SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, welcome everyone to another episode of Beyond the Case. This is a podcast where global leaders from Howard Business School's OPM community join in a personal capacity to share the real life lessons and mental models that go behind building enduring companies. Today's guest is Matt Widows, the CEO of May One. He has just completed Unit One at OPM. And Matt, it's a pleasure to have you on the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Yeah, great to be here. I appreciate the time.

unknown 0:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Matt, how would you introduce yourself to the listeners and just uh give us a short summary on your background?

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Yeah, so I have spent the last 20 plus years in Silicon Valley leading large growth teams. And, you know, started off there an early employee, one of the one of the first hundred employees at Red Bull Energy Drink, which has grown massively since, and had an opportunity to be at a few startups. Some of those were acquired. One in particular was bought by Intuit and so stayed on and kind of transitioned from 200, 300 person sized company to massive global company. And then great opportunity to go into gaming where I worked at companies like Zynga and King, which makes Candy Crush. You know, both of those do maybe two and a half to three billion a year in revenue and led go-to-market functions there like user acquisition and was responsible for large media spend. And then we founded Maven back in 2020 and have since, you know, been helping. We work very closely with private equity and venture capital to kind of scale their biggest bets and come in when uh their companies are at inflection points. And then we also work directly with large enterprises, sometimes public uh companies, to help them in really pivotal moments where they need growth, but they're looking for a firm like ours that takes a very operational approach and thinks about the the growth function end-to-end versus in one silo like product or sales or marketing. We come in and really think about the whole business just like we've grown, you know, every other company that we've worked with in the last 25 years.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

And Matt, you're also the founder of Maven? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Okay. Um at what point did you feel inspired to move away from the corporate lifestyle and venture out by yourself?

SPEAKER_01 2:18

You know, it's funny. I had a close friend who was an early employee at Facebook who had encouraged me for years to kind of start my own thing. And and, you know, I always kind of my reaction was always like, oh, I don't have any like huge ideas. And his attitude was, well, you know, why don't you start like an agency? I was like, oh God, that's like the last thing I would want to do. And he's like, well, maybe like a consultancy. I'm like, that sounded even worse. And I wasn't quite sure like what the difference was. And then uh I kind of pushed back to him. I was like, why don't you start one? And his reaction was interesting in that he was a super well-connected guy, but he was like, you know, we we both have great networks, but you have this like very hands-on, close relationship, long-standing relationships with people that you trust and that trust you. And so I kind of started looking at that. And um, he had flagged this because I was getting a lot of inbound, people calling for help from, you know, large companies like Coinbase Large, you know, when they were, you know, in 2018 when they were still kind of emerging and finding their footing. And so didn't really want to do a consultancy, but figured, okay, well, we could do that, use the money to go buy companies or to start our own companies. And that sounded pretty interesting. And so that's actually where we've kind of ended up. We we started off thinking we might do Venture Studio, similar to like Atomic or Betaworks. And then we realized it's actually much better to just go into businesses that are already established. And so now I'm focusing on making our first acquisition. So we're looking to buy, and if anybody out there has a company for sale, you know, we could go up to 100 million, but we're we're really targeting for the first one sub 25 million, uh, where we can take majority interest and then just use our operating company at Maven to scale and and build the acquired company like we do now for our clients, but in a world where we then have, you know, 100% or majority upside in in the outcome.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Can you share a little more on your factors or your criteria there for the company you probably want to get involved with? What industry would you be looking at? What kind of customer base, et cetera?

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Yeah, we we've got a really deep bench, both like deep and wide bench of world-class talent across really every seat of the business, including finance and legal and things like that that you wouldn't normally bundle into kind of growth in consumer businesses. We found through the work we've done at Maven that the lessons and learnings from consumer businesses apply to, you know, B2B enterprises tenfold, maybe. So we actually still think there's a massive opportunity in B2B because some of the things that we consider really table stakes and consumer uh at times in certain companies can can seem like witchcraft on the on the on the B2B side. But given our depth there, we're really focused on consumer. And then we've got a lot of depth in uh in application software type businesses. So we're not super dogmatic. We're being very open about that as far as like keeping our options open. But, you know, our most narrow buy box right now is a consumer business that has scaled in spite of being what we would consider digitally deficient. So, you know, don't have trust in their data, they don't have predictable, profitable growth at scale, and they don't really have the lever of paid figured out yet. And usually what's behind that is that teams aren't talking to each other, data is siloed or and or inaccurate, and the culture doesn't exist at the company to really facilitate growth. And oftentimes the founders or CEOs of those are kind of tired and they want to be done, and and you know, they they are really just there because they've still there because they feel some obligation to the board or or you know, having a good outcome. And so I think I think that would be the most narrow as a uh consumer business uh in doesn't have to be native application, but but most likely software would be my guess.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

