What would make a senior engineering leader leave the comfort and scale of Spotify to rebuild the tech stack of a catering logistics startup from scratch?
For Matthew Benzel of DeliverThat, the answer lies somewhere between a desire for impact, a well-earned sense of self-awareness, and a unique role he calls founder-adjacent.
In this episode of SaaS That App: Building B2B Web Applications, Matthew joins hosts Aaron Marchbanks and Justin Edwards to share why he left the enterprise world, how he’s building a remote-first development team, and what it really takes to go from enterprise systems to scrappy MVPs, all while balancing scale, trust, and a deeply human approach to leadership.
Enterprise Roots, Startup Heart
Matthew’s early career included time at Progressive Insurance, where he got an up-close look at how enterprise-scale software functions. It was eye-opening. But there was no context for how you get there. You’re just dropped in the middle of a massive machine.
That itch to understand how things begin led him through periods at GoDaddy and eventually to Onosys, where he helped build online ordering systems for major restaurant brands like Applebee’s and Outback Steakhouse. It was here that he fell in love with the fast-moving, high-impact nature of lean teams solving real problems.
Years later, he took on a leadership role at Findaway, a B2B audiobook distributor eventually acquired by Spotify. The experience was global, polished, and massive in scale, but the same sense of limited impact bothered him.
The Founder-Adjacent Role
When Matthew reconnected with a former colleague and co-founder at DeliverThat, a catering delivery startup, he found the perfect opportunity to make a different kind of leap. Not as a founder, but as something close: founder-adjacent.
What does that mean?
In this role, he brings the startup rigor of zero-to-one execution while balancing it with the risk awareness and systems thinking of a seasoned technologist. It’s a yin-yang dynamic with the company’s original founders that works, he says, because of one essential ingredient: trust.
CTO by Way of DevOps, Sales, and Customer Success
Matthew’s transition into leadership didn’t happen overnight. At Onosys, he started as a senior engineer and quickly found himself wearing many hats: managing servers, leading sales calls, even taking on the role of COO at one point.
This mix of technical and operational knowledge shaped the way he approached team-building at DeliverThat. Matthew didn’t just want coders. He needed multi-dimensional humans who could think like operators, speak like product managers, and still ship clean, scalable code.
Building a Remote-First Engineering Team That Doesn’t Churn
When Matthew joined DeliverThat, he inherited a single junior developer. Since then, he’s grown the team to nine and hasn’t lost a single person. That’s no accident. He focused on a few key principles:
- Hire for hunger, not just skills. Matthew’s first junior dev came from a dispatching role within the company and brought deep business knowledge to the tech team.
- Choose a tech stack you can scale with. Node.js, TypeScript, React, Postgres. It’s about economics. Matthew needs full-stack developers who can build efficiently.
- Create sacred focus time. Matthew blocked out his mornings for uninterrupted coding. “Stand-up starts at 1 PM,” he told his team. With founder buy-in, this became a cornerstone of productivity.
- Make culture intentional. Their Brazil-based team doesn’t just log in and out. They share language peculiarities, cultural stories, and even met up in person on Copacabana Beach.
The Real Role of AI in Logistics
Matthew is no stranger to the AI hype cycle. However, he’s not buying into flashy distractions. At DeliverThat, the real promise of AI and ML lies in optimization, not gimmicks.
The short-term roadmap includes building better data collection and identifying machine learning use cases, like smart driver-job matching and dynamic delivery routing. But Matthew is also exploring AI-powered dev tools like Cursor to improve internal team velocity.
And unlike many CTOs who gatekeep experimentation, he’s giving his team a budget to play.
Final Thoughts
Matthew’s story is one of deliberate, grounded leadership. He didn’t jump ship for hype or ego. He did it because he knew exactly what kind of impact he wanted to have and what kind of team he wanted to build. And with a small, resilient team, a smart stack, and a values-driven leadership style, that’s exactly what he’s doing, one release at a time.
Matthew’s Background
Matthew Benzel is the Chief Technology Officer at DeliverThat, the leading catering delivery platform operating across all 50 states with over 25,000 drivers. With vast experience in enterprise software development at companies like Onosys, GoDaddy, and Spotify, Matthew specializes in transforming complex logistical challenges into scalable tech solutions. As a self-described founder-adjacent leader, he has spearheaded major technological innovations at DeliverThat, including the launch of their new driver app and strategic integrations with platforms like Cartwheel.
Listen to the new episode on: