Matt Rutledge
Matt Rutledge(born 1972) is an American Internet entrepreneur, best known as the founder and former CEO of the daily deal site Woot. Woot was acquired by Amazon in 2010 and resigned his position at Amazon in 2012. Rutledge launched a new daily-deal site, Meh, in 2014.
Early life
Rutledge grew up in San Antonio and Carrollton, Texas. He was an undistinguished high school student. He then moved to the St. Louis, Missouri area to live with his mother, but returned to Texas to avoid paying some $8,000 in traffic tickets.
Origins and Founding of Woot
While working at a Dallas-area computer retailer called Resource Concepts, Rutledge began attending the monthly First Saturday swap meets, selling refurbished PC parts from a truck in the wee hours of the morning. In 1994, Rutledge launched his first company, Synapse Micro, wholesaling tech products to primarily mom-and-pop computer shops.
In 2004, Rutledge launched Woot as an outgrowth of Synapse Micro, offering a single product a day at steeply discounted prices. "I wanted it to be a blog and a store at the same time," Rutledge told Inc. Magazine. To that end, he encouraged the site's copywriters to be entertainingly frank about the shortcomings of the often obsolete products sold on the site. "We feel that if we don't do a good job describing what's wrong with a product, people will assume we just don't know. That's where most retailers fail. To them, every product is perfect."