Awesome, thank you. Okay, let's go back to your roots. So talk to us about your your your your years growing up. What did success look to you like when you were growing up? And how would you think uh has there been anyone who shaped that picture for you? Has there been any belief from those early years that you still carry with you or you had to unlearn? Sure.

SPEAKER_01 6:25

Yeah, many many people have shaped it. I've been I've been fortunate to have a number of great mentors over the years, both personally and professionally. But both of my parents were entrepreneurs. My dad worked in corporate for many years and then ventured off on his own as an entrepreneur and followed a similar path to many entrepreneurs where he succeeded, scaled very quickly, and then found that he had outgrown that scale, and then everything collapsed. So I got to see firsthand, you know, the risks associated with entrepreneurship. My mother also started her own thing at some point when my dad went back to corporate uh and and was successful in that. And so I've always had this appetite for, in some ways, puzzle solving. It's funny, I I say this somewhat as a joke, but I kind of mean it, which is when I'm interviewing people, or just my general philosophy as far as hiring goes, at least one small element of it is a shorthand I like to use is I want to hire all of the kids that sold candy when they were nine years old, right? I want these like intrinsically motivated, the people who started their own paper, like lawn mowing business, as I did when I was 12, or who, or yeah, who had pencils or erasers or some sort of, they were just kind of like drawn from an early age to to pursue their own interests, uh, even if in kind of an industrious nature and like self-motivated. And so, yeah, and then so my parents would probably be the first in that. And then I had an early mentor who's still very close. We we still speak, you know, every month and have for 20 plus years, but a guy named Bob Lepo, who uh HBS grad, actually class of uh 69, Stanford undergrad in history, but he made all of his money in the markets and then realized he was running what was one of the first kind of mutual funds before they were called that. Uh, bet all of his money, like every penny he had alongside the investments he was making for his clients, did very well, and then realized I don't have to come into work, I can just do this from anywhere. So he moved from New York to San Francisco and has lived there since um, you know, the early 70s. But he was very helpful and gave me great perspective from an investor's mindset as far as the things he's looking for, as well as the what Bob would say is like having an ability to be emotionally detached from your investments. And whenever you find yourself feeling, and granted, he's in public markets, so it's not as it's not like a seed round or some angel investor, but or private equity for that matter, but something I thought was interesting from him is he's like, if I if I get into a position and I find myself at night suddenly uncomfortable and I'm looking at the stock and I'm really thinking about it, he's like, I just get out. And then I that gives me like the space to think, and I can always get back in in the morning and I might have lost some ground or or made some ground, but that was a very helpful piece of advice and one of many learnings from Bob Lepham. And then maybe the last would uh of many I could name, but uh Craig Sherman, who led consumer investment at Meritec in Silicon Valley, uh who's just been an amazing mentor to me for years, and and uh both as a executive, as a friend, and and as a um as a mentor um in in investing as well.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

Um Matt, across your time at companies like uh Red Bull, Zinger, like you mentioned, uh I think you mentioned Interview as well, and then King. How do you think have you come across decision making on what opportunity to pursue next? Looking back, do you think there was some principle you had which was guiding you, or were you looking for certain patterns across the progression of your career and the quality of what you advocate?

