grew into the Colorado Sustainability Challenge and is now the Colorado Impact Challenge™, a partnership of CU Boulder and the Colorado School of Mines that connects organizations with interdisciplinary student teams to solve real-world problems.
  • Boulder Founder Summit – an annual gathering that connects student entrepreneurs with Boulder's startup community. CU Boulder, the Boulder Chamber and local founders run it together to help students launch their ideas and to give local entrepreneurs direct access to new talent and campus resources.

Read more about Matt's approach to building ethics and empathy into innovation at HumanCentered.

Community Building

Matt gives his time to organizations and causes that reflect his values.

Current

Prior

  • Ambassador, Daniels Fund – won a Daniels Fund Ethics Initiative grant to build ethics into every stage of students' business education.
  • Family Pastor, Antioch FC – member of the founding church-planting team that moved from Wheaton, Illinois, and led the families ministry at Antioch Community Church in Fort Collins, Colorado.
  • Advisor, Grand Challenge – judge for CU Boulder's annual Grand Challenge in earth and space sciences.
  • Judge, Race & Case – national business ethics competition at the University of Denver.

Early Career

  1. 2001 – 2014Denver / Chicago

    TransUnion

    A global credit reporting and risk information company whose stated purpose is Information for Good.

    1. Senior Director

      2008 – 2014 • 6 yrs

      • Set the strategic CRM direction for more than 1,200 users globally, and beat “stretch goals” for Sales Operations five years in a row.
      • Launched the CRM platform in 6 months to 18 countries, spanning 11 currencies, 10 time zones, and two languages, with high adoption and measured impact on deals won.
      • Rolled out a dozen after-market solutions from the Salesforce AppExchange, and negotiated lower costs with key platform providers without reducing scope.

    2. Technology Manager

      2006 – 2008 • 2 yrs

      • Led a development effort of more than 45,000 hours to build an enterprise-wide solution delivery platform on a service-oriented architecture.
      • Directed the build of a new data management system on one of the largest relational database implementations in the world.
      • Managed by metrics and dashboards, and reported status, risks and results to the CIO each week.

    3. Development Manager

      2003 – 2006 • 3 yrs

      • Led 20 senior software engineers and 20 offshore contractors accountable for $100M in annual revenue from online customers, with a $3.5M budget.
      • Increased year-over-year sales of batch services by 64%, reaching 1 billion transactions.
      • Built an eCommerce simulator so customers could try a product before purchase, and turned around a team 30+ days behind within five months.

    4. Solutions Architect

      2001 – 2003 • 2 yrs

      • Managed over 30 project iterations and releases using stage-gate and iterative methods.
      • Led the year-long integration of an acquired company’s platform into TransUnion to support consumer credit reporting growth.
      • Designed the next-generation product delivery platform for new acquisitions; reported to the CTO.

  2. 2000 – 2001Chicago

    Idea Integration (now Astadia)

    1. Project Lead

      2000 – 2001 • 1 yr

      • Delivered an extranet portal for Leo Burnett, from storyboards to production, supporting media planning for Fortune 500 clients such as Kraft and GM.
      • Helped design a media tool that won TelevisionWeek’s “Media Buyer of the Year” Award.

    2. Project Manager

      2000 • less than a year

      • Put risk and quality processes in place that improved deliverables and customer satisfaction, while staying 100% billable.

  3. 1996 – 2000Cincinnati

    Procter & Gamble

    1. System Analyst

      1998 – 2000 • 2 yrs

      • Helped set global business-to-business integration standards for the North American Order, Shipping & Billing division, which billed more than $100M a day.
      • Implemented web-based order management and electronic data interchange (EDI) standards for major retailers in Brazil.
      • Led on-campus recruiting at Purdue University and hired more than 10 technical associates.

    2. Intern

      1996 – 1998 • two internships