#38: Matthew Scullion, Cofounder and CEO of Matillion — Creating the right company culture, how t...

Welcome to From Startup to Grownup, the podcast. My name is Alisa Cohn. I'm an executive coach, an angel investor, and the author of From Startup to Grownup. Each week I talk to founders, creators, advisors, investors, and builders of all kinds about their insights and experiences in going from startup to grownup. Welcome back. And today I'm thrilled to welcome Matthew Scullion, the co-founder and CEO of Matillion, to the podcast. Matillion is a data productivity tool which helps organizations get their data business-ready faster. Matillion is based in Manchester, UK, and to date, they've raised over $300 million. We had a fantastic conversation about a wide variety of topics. Matthew is so smart and insightful. He's also super realistic. And one of the things we talked about was culture. We talked about his framework for thinking about culture and how important it was for him to build a culture that took into account people orientation along with performance. But we also discussed the other choices that founders might make and why those different choices can also create consequential companies. We talked a lot about pivots, and in particular, we talked about the insight that Matthew had that drove his pivot with Matillion and how he knew it was working and the specific way that it evolved. And of course, we also discussed his personal growth as a leader. Matthew talked about the difference between micro-confidence versus macro-confidence, what it's like to be a rookie all the way through, and the biggest obstacle people have in building their companies. It's a really rich discussion and I know you're gonna love it. So please enjoy my incredible conversation with Matthew Scullion, founder and CEO of Matillion. Matthew, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you.

Alisa, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. I've been looking forward to it.

Good, me too. You know, the first question is just about Matillion. Tell us about Matillion and what was the founding insight?

Okay, so Matillion is a software company, an ISV, so we manufacture a software platform. And Matillion is the data productivity cloud. We help organizations get their data business ready faster. So all these companies, every company around the world really, is racing to put data to work to improve the way they understand their businesses, serve their customers, streamline their business processes, revolutionize commerce with data science, AI, and machine learning. All of those use cases require business-ready data, which isn't how data is born. And so our platform provides our customers with a set of tools and services that allows them to refine their data into a business-ready set of formats to fuel analytics, AI, and ML, we hope in a way that's faster and easier to use than any other way. And then, yeah, the founding insights. I should perhaps note, Alisa, that Matillion is to some extent one of those stories of a pivot. And so the company was founded by myself, my co-founder, Ed Thompson, and then another co-founder, Peter McCourt, joined us shortly afterwards. All the way back in 2011. And at that point, we did set the company up to operate at the intersection of cloud and data analytics. We'd been doing work in data analytics in the years prior to founding Matillion, and we just started to work with cloud technology and AWS in particular. And we thought the meeting of the two was powerful, and that's why we set the company up. But originally, we delivered solutions finished working analytics stacks for our customers. And the insight that drove us to convert the company into a software company and start building and then selling and supporting the Data Productivity Cloud was that we found delivering those solutions harder than we thought it should be. The process of taking data in its raw state from systems and turning it into business-ready data to fuel dashboards or AI algorithms or whatever turned out to be the massive majority of the work in any use case. And we thought, well, it's so time-consuming because it's harder than it needs to be. Uh, what's needed here is some software. So we built the software originally for our own use. It worked so well that it occurred to us that some other people in the world might have the same problem and appreciate using this software to solve it. And so in 2015, 4 years after the company was founded, we started to market what back then was called Matillion ETL. And over time, that's turned into our platform of data productivity technologies.

And that's what you guys do today. Correct. That pivot. Matthew, I'm so appreciative that you brought that up because I think that we hear a lot about the mystique of the pivot and sort of every— like any— company that builds itself to a big company. It's like somehow they have a pivot in their background. But I think it's very difficult to really think about the anatomy of a pivot. It— in the fog of war, in sort of the day-to-day running of a business, you're getting some signal, you're getting some noise, some signs of life, some setbacks. That's normal. What— can you walk us through the specific thought process that you and the team used to recognize, oh, this is real signal here, we need to really pay attention to this, and then actually turning that into the main product?