SPEAKER_01 9:56

This this would actually, yeah, this one's very clear uh and comes from another mentor of mine, a guy named Jim Avery, who was a professor of mine in advertising in college, who there's a book called Campaign Planning, which is a very common thing to do in media. But the book campaign planning was literally written by Jim Avery. So he's a great advertising executive. But Jim had told myself and my classmates or senior year of university to never to certainly not take your first job based on what you'll make. But for your entire career, if you're going, if you're stuck between two opportunities, very simply just use follow the opportunity where you will have a better opportunity to learn. So you might be faced with one that pays twice as much, but you're gonna be doing kind of the same stuff, and maybe one that pays a third of what you're used to making, but you're gonna be doing something new and you're gonna have a lot of autonomy and you're gonna be able to learn and fail and succeed. And so I've always done that. And so, and I I oftentimes mention this. I mean, in the past when I would interview um, I would, I could encourage anybody. I'm like, we can go through my entire career, and you can just ask me at every single stage, like when I left Red Bull to go to Homestead, or I left Homestead once we got acquired too into it, why did I stay? Or, you know, continue to why did I leave Zynga for King? I can tell you explicitly what I thought I would learn and why I would learn more at the new role. And then I can also explicitly tell you with great detail what I did learn in each one of those changes. So my approach has always been simply as it relates to my personal career when faced with those, is where will I have more opportunity to learn? That might be different when faced with like a business decision. In fact, it probably you probably shouldn't be making too many business decisions within your business somewhere you think you'll you'll learn the most because you'll likely be pursuing a lot of you know shaky ground. But if that hopefully that was the the spirit of the question, but that would be that would be my answer for that.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

Wonderful. It sounds like you had a lot of clarity in your thinking from an early age. Because most folks just go with an opportunity and then a few years down introspect and recognize what they think they should be doing. The fact that you you could understand so clearly from an early age to pursue learning versus just financial, it's quite incredible.

SPEAKER_01 12:01

Well, and it was also a signal that as your North Star is also a great signal that it's time to leave when you're looking around, you're like, I'm not really learning anything. And so you can seek, you know, for anybody who's still in corporate and reporting up a chain, you find yourself not learning. And I would, I've done this my whole career, which is like go to your boss, go to your boss's boss, whoever, and just say, hey, I want to take on something new. I'll do, I'll do like I'll work 80 hours, like I'll work twice as much, but I'm I really want to learn this thing. Can I do it? And very rare in my life has that been outright denied. And then in worlds where I just realize there's really not much more to ask for because it's already covered or whatever, that that has always been a signal to me to me that I should probably start looking and then go find something where I can learn.

SPEAKER_00 12:45

And what is your process, if any, for maybe documenting or centralizing the learnings that you take in from either every profession you're involved in or every experience? I didn't give any of these questions to you ahead of time. But the fact that you collect these names, think of these uh particular moments in your life which have shaped you into getting to the position that you're in today means you've done a lot of reflection at different points in your life. Is there a process you have for this? Yeah. Do you do maybe journaling every day?

SPEAKER_01 13:13

You know, it's funny. I had uh I came up with this process pretty early on too, but I have a color scheme where uh and it's been very helpful, especially helpful in in corporate when you're like going when you're doing like reviews with, you know, for yourself or with others, but particularly when you're doing like a self-assessment. But I have a color code that I use for the first is like, and it doesn't matter the color, but is things that have never been done before. So something that I either led or was a major part of that at that company had never been done. And so this could be a new piece of technology, it could be a new process, it could be any number of things, but it's like this did not exist before I was here, and I either led it or played a major part in its um evolution and launch. Second is, and my role has always my roles have often tended to go towards the contractual side of things. So negotiated deals or, you know, money saved, we would get, you know, at King and Zynga, it wouldn't be uncommon for us to spend 350 to 500 million a year in media spend with large portions of that going, you know, hundreds of millions going to Facebook or Google. And so negotiating back 15, 25 million at the end of the year to get a check coming back to the business, making notes of those. And then anything that was innovative. So, like not necessarily things that had never been done, although sometimes those cross, but pursuing projects where I'm pursuing innovation and saying, look, here's a new thing that we've discovered and something that like benefited the company may not be, but uh it's like a different color, like not color on the sh on the page, but it's like a different shade of the true never been done before, like outright versus an optimization of something that had existed before. And then of course just looking at the data and letting that drive how are how are things going as far as like actual performance, which is usually the deno common denominator there is profit. So I I think those are a few of the things that I've done in the past.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

You also spend years spin uh years playing poker professionally. Yeah, yeah. Talk to us a little bit about that. What do you think that taught you about separating a good decision from a lucky outcome? Yeah. And uh how do you apply that distinction to your life today?

