Summary
Matt Donahoe is a co-founder of Skydio, the largest U.S. drone manufacturer. He met his eventual co-founders, Adam Bry and Abe Bachrach, through MIT’s autonomous-flight research community, and has held a range of hands-on engineering and operational roles at Skydio since helping start the company in 2014.
Career
Donahoe earned a B.S. in Systems Engineering from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in 2008, the same years and school as future Skydio co-founder Adam Bry, before going on to a master’s degree in Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab from 2009 to 2011. As a Media Lab graduate student, he was a friend of Bry and Bachrach’s during their overlapping years at MIT, where the pair were conducting prize-winning autonomous-drone research in the Robust Robotics Group (MIT News; LinkedIn).
After MIT, Donahoe worked at mobile games company Pocket Gems from 2011 to 2013, where he was a founding engineer on Episode Interactive, an interactive storytelling platform that let users create and share animated, choice-driven mobile stories (Contrary Research). In 2014, he joined Bry and Bachrach as a co-founder of Skydio, helping build the company’s earliest autonomous-drone prototypes.
Unlike his co-founders, who took on the CEO and CTO titles, Donahoe’s LinkedIn profile shows he has moved across a range of hands-on roles inside Skydio over the company’s history — including camera operator, office manager, accounting assistant, app tester, and embedded- and manufacturing-software engineering — reflecting the wide range of functions early startup co-founders often take on as a company scales from a handful of people to hundreds of employees (LinkedIn). Outside of Skydio, his personal website catalogs an eclectic range of side projects and interests, from a mechanical calculator and gesture-based drawing app to snowblading and waterskiing.
Source Notes
This profile draws on Matt Donahoe’s LinkedIn profile, MIT News’ feature on Skydio’s founding, a Contrary Research deep dive on Skydio’s business and founding story, and Donahoe’s own personal website. His exact birth year is not confirmed in available sources and has been intentionally left blank rather than estimated.