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So I guess when you look at that word pivot, sometimes it's clearer than other times. In Matillion's case, prior to our pivot, we were operating in the cloud data analytics space. And after our pivot, we were operating in the cloud data analytics space. So, you know, maybe it's a kind of 45-degree right turn.

A very subtle pivot.

Whereas, you know, people often use the company Slack as an example of a pivot where they were doing something completely different, built Slack to help themselves do that thing, and then decided to commercialize Slack, and that became wildly successful. That's more of a hard right. And then, of course, probably in all companies, subtly our product proposition and quest for product-market fit ebbs and flows over time, and that probably wouldn't be described as a pivot, even though it is an adjustment in course. So I think to some extent, it's to do with degree. You know, at Matillion, I've been asked this question plenty of times before, I guess, because it's interesting, around the pivot, and in our case, there was probably a couple of things. So one is we knew that this problem that we chose to solve for ourselves was a real problem because we lived it. We work in the cloud data warehousing, cloud data platform market segments. So this is the same segments as also companies like Snowflake and Databricks and companies like that. And we were quite early adopters of that technology because it's what we decided served the needs of the first thing that we did best. And we built a lot of data warehouses on cloud data warehouse, on cloud data warehouse platforms when that was a novel thing to do. So we kind of knew a lot about the problem. And then when we built ourselves a software product to solve that problem internally and it worked really well, that was because it was well anchored in the pain that we'd experienced, if that makes sense. And then separately, there was the signal from what we'd been doing previously. I always think when you have really strong product-market fit, you can kind of feel this suction from the market that's like dying to buy your product. If it's quite hard to sell and it's quite hard to find demand and it's quite hard to make customers stick, then you're probably not resonantly solving a problem that customers really have and that are willing to pay for. So in our prior business, there was a bit of a sucking feeling, but not like a really strong one. So that probably made us more interested in seeing if the grass was greener elsewhere. But for us, Alisa, I think the key thing— and it's maybe a surprise when people hear us talk about this in the context of a product pivot— but the key thing was really around culture because Whilst what Matillion does has changed in the era prior to 2015 and the era afterwards, the way that we run the business and the team hasn't. That culture has been fairly consistent. It's evolved, but it's been fairly consistent over time. And the culture meant that the smartest people in the company, and the product was kind of co-invented by two particular Matillioners, Ed Thompson and also a gentleman called David Langton. They kind of had the idea. But the culture meant that we could talk about it in an environment of intellectual safety and beat each other up. I should also give some praise to Ed. He and I had been working together for 10 years prior to founding Matillion, and I think he'd cracked the code of how to persuade Matthew to do something. But yeah, I think culture is really important because culture allows ideas to flourish. And that idea might be better than the thing you're doing today. Hence, a pivot.

I love it. And I love that you brought up culture because one of the questions I was going to ask you, and I'm going to ask you now, is make the case for culture about a company where people, where the founders are— and I've worked with many founders for the past 22 years, and founders are not always, let's say, people-oriented. They're always extremely success-oriented. So, if you're very success-oriented and you hope it's nice for the people, but like, "Eh, it doesn't really matter," I'd love to hear you make the case for culture and specifically the difference between people would say, "Well, it's not a democracy," as compared to what you just said is we can debate things with intellectual honesty.