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Yeah, I mean, there's so there's a chicken and the egg argument to be made here of like which came first, you know, and and did poker benefit me in business or did benefit did business benefit me in poker? And I think I think they're really kind of two sides of the same coin. So I I put myself, I paid my well way through college largely with uh poker uh winnings. So I was uh playing on nights and weekends, going to school during the day. Um I also had other jobs, but poker was emerging and and became legal and available near my university around my my junior year. And I saw there, you know, this huge opportunity in the game because there's just so many people that don't really take a serious approach. They don't take a studied approach. And so I organized kind of a small, what back then and maybe even now would be called like a mastermind group where I had like-minded people who wanted to talk about hands and wanted to talk about the latest theory and were actively studying and really thinking about the game at kind of a more theoretical level and and less of a, I don't know, less of a game like blackjack or craps where you're like, I just hope I just bet and I hope the I hope it works out. And so the the parallels uh between poker and business, I think they're probably pretty well documented, but they're it's it's pretty amazing. You're dealing with incomplete information. So you can see some of the board, but you don't know what everybody else has. Totally true in business. You're dealing with really fast, like high pressure decisions, right? Way more skid decision. We, I mean, you almost always have a couple days, if not a week or months, to actually like pull the trigger on something. Whereas in poker, you're making a decision every street, and the the street is like when the next card comes. And the dynamics of the situation at hand can change drastically on each card and your opponent and your own holding and your opponent's perceived holdings, which would be like a massive range of hands. And so I still continue to play today just because I think it's fun as a it's like something that keeps me sharp, but I I really only get to play maybe three, three times a year. And uh recently was of the rare occasions that I got to play, or that I get to play, I should say, I had this amazing outcome and opportunity late last year in December of 2025 to play at a televised final table of a world poker tour event called the Shooting Star at the win in Vegas, and finished fourth in that out of around 700 people, 675 people. And uh so that'll be I I don't know when it's gonna air, but it seems like it'll be done, it'll be on CBS Sports before between now and the end of the year. I just no real update on when that's gonna come out. But yeah, poker's a great passion of mine and uh is a uh is something I'm willing to talk about with anybody. So if anybody has poker questions or you want to talk high-level theoretics or or even just like you know, low-level entry stuff, feel free to reach out. Incredible.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

Uh uh, congratulations on that. I did not know that you have made it so far ahead in the pro uh professional poker career. So good stuff there. Have you ever found your judgment to be tested in business? And if yes, you know how you go about making those uh decisions.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

