Matt Asay
Chief Operating Officer, Canonical

Web site | @mjasay

Matt Asay has been involved with open source since 1998, and is one of the industry’s leading open source business strategists. Asay currently is Chief Operating Officer at Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux project. There Asay is responsible for ensuring alignment between strategic goals and operational activities across the company, the optimization of day-to-day operations in the company, and leadership of Canonical marketing and back-office functions.

Before joining Canonical, Asay managed business development for Alfresco, the open source leader in Enterprise Content Management, and also ran Alfresco’s operations in the Americas for three years.

Prior to Alfresco, Asay was a founding member of Novell®’s Linux Business Office in 2002. In 2003 Asay founded the Open Source Business Conference, the industry’s premier open source strategy event, and has served as an Entreprenuer-in-Residence for Thomas Weisel Venture Partners, focusing on open source investment opportunities. Before Novell, Asay was General Manager at Lineo®, an embedded Linux software startup, where he ran Lineo’s Residential Gateway business.

Asay earned his Juris Doctorate degree at Stanford Law School, spending two of his three years studying software licensing and innovation, and specifically the GNU General Public License, under Professor Larry Lessig. He also holds Masters and Bachelors degrees from the University of Kent (Canterbury, UK) and Brigham Young University, respectively.