Matthew Steven Bartus

Matthew Bartus is a partner in the Cooley Business department and a member of the Emerging Companies practice group. He maintains offices in Cooley's Palo Alto and San Francisco offices. 

Matt solves legal and business problems for high-growth companies, from founders with an idea (who are typically pre-incorporation) to established later-stage businesses. Matt assists with setting up a corporate structure that enables fast and flexible growth, and a solid legal basis for future financings and liquidity events. As those companies mature, Matt typically acts as "outside general counsel," helping companies with varied legal matters such as financings, M&A and public offerings. He offers clients market knowledge on terms and strategies for navigating difficult situations.

Matt also assists clients by accessing Cooley's large and diverse ecosystem of companies at all phases (from startups to large corporate clients), institutional and angel investors, business partners and investment banks that are served by Cooley's 750 lawyers in 12 offices in the major innovation centers of the country and in China. 

Matt's clients operate in a broad spectrum of industries, including consumer and enterprise technologies (including hardware and software companies), ecommerce, medtech (including wearables), clean-tech/renewable energy and financial services. Representative company clients include 500Friends, Azumio, Developer Auction, Getable, Gumroad, Hawthorne Labs (Circle), HealthEquity, Kitchit, Lark Technologies, Madefire, Quarterly, Scan, Solera Networks, StartX, WordPress (Automattic), ViKi, and Zephyr Technologies.

A significant portion of Matt's practice involves representing buyers and sellers in M&A transactions, ranging in value from under $5 million to over $10 billion. Matt has advised on 100+ transactions having a total value in excess of $30 billion. For his work, Matt was recognized by Legal 500: United States 2012 Edition for Mergers, Acquisitions and Buyouts – M&A: Large Deals ($1bn-5bn).

Matt regularly represents venture capital funds in investment transactions. His clients have included Allegis Capital, Alsop Louie Capital, Audrey Capital, The Collaborative Fund, Azure Capital, Foundation Capital, Khosla Ventures, North Bridge Venture Partners, Peninsula Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Vantage Point Venture Partners.

Matt is the author of the popular startup blog . He also acts as outside General Counsel in a pro bono capacity to StartX, the Stanford student accelerator. Matt is Co-Chair of the Cooley Palo Alto summer associate program, and a member of Cooley's firmwide Technology Committee, which is responsible for overseeing the introduction of new technologies at Cooley.

Earlier in his career, Matt was a Partner at Gunderson Dettmer in Silicon Valley. He started his career in the M&A group at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York City.