Yeah. So, look, the first thing I say, Alisa, is I don't think there's a right or wrong way to build a company. As regards culture, I do tend to think of a kind of made-up Matthew framework that there's maybe 3 ways to build a company. There's a culture-only way where the main thing that you care— main and perhaps only thing that you care about is the culture of the company. There's a performance-only way, which I think is what you were alluding to, where the only thing you care about is the performance. And there's a culture and performance way where you care about both equally. And for me, of the three, two of them work. The performance-only way undoubtedly works. There are consequential companies, hugely valuable, that have changed the world, that aren't culturally resonant places to work. And on a podcast, I won't list out the names of some examples, but I'm sure you can insert your own company names. The culture-only way kind of works for a small thing, you know, sitting around the campfire playing the guitar type of organization. But I think it is difficult to change the world, make a dent in the universe bigger than yourself without a maniacal focus on performance. But culture and performance works. And the only downside is it's just more effort, right? You're having to work for two things. Why did we choose to build Matillion in the culture and performance way? Well, partially, that's the company I and we wanted to build, right? I was Matillioner number one, I suppose, and that's the company I wanted to build. I set the company up because I wanted to build something I thought was beautiful, and that was in my definition of that. But also, I believe that the most important thing in our company, and perhaps in most companies, you know, I think what you're meant to say at this point is it's the customers. Now, let me be clear, as encoded in our values, we only exist to make the lives of our customers better. We think about them all the time. They're hugely important, but they're not the most important thing in Matillion. Now, is it the products, right? What our customers buy from us is the products, and it's the product that allows them to make their data business ready faster and, you know, change the world through their data innovations. The product is hugely important. It's not the most important thing in Matillion. Maybe it's the shiny investors and, you know, all the awards. Well, you're probably getting the idea now it's not. The most important thing, in my view, in the company is the team. Because the team makes all those other things happen, right? They find and win and then delight the customers. They develop and ship and support the products. They deliver the financial outcomes that allow us to attract the investors and win the awards and all that sort of good stuff. The team's the most important thing, and the team lives in a culture, in our case, underpinned by 6 values that we all hold precious. And use to guide ourselves in the dark. And so for me, that's why culture is important, because the most important thing is the team. And therefore, it makes sense to look after that asset by being purposeful around the culture in which they work.

I love your framework, and it's very— I love your sort of analytical way you think about culture. I guess I would love to know maybe two things. How— what process did you personally or the company go through to identify the key values that were going to make people happy and make the company successful, both of those things? And then second, how do you hire for those values?

Okay, so the second answer will be much more satisfactory than the first, I suspect. But, um, I always sort of, uh, smile wryly to myself when people ask me these questions about the very early stages of Matillion. So let's just get one thing out there, like I didn't go to Chicago Booth or Harvard. I didn't used to work at Facebook or Google. You know, I'm a guy from South Manchester, UK, which is usually more famous for soccer and music today. I will point out, as a little advert for Manchester, it is where software was invented, of course, Alisa. The world's first stored-program computer was developed at Manchester University.

Wait, you heard it here first, people. That's where software was invented, Manchester.

