Matthew Iovanni

Matthew Iovanni is the founder and Managing Partner of Blarney Ventures, a Boston-based investment holding company he established in 2014 that owns and operates a portfolio of B2B sales-and-marketing services businesses. Before building his own firm, Iovanni spent more than 13 years working through essentially every role in a sales and marketing organization — from SDR and marketing analyst to sales manager, Vice President of Sales & Marketing, and two-time board member — across companies ranging from under $10M to over $150M in revenue. This operator's path, rather than a finance background, defines his investing style.

The idea for his flagship company came to him while walking through San Francisco in late summer 2014, shortly after a bruising experience at an early-stage company that collapsed roughly seven weeks after he joined. Passing a KPMG building on 2nd Street, he wondered why there was no equivalent "big firm" for sales and marketing the way there was for accounting — a question that led to the founding of FullFunnel, which he co-founded in the fall of 2015 to deliver "Revenue Operations as a Service." He relocated from the Lake Tahoe area to Boston in August 2019 to lead teams in person, only months before the pandemic pushed operations remote.

Under the Blarney Ventures umbrella, Iovanni built a small roll-up of complementary services businesses: FullFunnel (sales and marketing outsourcing and advisory), Practice Alchemy (business outsourcing for law firms), and SalesWorks (outsourced sales training and development). In May 2020 Blarney acquired London-based SalesWorks and created a new UK holding company, Blarney Ventures UK, giving its subsidiaries a European foothold; SalesWorks CEO Shabri Lakhani stayed on as a partner. The Practice Alchemy and SalesWorks brands were later folded into FullFunnel, which today runs sales and marketing programs for well over 150 companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 organizations. Iovanni continues to serve as Managing Partner/CEO of FullFunnel and has held a partner and board role tied to SalesWorks.

• Invests in and operates B2B sales, marketing, and revenue-operations services businesses — the domains where he has decades of hands-on operating experience.
• Favors a holding-company / operator model: acquiring or building managed-services companies and scaling them, as with the FullFunnel–Practice Alchemy–SalesWorks portfolio, rather than passive minority checks.
• Looks for synergy with existing portfolio capabilities — of the SalesWorks deal he said it "bolsters the BV portfolio and opens up a segment of the market that is very synergistic with our core offerings."
• Data- and process-driven by conviction: he argues demand generation follows "predictable, measurable principles" rather than magic bullets — famously quipping that in sales and marketing, *"2 + 2 does not equal banana."*
• Increasingly focused on AI-enabled process engineering and GTM transformation, arguing that "sales and marketing as we know it is dead" and that AI is restructuring traditional B2B go-to-market.