Cohler earned a B.A. with honors and distinction from Yale University. Early in his career, Cohler worked in China and was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. He befriended Reid Hoffman and went on to become a founding member of Hoffman's startup LinkedIn. Cohler was vice president and general manager at LinkedIn and was considered CEO Hoffman's right-hand man. Cohler was one of the first five employees hired at Facebook. He was Facebook's vice president of product management and worked with the team during many of its critical growth phases. He continues to act as a "special advisor" to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In 2008, he left Facebook and became the youngest general partner at Benchmark.
Benchmark
At Benchmark, Cohler has backed the firm’s investments in Dropbox, Asana, Quora, Greenhouse, Domo, Duo, Edmodo, ResearchGate, 1stdibs, Peixe Urbano, CouchSurfing, Baixing, and Zendesk. In 2011, he led a $7 million round of funding for Instagram, which agreed in April 2012 to be acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. In March 2014, Cohler led Benchmark's investment in Xapo, a Bitcoin wallet/insured cold storage vault. Cohler sits on the boards of Asana, Greenhouse, Tinder, Domo Quora, ResearchGate, Instagram, 1stdibs, CouchSurfing and Duo Security. In 2018, it was announced that Cohler would "step back" from Benchmark and not be a part of their next fund. Although he departed the Benchmark fund, he was expected to continue to hold his board seats, including at Uber. Cohler later left the Uber board in July of 2019, at the same time as Arianna Huffington.
In April 2013, a lobbying group called FWD.us was launched, with Cohler listed as one of the founders.
Personal life
Matt Cohler's brother - Eric Cohler - is an interior designer based in New York. Eric has re-designed many of the properties that Matt owns, including a townhouse in Gramercy Park, New York and a penthouse in the Nolita district of New York. These efforts have gained the attention of several media outlets, mainly due to their high listing prices, in the tens of millions of dollars. Eric Cohler has also undertaken the interior design for other high-end properties, including a $39 million property in San Francisco. Matt and Eric's sister - Jennifer Cohler Mason - is the creative director of Eric's design firm; Eric Cohler Design.