Your audience knew that, Alisa Cohn. But, and, you know, when we got started, we were a super small company as well. So a lot of the things that, like, how did you do it? What process did you apply? It was the process as well. We just sat down and wrote it down. And in terms of the values, it was literally the first thing I did on the first day. And to this day, I can't quite tell you why, but I remember Ed and I, came into our new kind of proto-WeWorky style room that was about the size of my shoe cupboard now. And we set up a couple of PCs that we brought with us. We made a cup of tea because we're British, and then we thought we should do some work. And Ed's a software engineer by trade, so he started building some software. But I'm obviously a bit more work shy than him, so I started building an intranet. For the two of us that had already known each other 10 years. But of course, I kind of hoped that we wouldn't always just be two of us. But also, I wanted to set he and myself off on the right track from day one. And I thought a good way of doing that was to write down some guardrails initially for us, in future for everybody else. And the first page on the intranet— this will be about 10 past 11 Monday morning. We've set the PCs up, we've made the cup of tea, first job, write down some values. And I wrote those values down and we've tweaked them a little bit since I've sort of hired some posh people to make them sound better. But in general, we have been living those values ever since. And what were they? They were the things that I thought were important. And that in and of itself is pretty important because you've got to live them. And that would be a key tenet of values for me, uh, everybody, but especially executive leadership and especially the CEO, has got to believe them and live them all the time and never ever break them. So I just wrote down what I thought made for a good company. And, uh, as I say, we've evolved them a little bit over time and tidied them up a little bit and certainly put in lots of processes and scaffolding to preserve them, but they're basically just what we thought was important on the first day. Now, to your second question on how do you hire for them, it's like many things in business, Alisa, I think. Outcomes are correlated to effort, and so you put the effort in. We ask interview questions against them, we build them into the job specs. As people are onboarded into the company, they nowadays go through a 1-week-long academy where they're enabled on them and a few other bits and bobs, but it's mostly enabling them on the values. We review people against them quarterly, we give prizes for them, our super all-hands event once a year, you know, they were imbued in everything that we do. And you tend to find that they're kind of lived at one of three levels. Level 1 would be, I've learned them, I know them, and I can now stay within their guardrails. If you're not at Level 1, you need to get there quick or leave the business because it's not acceptable to not be able to live inside them. Level 2 is that you start to be able to deploy them in your work to influence your decisions. So, one of our values is we innovate and demand quality. So, you might say to yourself in a meeting, or in your head, or as you're doing something with a colleague, hey, are we innovating and demanding quality there enough? Are we recognizing that no person, product, or process is ever finished? That would be like the second level of living them. And the third Dan double ninja level of living the Matillion values would be that you are like an active agent in ensuring that they're lived and used in the rest of the company. So Alisa comes in and says to me, oh, I've just spoken to a customer and I really hate that guy and I can't wait to charge him twice as much money. I'd say, hey, listen, we don't do that here. That's not doing business with integrity and it's not being customer obsessed. I'm an active agent, like a policeman and you know, a custodian of those values. That's like third down.

I love, I love your frameworks. They're so good. They're so structured and helpful. And if you were interviewing me, if I were a new candidate for, you know, some role, and you were gonna— we had a great conversation about my skills and whatnot, but you were going to interview me to test my values fit. What kinds of questions would you ask? And how would you go about determining, discerning if I was going to buy into the values.

You're going to show me up here, Alisa, because if I was interviewing you, you'd be a senior executive in the company, because the only people I personally hire nowadays are ELT team members, right? Right. Um, you'd kind of have to ask my hugely talented talent acquisition departments on exactly how we, uh, we sort of dive in and discern. But certainly we have 6 values and we will score people against each of the 6. And there's, you know, worked example questions against each one. How would you handle this situation? Can you give an example when you did this? Have you ever seen this or done this? And we'll give them a score. I think when I'm doing it at an executive level, a little bit of it is experiential and synthetic, But of course, I have the luxury of interviewing people a lot of times, or meeting with people, I should probably say. More realistically, it's not really an interview at an executive level. It's more a meeting between peers that may want to work together. But, you know, a typical executive hire, I might meet with that person 14 times before they join the company. And so during that time, I get to spend a lot of time talking about them, about us, and about our values. And it just becomes clear if it's not a fit for someone. But in the wider business, within the talent acquisition teams, yeah, there's specific questions lined up against each value where people are, you know, asked to comment on them, give experiences, give situations, and then are scored against them. You know, it's binary as well, right? If we don't think you can live inside the values, then you're not going to join the company because the moment that we say, well, you know, Matthew's great, even though he's a cultural basket case, but he crushes his number every quarter, then we've just lost all moral authority to talk about our values. So you just can't let that happen.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about a time that maybe you made a difficult decision because it was aligned with your values, but maybe it was really difficult to make, or even maybe so-called against the sort of short-term purpose of the business, or somehow when you really exhibited commitment to your values, even when it was difficult?