Yeah, yeah. Daily, maybe. I'm not sure. You know, I think on some level it's it's funny, it ties actually back to the poker uh question a little bit in that like you have to you you constantly have to make judgments with incomplete information. And so you're developing, you know, over a career, you hopefully develop a good intuition and a good which is like obviously very squishy intuition, but uh something, you know, I I tend to trust my intuition a lot more than maybe many do. Like, and as a result, and again, this is part of that chicken egg, but I have no problem pulling the trigger on a massive decision with a high amount of risk if I feel like it has a proportionate chance to pay off, right? And so it's like there's this kind of common question, it's just a it's like a philosophical question, but you know, it essentially amounts to would you risk basically everything you have, not family, stuff like that, like keep the important things, but all of your financials, all of whatever. And let's assume that your net worth is less than a hundred million. Would you, on a coin flip, take a billion-dollar bet where heads you win a billion and tails you lose everything you have, assuming you have less than 100 million? I wouldn't be, I think it's that crazy to actually take that flip because like on average you're gonna make 500 million as an outcome, right? The expected value of that coin flip, half the time you win a billion, half the time you win zero. So every time you flip the coin, you should be making 500 million. Um, it's an amazing, a five to one on a coin flip if you have 100 million, is like an amazing outcome. Now, you have to factor in risk of ruin and these other things. So it's like the same thing. Would you put would you put all your money at the at a table to play poker with children who, or not children's not the right frame, but people who've never played before, who are willing to play for huge? You also probably wouldn't because like anything can happen. You're not like guaranteed anything in life, right? You but a coin flip is pretty pure. And so to kind of like come back to the core question, yeah, judgment is like refined over time. And I think that like that's one of the things that isn't captured in AI and a lot of these things. And we're very like very bullish on AI, but take a very sober approach to it. But as we think about it as it relates to business, there's really no substitution for taste and that intuition and that kind of like refined thing that says, well, hold on, this is like not as cut and dry as it might appear on the surface. And so, you know, I think you you live and you learn, but I think the biggest mistake I see other leaders and certainly like earlier career people is being frozen by decision and making no decision, which is like, I think, infinitely worse. You know, if you presented like 12 judgment calls and the outcome of that is you've made one decision out of the 12 versus somebody else who's made, you know, eight out of the 12 and has been right on six of them, I think on average that person's gonna do better than the person frozen by decision making. And so I tend to gather information very quickly, take as much into account as I possibly can, and then make a decision. Obviously, there's like there's a uh very exponential curve based on the level of the decision that's being made. But yeah, I've I've separated the kind of outcome of those from just with the if I've made a good decision with the information I had, it's kind of like being avoiding being results oriented. And hopefully, I think my yardstick is. Whenever decisions, the outcomes perform poorly, if I look back after the fact and say, well, given the information I had, could I have made a different choice? Like, did I make a sound choice? My hope is that even looking back, I say, Well, given the information I had, it was a good choice. The outcome didn't work out. And occasionally, of course, you look back and you say, Yeah, I missed that and I should have not missed that. And so I made a bad decision and the outcome was bad. And I think it's just as important to do that, which is harder to do where outcome is good, but still doing the retro that says, But was the decision good? Because it turns out like we survived by the skin of our teeth, and I missed that one thing, but the outcome is fine. It's very easy to gloss over that. And I, if nothing else, that's one thing that studying poker teaches you is to look at those spots and say, okay, where am I getting lucky versus where am I making good decisions and seeing good outcomes? Great. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

Uh I want to transition now to your OPM experience. Talk to us about what inspired you or motivated you to even consider the program. How did you learn about it?

SPEAKER_01 23:01

Yeah. You know, another another mentor of mine, uh, Chris Ye, who uh wrote a book called Blitz Scaling, really great book, uh, with Reed Hoffman, who's the founder of LinkedIn. But Chris and Reed taught a course at Stanford around this subject, and then they decided we should just turn this course into a book, and that became Blitz Scaling, which is very popular many years ago, maybe six, seven years ago, maybe maybe I guess probably more eight, ten. I'm I'm I've I forget how fast the years move. Read that. But uh I was just having a lunch with Chris, and we were talking, and he's HBS, I don't remember what year, but probably 20 years ago. And seemingly out of the blue, he was like, Hey, have you ever thought about OPM? And it might have been something, it must have been something I was talking about, but I wasn't like explicitly looking for programs. And I said, I hadn't. And then he's like, You should look into it. I think you'd really like it because he knew I I had not gone to uh B school. And so went home within an hour, had applied. The application was quite simple. And so whenever we were there, and and at some point they asked, like, raise your hand if somebody had referred you to OPM who had done OPM before. My hand was one of the few that didn't go up. I was actually shocked that like 90% of hands went up that people were there being directly referred from another OPM or uh, but Chris had just heard great things about the program. And again, trust it has if you think about that judgment call in that moment to pay a bunch of money for something I had, there's very little information online about what it is and what you can expect out of it. I'm like, okay, well, like Chris thinks it'll be good, Chris knows a lot about me, Chris knows a lot about Harvard, pull the trigger, and it turned out it was it was definitely worth it.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Right. And from unit one, are there any takeaways or maybe any quotes, any professors, any cases that that keep coming back to you that you find yourself revisiting?

