Alumni trace startup success back to Farmer School days
From a first-year geology lab to launching real estate platform Riva, Matt Green and Zach Wolf share how their Miami education shaped their journey
Alumni trace startup success back to Farmer School days
From a first-year geology lab to launching real estate platform Riva, Matt Green and Zach Wolf share how their Miami education shaped their journey
When Matt Green and Zach Wolf stepped into the lower level of the Farmer School of Business this past May, they weren't there to take a test or cram for a capstone project. The co-founders of Riva, a rapidly growing real estate platform, were there as judges for the New Ventures ESP 401 pitch competition.
Looking around at the current students, the contrast between the founders’ past and present came into sharp focus.
“Seeing 19- and 20-year-olds have full-blown startups making monthly revenue at that age, I was like, ‘This is fascinating,’” Green recalled. “And all of a sudden, I felt a sense of pressure of, if I was in this room, I would feel like I have to be doing something, I have to be winning. But then I very quickly realized that the experience that we've gained, and the corporate side of the world has been so valuable as well. And now here we are at almost 30, doing our first venture.”
Their journey back to Oxford was years in the making, rooted in a friendship that started in the most unlikely of places for two future business leaders: a freshman geology lab.
Two Different Paths to Oxford
For Green, attending Miami University was practically predestined. “I grew up in Cincinnati, so Miami was just 45 minutes up the road,” he explained. “Both my parents went to Miami, my older sister ... I come from a merger family, so my parents, my sister and her husband, my wife and I, all of which are mergers. Miami runs through the Green family through and through.”
Wolf’s path was entirely different. “I'm an East Coast kid,” he said. Wanting to find a strong business school, he and his mother took a rainy tour of the Oxford campus, and he immediately fell in love with it. “No one I knew back home in Maryland knew what Miami was. But I wanted to get out and explore, and I wanted to go to a good business school, and so that was what originally drew me there.”
After meeting in that geology lab, the two eventually joined the same fraternity and lived together at various points during their college years. But it was their shared mindset that kept them close long after graduation, even when they found themselves living on opposite ends of the country.
The ‘Terrible Ideas’ That Built a Foundation
As they navigated the corporate world – Wolf in procurement and Green in marketing – they maintained a steady stream of FaceTime calls.
“It's hard as you get older to stay in touch with friends, but one of the reasons we always called each other was to bounce ideas off each other,” Green said. “So, we shared this passion for entrepreneurial ventures, some of them terrible ideas, many of which never got off the ground. But it was something that we regularly did. There was always that shared passion.”
That shared passion eventually crystallized into Riva, a "TikTok for Zillow" video-first real estate platform that they are now building alongside a third Miami alumnus, Rob Sandberg, who had been friends with Green’s wife at Miami.
“I think we want to take a slice of the market from Zillow and become a real player in the real estate industry, and the new way that people discover their next home. Right now, we're focused on homes for sale. There’re almost 2 million active sales listings in the US for our homes. Then there's a whole rental market that we haven't even tapped into yet,” Green said.
Despite their years working in corporate America, the pair credit their foundational knowledge directly to their time at Miami. “Everything that I know about building anything, any sort of product, any technical detail does tie back essentially to where I started in Farmer,” Wolf noted, pointing out how the school contextualized business into real-world applications.
“Everything is built on a foundation of Farmer and Miami, and that's been so fun to tap back into and honestly be proud to have come from Miami,” Green said.
Returning to Their Roots
When they were invited back to campus by one of their former professors, the full-circle nature of their journey hit them.
“The entrepreneurship program was such a core part of my education and four years undergrad at Miami,” Green reflected. “We were just there in May helping judge the pitch competition, and I walked into a room and (professor) Mark Lacker came up to me in about 10 seconds. That was such a cool experience to have been away from campus for seven years now, and to come back and still have that connection.”
Today, as they navigate the very real challenges of scaling a startup, securing venture capital conversations through the alumni network, and managing their own creative tension as co-founders, Wolf and Green said they realize that everything they are doing is built on the foundation they laid in Oxford.
When asked what advice they would pass down to the current students at the Farmer School, Green said he’d tell them not to hurry.
“Everyone follows a different timeline, so don't put so much pressure on yourself to succeed now. All experience is good experience, and you'll be fascinated to see yourself change and your path change in one year, three years, five years,” he said.
“Squeeze every single moment out of your experience. Don't just pass through the business school, don't pass through Miami, do everything, touch everything,” Wolf urged. “I look back on my favorite moments at Miami, and it was when I was feeling the most connected to the campus and to the school. Everything is full circle, and everything ties back to this tight, close-knit community.”