Yeah, I mean, there's probably hundreds or thousands of those because every Matillioner lives by and uses these values every single day. So there's kind of micro and macro ones happening all the time, I suppose. I always say they're the kind of guardrails that keep us safe and the lantern that guides us in the dark. And you know, that tends to mean they become most valuable in the darkest of times, macro or micro. One example that I sort of often bring to bear, keeping the sort of names and timescales out of it to protect the innocent, but I remember we once had a very shiny and quite new to the business senior executive running an important organization within the company. And separately, we were also fundraising with some of Silicon Valley's best investors, most glamorous investors that we were talking to about potentially investing in Matillion and getting quite far down track of those conversations with some of them. The nature of those fundraising conversations is you tend to introduce the potential investor to some or all of your executive team. And I was very keen to roll out my new shiny senior executive. You know, we were a smaller company then, and on paper at least, this person was kind of, uh, the, the biggest player on the pitch, you know, the first draft pick, if you like. And so consequently, I rolled out this person and introduced them, and they talked through how they felt about the business and the future of their org and how things were going to work. And the investor was duly very impressed. Now, these investment rounds, I think, occasionally are over very quickly, but more normally go over at least a, a small number of weeks. And in the intervening time I became aware of like some unfortunate and reasonably present cultural differences between what our company and values require and what this particular executive was able to live within and prosper within. My initial reaction was to coach very, very firmly on that and set a tight timescale, very tight success criteria., and it quickly became clear to both of us that that wasn't going to work out. And so I then had to exit that senior executive right in the middle of a fundraising process where the potential investors had already met this person and were impressed with them. I think that is just one example of the sorts of things, but you've got to do it because you can't get integrity back. It's like a one-way currency. So, the moment that I ignore people not living within the guardrails of our 6 values because of a tactical situation or perhaps because of functional performance, then I just lose all ability and authority to talk about Matillion being a culture-centric company.

I love it. Thank you, Matthew. That's such a specific and great example. Great answer. So I really appreciate that. And I want to circle back on something that sort of has been woven through this discussion and discussions I've heard you have before. You've talked about, you know, sort of, "I didn't go to Harvard. I didn't go to Chicago Booth." By the way, I don't think you went to Stanford either.

I did not. Just to be clear. Right. I just don't feel that's something to apologize for. No.

Absolutely.

That's a joke, by the way. A bunch of my friends are very well qualified from Stanford.

I know plenty of nice people from Stanford. That's right. Well, I guess I want to sort of start with a broad question, which is like, well, and I'll even read a quote that I heard you say. "I didn't know I was building a billion-dollar business when I started out. I was too modest. That's the difference between the UK and Silicon Valley." So I'd love to hear kind of your reflections on that and maybe specifically how you think you're not just being in the UK, but specifically way up in Manchester, how that has affected the growth of your company and your leadership style.

Firstly, Alisa, let's just rewind way up in Manchester, man. Manchester is a tier 2 global city with equivalent economic output of Boston. About 2 hours' drive north of London. So you've been corrupted by those Londoners there that think nothing exists outside the M25.

Thank you for that correction.

Thank you. No problem at all.

Good luck at the record show.