SPEAKER_01 24:42

I mean, this is like not a very satisfying answer, probably, but kind of all of it. I mean, I think the um DOS, uh Narandas is a real uh standout amongst star professors that we had as well. I mean, every every one of our professors was was amazing, but he he has a certain uh way about him. Did you have DOS? I know some of the other classes haven't had DOS. We've had DOS, yeah. He's amazing. And so, and for me, it was uh that was actually one of the most exciting and revealing things for me. I've spent my life uh working in, you know, customer face and go-to-market functions. So in his class, I, you know, and others that had I had talked to who didn't know anything about OPM, but who I can kind of consulted as like, hey, do you think I should do this or not? Because obviously a big time commitment. Many had said, oh, you know, like you probably won't like don't expect to like learn a ton, which I did. Like those people were totally wrong. But but yeah, it's probably like good for networking or whatever. And so in DOS's, I'm like, okay, well, like I'm excited, but I kind of felt going in like I've got a pretty good grip on that. That's what I've spent my career in. But it was kind of quite the opposite. I and maybe it's because I know the material so well that I was able to like absorb so much more, maybe, than maybe in finance or something where I'm like less, less experienced. But I found that in that class, the thing I should know the most about, I actually learned the most. And many of those were reminders of things that are truly like foundationally important in go to market versus like words on a wall. So, like we all, you know, there's like work hard, play hard. Like everyone's like, yeah, work hard, play hard. And so those kind of get bundled in to things like make the customer the hero. And it was like in his class where some of those things, and you know, like obviously focusing on benefit and things like that, but you start to come back to your core. I found myself doing that where I'm like, right, those are actually like these like 10 commandment undeniable, you know, hard truths that are not just words on the wall. And then there's like a and they kind of get mushed together with all these other kind of like common, not necessarily sayings like that, but common thoughts around like fundamentals of brand or fundamentals of of culture or these other things that sometimes fall on that. And so, yeah, and I think for me, the biggest takeaway is because our whole business, like, I mean, it was actually very refreshing because it kind of like if I summarize kind of the arc of like all classes lumped together of unit one, it was like how important trust is, which is like, well, yes, which again should be this is a w another like water is wet kind of thing. But like all of, and this isn't a sales pitch, but it is the nature of my career, is that all of um the 170 people we paid last year at Maven are people I deeply know and trust. And so, you know, check box there. Another major theme was when you're trying to grow a company, you need to focus on like all things at once and you need to like be able to go like a certain depth at the right time, but that you shouldn't be like running from the left of the ship to the right and like, okay, we fixed all the accounting stuff, now we're gonna go over and fix the data stuff, now we're gonna go over and fix the product stuff. Which that whole philosophy is essentially what we what sets us apart in the market when we work with clients is like we're not coming in to solve whatever problem you think you have, like we can't scale paid. We're like, yeah, it's probably a data problem and a lifecycle problem and a product problem and a customer experience problem. And if you want to solve what it looks like on the surface, you actually have to go really far here. So that was very like reaffirming. And and I think the big takeaway for me is how much better I could do at, and I've started doing this where I now have uh sections on my calendar uh every day of the week where I have two hours dedicated for just sitting and thinking about, and I don't necessarily always need the time, but like I have carved out time now for accounting, which I never did because I'm not like drawn to accounting. And I I pay people to do the accounting, but I can like sit back and think about like strategically how are we doing, you know, doing there and what could we be doing better? And I've got time set aside for market-facing functions and strategy and these other kind of like core pillars, um, operations, like things that exist at at Opium. So I think that was the biggest change for me is coming back to having dedicated time carved out for just my own time to think about our business in each one of those facets every week where nothing is meant to be done necessarily. It's like me and I could be walking, but it's like me and a piece of a piece of paper and a pencil and reviewing, you know, various areas of the business. So like I I'm never really losing sight of any one thing.

SPEAKER_00 29:27

Amazing. Um in closing, I I want to ask you two questions. Firstly, if you go back in time and if you could speak to a younger version of yourself, what would you tell him? Let's start with that one.

