About Front Seat
Front Seat is a civic software company and incubator. Our flagship product is Walk Score, which calculates a walkability score for any address.
Josh Herst - Chief Executive Officer
Prior to joining Front Seat, Josh was the Founder and CEO of TripHub,
which helped to redefine the group travel market with its planning and collaboration tools. Before TripHub, Josh was a Venture
Partner with Madrona Venture Group and a strategic advisor and consultant
to early stage technology companies. Previously Josh spent eight years
in marketing positions at Microsoft where he lead product planning,
demand generation and business development for Expedia and marketing
for MSN.
Josh graduated magna cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis. He and his wife have two young sons who keep them very busy and happy, are active community volunteers, and have a Walk Score of 88.
Jesse Kocher - Lead Developer
Jesse makes Front Seat’s web projects come to life. Jesse was formerly the Director of Web Strategy at the New Progressive Coalition (NPC), a company that advised political investors on managing their investments in progressive organizations. Jesse led the tech team through NPC's first two launch cycles, creating online tools for investors to build and manage their portfolio of political investments.
Jesse and Matt have been working together since they met at Brown University. In 1999 they founded the software startup EQuill, a Web development software company they sold to Microsoft in 2001. In 2004, they founded Driving Votes together, and Jesse created and ran the organization's website which helped thousands of volunteers meet and share rides on their trips to register Democratic voters in swing states. Jesse graduated from Brown in 1999 with degrees in Computer Science and the Visual Arts.
Matt Lerner - Chief Technology Officer
Matt Lerner is CTO of Front Seat. From 2001-2007, Matt worked at Microsoft, most recently as a Lead Program Manager for Windows Vista, where he had responsibility for designing the core user interface components of the world's most widely used software.
While at Microsoft in 2004, Matt founded Driving Votes, an organization that registered thousands of Democrats in swing states. Prior to Microsoft, Matt was co-founder and CTO of EQuill, a Web development software company he sold to Microsoft in 2001. Matt is a board member of Fuse Washington and a trustee of the Sightline Institute. Matt was awarded a Fulbright fellowship and has a Computer Science degree from Brown University, where he studied at Brown's famed graphics laboratory under the supervision of Professor Andries van Dam.
Mike Mathieu - Founder and Chairman
Mike founded Front Seat following the successful sale of his Internet publishing company to a private equity firm.
Prior to Front Seat, Mike spent six years as founder and CEO of All Star Directories, an INC 500-listed publisher of online and career school directories. During the 1990's, Mike was General Manager of MSN.com and the MSN Search engine at Microsoft, and helped build Microsoft Excel and Word into the leading office applications. He sits on the board of KUOW Puget Sound Public Radio, is a partner and former lead partner in Social Venture Partners, a leading U.S. venture philanthropy network and past Board President of the Technology Access Foundation. He holds a BA, Magna Cum Laude in the History of Science from Harvard University, and lives in Seattle with his wife and two kids.
Collaborate With Us
We are looking to collaborate with other social innovators. Our current interest area is turning public data sources (energy usage, voter files, census data) into enlightening civic experiences.