Exactly right. Yeah. A question I sometimes get asked is something along the lines of, if you were starting again, what would you do the same? What would you do differently? And one of the things I'd do the same is what we were talking about before. Write down all values and live by that because it served us really well. But the thing I'd do differently is I'd assume I'm building a billion-dollar business on day one and act accordingly. And I think in Britain, we don't often enough wake up in the morning and think, I'm going to make a dent in the universe bigger than myself. I'm going to change the axis on which the world spins in just a small way through the developments of my products or service or innovation. We're kind of just culturally a bit too modest in our outcomes, and it comes from all sorts of factors. It's like, it's something I feel particularly passionate about and actually was lucky to serve— still serve, actually— on the Prime Minister's Business Council this year. In fact, I'm going to Downing Street tomorrow, would you believe, um, to bang the drum of this subject. There's more similarities to Manchester or London, um, and Silicon Valley than there are differences, that they both have highly educated, talented, uh, skills bases with fantastic universities, uh, like Stanford, like Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Imperial, St Andrews, right? They've all got amazing engineers being pumped out. There's lots of capital, there's brilliant communications, there's safe, uh, business-centric legal systems, everybody speaks English. So why do we rinse out multi-billion dollar companies in Silicon Valley as a matter of course and it's a much rarer event in the UK? Well, it's the playbook and it's the attitude. Um, and so if you think that you're going to make a dent in the universe bigger than yourself, you act accordingly. And I'd say the biggest thing is it, it gives you an imperative around time, because time is actually the biggest enemy of the high-growth company. You don't sit there putting up with something not being right if you're trying to build something big and change the world. Whereas if you're trying to go from 0 to 50 people or 0 to $20-30 million or 0 to $50-100 million of enterprise valuation, none of which are things you should particularly anchor on, by the way, but just using them as measures to bring it to life for people. If you're trying to build a business to sell out after a couple of years or deliver a 2 or 3x return on investment, then what that drives you to do is be more modest, more cautious, uh, more step by step, more slow. And, uh, it turns out, as I think the data supports, that that doesn't build world-changing consequential companies in the same way. So I think that's what I meant when I talked about that. Does that answer the question?

Yeah, it does. And I'd love a specific example, sort of in terms of like, oh, if I had only known that, or thought about that, especially even beginning, in the middle of your journey, what would you have done differently?

Well, I was very lucky because roughly around the same time as we transitioned our company from being a solution provision company, 2011 through 2015, to an ISV, a kind of Silicon Valley-style company that happened to be born in Manchester, UK. I made some really great friends and partnerships with people that were very much imbued with all that's good about Silicon Valley, um, and was therefore able to, uh, learn from them, uh, what I think is the required accelerated rate for any entrepreneur and CEO. So, um, certainly in that 2015 phase onwards I am not saying I didn't make lots and lots of mistakes, but I think we did start to have installed reasonably quickly that cognition that we were going to try and build something big from that moment on. Go back to the 2011 one, though. My expectations were much more modest, and it probably made me happier than I should have been with the performance that we delivered in the early days. If I'd been harder and firmer about it, I'd be like, wow, We're selling this and people are buying it and that's all right. And it might be worth a few million quid one day, but I don't hear that sucking sound of resonant product-market fit and market need. You know, I should change the products and accelerate. Like every entrepreneur ever, we made some early hires that I don't think we'd make today. You know, it would have made me more discerning and demanding about hiring the best people in the world that I could possibly attract, not the easy options. Um, I think when we raised our first round of institutional funding, in the end we did raise, uh, a round from a great British investor called YFM who've been hugely supportive ever since. But I remember I went over to Silicon Valley, I did 3 venture pitches never having done one before, and they all passed. And I didn't really know at that point that the pass rates, like, somewhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 for most people. And so if I want 3 term sheets, I probably should have done like 30 to 60 first pitches, and I did 3. So there's Lots of examples, but I think in general, the challenge that we need to work on and solve here in the UK, possibly in other geographies, I'm not familiar with those, is just that imperative, that cognition that you're founding a company or taking a product to market because you want to make a dent in the universe bigger than yourself. And then everything else drops in behind that. You know, the urgency, the constant paranoia and fear about time. The need for capital to fuel it, the discernment that whatever you've got is not good enough, all that, that sort of itch to get on with it comes from that cognition that you're trying to make a dent in the universe bigger than yourself.

I love it. That's so helpful. And I sort of think about it as productive impatience and productive paranoia. That's kind of the marker of that sense of urgency. And something you were getting at too is basically you were a first-time I mean, I think you were sort of a second-timer, but effectively you were like a first-timer. And when we met in Lisbon at Web Summit, you called yourself a rookie and that like everything you do is like you're a rookie all the way to the end. And I love that expression and even that sentiment. And I'm just curious, like, I guess I kind of want to know, like, what does that feel like? And also, how do you learn considering that you're always a rookie?