SPEAKER_01 29:39

Yeah, let me think about that. This is this might sound this is gonna need like a little bit of context. So this might sound a little bit weird at first. But and I did learn this relatively early, but I could have learned it earlier, which is, and I've confirmed this many times with like insanely successful people, like just we can just leave it at that, insanely remarkably successful people, which is everybody is just making it up as they go. Like nobody really knows what they're doing. Again, needs to come with some big caveats and some like color behind that. But like we're all we're all just like monkeys on a rock hurling through space at you know 30,000 miles an hour or whatever it is. Like, we've never been faced with any one of the decisions we're typically making in any given day on the business side, right? If you're at home and other things, it's like pretty frequent stuff. But you're oftentimes finding yourself, and there is no like real playbook. And so I think there's just a lot of peace in knowing. I think for a long time I thought I was lacking some great knowledge or like I just need to read more here, which is true. Like, I you still like I'm a lifelong learner, I'm obsessed with learning. But I thought there would be some like endpoint or some like, you know, when I'm X years old or whenever I've done this for enough time, I'll kind of have all that settled. And so, and in many ways, like not to get too far down on like the analogies, but it's like um, and I'm not very good at golf, but it's like golf. Like Tiger Woods is still working on his shot. Now, obviously, Tiger Woods isn't making it up, but there's so there's some nuance to that statement. But I I think I thought for a long time that everybody else had to have some like magic, you know, ability or or knowledge that I didn't have. And I think when you realize, and when I realize that like that isn't true, and when you sit in front of, I had an example where I was very close to the owner for many years, family friend essentially, of like one of the largest sports franchises in the world, and would sometimes be with just him and two other people, my friend and my friend's dad. And we were younger, and I would hear them talk, and this guy's, you know, multiple billions, whatever. And I'm like, they're just they just sound like 14-year-old boys, kind of like shooting the shit. Like they don't, they don't have anything figured out. And when they talk would talk about like some big decision within the franchise or other things, I just see them like, yeah, I don't know, like maybe we should do that. Like, yeah, I'm all right. I guess we'll probably do that. But that's like no definitive answer to anything. And so for me, that was like very freeing in in that like you you uh you have everything you need right now to kind of like pursue what you want. And like again, going back to the those two parallels of like one person faced with a dozen choices that makes one or none, and the other who just kind of goes and like figures it out and optimizes and and you know remains opportunistic to and and like able to pivot and and flexible. That's kind of all you need on on on some level. I don't mean to be like overly simple simplistic, but but like that goes a long way.

SPEAKER_00 32:47

That's such an incredible response because it also ties into you know how most people wait to jump on an opportunity to feel they're prepared enough and never never be prepared. Just take the leap of faith, get started. I think it ties into what you said.

SPEAKER_01 33:03

And well, and the others that jumped off the cliff before you were also not prepared. Like you think they were, but if you go ask them, and I again I've validated that with like many, many people. Like, and I would encourage other listeners, like go to the most successful person you know, and at some point ask them, do you kind of feel like everyone's just making it up? And I think 80 plus percent of them will be like, Yeah, I kind of think everyone's just making it up as they go. Like, I don't know anything. And when you talk to a lot of those people who've got done well, they're like, I don't know anything about anything we do, but like we've been really successful, and they're just kind of like fumbling through it like anybody else in a in a way again that's like positive. It's not like a critique, it's just is what it is.

SPEAKER_00 33:41

So yeah. Another thing that comes to mind is that I don't do you have the John Osho case, the spin brush?

SPEAKER_01 33:48

No.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Oh, the yeah, for the toothbrush?

SPEAKER_01 33:50

Yeah. The yeah, yeah, I forget what it was called, but the uh but yes, yeah, yeah. Where he like goes in at the and at the end, that was like two.

SPEAKER_00 34:00

Nothing about the new industry, nothing, and then uh the quality of his decisions, you know. Yeah. But he entered a new industry as well and still ended up being successful.

SPEAKER_01 34:11

Well, and on the way, if my if my memory serves, on the way out of like selling that to PG or whoever, he walked across the street and sold Swiffer. Like I was just sketched on like a piece of paper. He was like, Hey, we can do a Swiffer wet chat, and like was another hundred million with like nothing but a piece of paper. So yeah, that is like a that's a really great example, I think, for that. Particularly where he just walks in and is like on a piece of paper, he sells a hundred million dollar idea or whatever. And so I think that that is that can be like very like encouraging, but at the same time, it's like, okay, people still you still have to kind of pick a lane on where you want to go. And I think what one other big lesson that has been helpful, and I luckily I had this early, but is like pick a lane, go as hard as and as fast as you can until you have evidence that you should be in a different lane. But like, and and that's okay. It's okay to switch lanes. What's not okay is to like sit and do nothing and like wait and or just like half-ass something. And so if like if you have like if you follow your like strongest desire as it relates to work to your fullest extent, like that is, I think, what is a common theme of amongst those that are successful versus those that have failed. And there are many that have failed, pursuing it to their fullest extent, but I would think there are very few that have succeeded, like kind of halfway in and like not fully like committing to the premise. And again, doesn't mean you need to be stuck and saying like six years in or six months in, like I said I was gonna do this and like nothing is working. Like, um, it doesn't mean like you can never pull the ripcord, but but you should have a clear understanding of like what the pivot is if you don't feel like that path is is any is like worth pursuing still.

SPEAKER_00 35:54

Matt, my final question to you. I see there's a bookshelf behind you with some books on it. Any book that you feel has in influenced you a lot in the way you think or anything you want to talk about in terms of what a takeaway might have been from a book.

SPEAKER_01 36:09

Sure. Yeah, there are many. I mean, I mentioned I mentioned blitz scaling, so maybe I'll give Chris a plug on blitz scaling, but uh many of your uh listeners may have read that. But uh essentially time is the enemy, the main takeaway from that is like time is the enemy of a fast-moving company uh or fast growing company. And so, particularly when you're faced with a highly competitive set of peers, and I think we we see that all the time, and many have the observe it, but you know, we have a unique perspective inside of Maven where oftentimes companies miss out on massive opportunities, massive, massive, massive opportunities because they're waiting for like perfection. This is the like perfectionist enemy of good. And it doesn't mean to be, of course, like willy-nilly and just like shooting shots left and right, but some of this comes back into like disagree and commit and and just like these other like fundamental things. But like as an example, when scaling, particularly in media, the cost of acquisition of a customer in almost all cases is as cheap today as it ever will be. And so I have seen countless companies and have been at companies where we are trying to acquire a customer for, I'm making up a number, but say for $25. And we see acquisition costs of like 30. And we're like, oh, like slow everything down, and it's gotta be 25, it's gotta be 25. And you fast forward a year, and these are companies with billion dollar budgets, and the cost of acquisition across the industry is 40. And you're like, okay, like 38, that's the max, right? And then the two years later it's 55, and you're like, all right, 40, where you could have unloaded, you know, years before. So that's um that's not a blessing to go spend whatever you want on CAC, but but time is the enemy of uh of of fast scale. And so the the companies that make faster decisions and on average are better at their decision making than their peers will succeed in really competitive environments. And then there's an old classic, uh, I can't remember the name, but you, it's called predictable revenue, uh, which is another one that that kind of walks through, you know, in some levels, it's not like a it's not a cheat sheet per se, but it it gives the perspective on, you know, on some level of what we do, which is driving predictable, profitable growth at scale and how that comes about, because those, those like all do a lot of heavy lifting. Like you, everybody wants predictability, they want it to be profitable, and they want it to be big or at scale. And if any three of those break, it's unpredictable, profitable at scale, it's predictable, not profitable at scale, or you know, it's at scale, but you know, but not predictable. All of those are are struggle. And there is a, you know, it's it's uh it's risky because those things can sound that can sound very like something can be straightforward but not simple. And the example I give often here is uh how do we how do we grow a business? It's very straightforward, but it's not simple. How do we grow a human is probably an easier way to talk about it, or how do we succeed as adults in our in our like our health is a really good example of that. Diet, exercise, sleep, meditation, meaningful relationships. It's kind of it-ish, right? Maybe some therapy here or there, right? But it's real straightforward. Super straightforward. Couldn't be more straightforward. Diet, sleep, exercise, meditation, meaningful relationships, just go do that. Nobody does it. It's not simple. And so I think when growing a company, it's you know, we're commonly at risk where we say, Oh, like it sounds so simple. It's like it's not simple, but it is straightforward. And so predictable revenue as a book will help anybody who hasn't read it, can help kind of start to peel that onion back a little bit and kind of walk you through the diet sleep exercise of that. And then, you know, obviously you still need great people in each of those seats to to execute against that.

SPEAKER_00 40:02

Wonderful. Matt, thank you very much. Uh I think this one is very powerful. It touched on everything I would have envisioned this podcast to stand for. So I'm grateful to you for making yourself available. Uh and I hope to get this released in the next day or two.

SPEAKER_01 40:16

Okay, awesome. Yeah, pleasure speaking with you, so and appreciate the uh the great questions and and uh your time today as well.

SPEAKER_00 40:22

Take care. Bye.

SPEAKER_01 40:23

Okay, have a great day.

SPEAKER_00 40:25

Cheers.