Yeah, so it's hard to be in the Goldilocks zone, I think, as a CEO, because if you're a founder CEO, you're quite possibly a rookie CEO like me. And if you're a pro CEO, you know what you're doing because you've done it 2 or 3 times before, but you don't have all the advantages of being a founder. So it's quite hard to end up in the Goldilocks zone. The only people that do, I think, and this isn't me, so I'm guessing here, is those kind of masochists that don't mind doing startups, which are like brutally hard work and really difficult, multiple times, because that's the only way that you can be an experienced CEO and a founder at the same time. I'm a rookie CEO. Now, just to qualify before the 650 Matillionaires that are on Team Green worry too much, what I mean by that is that at each stage of Matillion's growth, that's new at the margin to me. It doesn't mean I've got no experience being CEO. I've been CEO of Matillion for 11 years now, and before that I had another, what, like, thick end of 15 years leadership experience. So there was many things I did know what I was doing. But on the margin, as the company goes through— well, our last fundraising round was Series E, our next one therefore would be Series F. I've never done a Series F before, right? So I mean, that's a bit of a potted example, but everything in the business at any one time is kind of like that. And so that drives a need in all executives, but particularly for the CEO and founder CEO perhaps, for accelerated learning. You know, the recognition of the fact that the rate at which the company grows can be drawn as a line and the rate at which you learn can be drawn as a line. And if your line dips below the company line or goes flat, then it's probably time for you to stop being the CEO. You need to keep your line above and up and to the right. For me, the way I try to do that is to remember what I think. And people laugh at me when I say this, but it's useful for me. I try to remember the assumption that I think I'm fundamentally pretty stupid and fundamentally pretty lazy. Because if I remember those two things, it makes me ask people that know stuff that I don't yet know, and they tell me, and I can learn from that. And it reminds me to do that energetically and to work hard, because otherwise I'll be like, oh, I'd be defaulting back to my natural lazy state. And so just those two little raisins for me, like, just help me keep curious and keep energetic about being curious and therefore, hopefully, keeping my learning line above the requirement line.

I love it. Founders, if you're listening, if you could just be as stupid and lazy, as stupid and as lazy as Matthew, you'd also be a successful unicorn. I love that.

Assume. Assume that you're stupid and lazy.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you for that correction. Assume. So, I mean, on that topic, could you talk about Some of the ways you've personally grown as a leader?

Yeah, gosh, I mean, I think one of the biggest things is how your job changes and having to take an inventory of that and then adapt to your own behaviors over time. So, on day one, it was Ed Thompson and myself. He was CTO and I was CEO, and he did all the software engineering, and I did all the sales, all the marketing, all the finance, all the HR, all the project management, or whatever you want to call that bit of it, and a little bit of the software engineering. So very, very, very hands-on and multidisciplinary. As the company scales, you get some team members, they are probably fairly Corinthian. So energetic and passionate and with skills, but have not necessarily done the jobs that they're now sat in. So you need to help them. So you go from flying the plane to being in the cockpit with the person flying the plane. And then as the company scales a bit more, maybe there's a pilot and a copilot, but you're sat in the seat behind them just making sure they don't crash. And then later, you know, you end up in air traffic control and your job is to just check in, hey, How's it all going? Do you need anything? Do you need me to vet to you somewhere different? Do you need me to get anyone out the way or provide any resources for you? And hey, could you all turn left or could you all turn right? And so you go from being like really hands-on to helping, but in quite a hands-on way, to guiding, to then ultimately realizing that your executives are the CEOs of their own organizations and know far more about their domain than you do., and you have to adapt yourself appropriately through that journey. I should also say that you have to get sanguine with that, right? Because it can be a little bit difficult. Hey, I used to do this and now some other person's doing it and they're much better at it than me. That also drives practical things like how do I use my time? Somewhere about every 6 to 18 months, I'd say roughly, I sit down with my wonderful assistant Laura., and we kind of say, am I allocating my time correctly? And normally I do it because I'm starting to get the feeling that I'm not. And we'll go through and we'll cut a load of things out and we'll create time for some new things. And I'll, you know, go and use my time in a different way. When you've got your hands on all the control levers personally, like you either do stuff yourself or tell people directly. Once you've got executives doing it for you, you can't do that anymore. You can't dive into their teams and change things around. You have to kind of be respectful of the fact it's their org. And then finally, I could go on like this all day, Alisa. But finally, because of that, particularly as a CEO, you have to be really careful what you say and how. Let's say you're an engineer. I walk down onto the floor of the office that you happen to work on. I go, hey, Alisa, that's a great looking screen you're building there. I wonder what it'd look like in pink, right? And I'm just shooting the breeze, right? I'm in a jovial mood and I'm wearing a pink shirt. That's why I said it. Go back up to the office, 3 days later, the entire platform has been built in pink because people sometimes misinterpret what the CEO says, even if he's talking rubbish, as an order, right? So at Matillion, we use these communications modes to label what we say. Tell mode, sell mode, consult mode, brainstorm mode. So I now have to go, hey Lisa, brainstorm mode. I wonder what that'll look like in pink. And you go, "Rubbish, Matthew." And I go, "Great answer," and go back to my office. So loads of stuff, but those would be a couple of examples.

I love it. It's so like— what I often say is like, it's a masterclass in something. That was like a masterclass in the way a CEO has to think about his or her role and adjust as you go. I love it. Matthew, my last question. I could talk to you all day, but this has to be my last question. What advice do you have for other founders as they embark on their journey to grow into leaders?

Do you know what? I think because of the wonderful way that you've cruise directed us through this conversation, Alisa, I think we've probably touched on many of the things that I personally would give as advice to a startup founder. So first of all, in the kind of pre-start race, in yacht racing, the race is won or lost often before you cross the start line, right? It's the pre-start. And that's the same with businesses. Most businesses die before they're ever founded because people sit there going, oh, I'd love to set a business up, but then come with 99 reasons why not to and never do it. And I think the number one reason they don't is they get preoccupied by the idea. They think businesses are an idea. They're not right. You've got to kind of land yourself roughly in a market, a need that there are some customers for, and that those customers are willing to pay to have a problem solved. But building products is mostly turning the handle of finding product-market fit. It's a manufacturing process. It's not a eureka moment. So in the pre-start phase, I'd be like, don't get too hung up about the idea. You know, get yourself roughly into the right neck of the woods and then turn the handle. And product-market fit, of course, isn't on and off. It's a constantly evolving analog line. And so you're going to need to keep turning that handle. Forever. May as well get into the habit at the beginning. The second thing I'd say is, you know, I don't think there's a right or wrong way to build a company, but I do think it needs to be authentic to you. So if you're like an autocratic tyrant, fine. Those people have been very successful, right? Just don't try to kid everybody that you're setting up a, you know, super duper cozy culture company. And, you know, at Matillion, we happen to do it by defining some values. Make sure whatever your version of that is, is authentic to you, because the commander-in-chief of the values, uh, the ultimate arbiter and custodian is the CEO. Um, so you've got to be able to, to live them. And then I'd say, assuming this is what you want to do, uh, because not all businesses have to change the world, right? But if we're talking about high-growth technology, technology-enabled style businesses like ours, I'd say absolutely assume that you're going to make a dent in the universe bigger than yourself and act accordingly. Acting accordingly being like urgency, impatience, insanely high standards where nothing's ever good enough, and the necessary recognition that you need to learn at an accelerated rate ahead of the needs of the business. Uh, so those would be some of my pieces of advice to a founder.

Beautiful. So beautiful. Matthew, thank you so much. This has such a rich discussion, and I really appreciate you spending the time and joining us today.

Alisa, it's been an absolute pleasure, ma'am. Thank you very much for having us. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alisacohn.com.