Founding a tech company in college, standing out to get your dream job, and moving into venture capital with Matt Veryser (VP of Startup Studio at Ascend Innovations)

Callan Harrington 00:01
You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here.

Callan Harrington 00:21
Welcome to That Worked, a podcast where we break down the careers of top founders and executives and pull out the key items that led to their success throughout their careers. I'm Callan Harrington, your host, and today's guest is Matt Veryser. Matt is the VP of Startup Studio at Ascend Innovations and has been heavily involved in the startup community throughout his career. Matt, thanks for coming on the show.

Matt Veryser 00:45
Glad to be here.

Callan Harrington 00:47
In your words, tell us a little bit about what you're up to now.

Matt Veryser 00:50
Right now, I'm building a startup studio and venture studio at an organization called Ascend Innovations. Ascend, as a parent company, is a consulting firm focused on solving complex community health problems, approaching that work through a UX lens—a very customer-centric lens—and bringing strong data science capabilities to the table. I used a lot of buzzwords there, but what that typically looks like is helping communities solve really tricky problems around things like infant mortality, addiction, opioid use, and other complex community challenges that public health institutions are interested in addressing.

Callan Harrington 01:28
I’m going to try to repeat that back the best that I understand it, because you’ve got a different level of knowledge in this. But what I hear you saying is, there are a lot of challenges over the years in community health, and it seems like a lot of times this has been overlooked. I know for a fact that community health in general is overlooked, but now it’s getting to a point where real change is needed, and people are paying more attention because this can dramatically increase the bottom line of major companies in the space. Is that accurate?

Matt Veryser 01:57
Yeah, you've got it. Previously, the idea was that these social care services were always something that, well, you know, a government or a charity should provide. But now health organizations, Medicare, and Medicaid organizations are realizing, "Wait, we can reduce our costs by subsidizing the food bank."

Callan Harrington 02:15
I want to dive in more on this, but before we get there, this is where you’re at now. Where did this all start? Where did your career kind of kick off?

Matt Veryser 02:23
I am someone who believes that entrepreneurship and building businesses have the opportunity to change the world and make it a better place.

Callan Harrington 02:30
Why do you think that? Because we’re solving one problem at a time, or sometimes a technology or a new opportunity comes along that can solve a couple of problems, but generally speaking, entrepreneurship is about finding some sort of problem that isn’t solved by the marketplace and bringing a solution to market that either better aligns stakeholders or uses a new technology to address an old problem.

Matt Veryser 02:56
But I look at entrepreneurship through rose-colored glasses—I really believe that it’s our opportunity to make the world a better place. And I think that we as founders also have an obligation to build really high-quality workplaces, hopefully exceeding the quality of the incumbent technology or labor force.

Callan Harrington 03:14
Do you have any examples of that? I agree with you, and I definitely think that... I mean, obviously, I’ve spent most of my career, and when I say most, pretty much all of my career, in tech. I wish I could say I got into it that altruistically—I didn’t. I fell into it and happened to really enjoy doing it. When I say, "Do I enjoy being in tech?"—it was fun, it was new, and it was constantly changing. But when you say, in particular, building companies that essentially can make a difference in people’s lives internally—employee-focused, if I heard you correctly—what does that mean to you? What does that look like?

Matt Veryser 03:54
I’m going to go back to the prior question that you asked me, which was, how did I get into entrepreneurship to begin with? I’m going to use a non-tech answer to answer that question. I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My grandparents were entrepreneurs—owned gas stations, KFCs, and things of that nature. On the other side, there was a tool and die maker. My dad and his brothers inherited this tool and die company and built up this metal stamping organization with three plants—two in the Detroit area and one down in Texas. While they weren’t a technology company, a lot of the values and beliefs I have around entrepreneurship come from watching the impact my dad and his brothers were able to have in building, growing, and running this business. The example I always give is that it was a commodity industry, really cutthroat—tier two suppliers to tier one suppliers, stacked five of them against each other. It’s a brutal business to be in, but throughout it all, my dad and his brothers were able to maintain this family culture at the company. When they sold the business in 2007, the company had a tradition of doing a company picnic every summer and a holiday party in the winter. What really stuck with me was, I remember being invited to one of the company holiday parties after they’d sold the business. People weren’t even working there anymore, but the company was that close-knit that people were still getting together and still inviting the family who had sold the company to these gatherings. That was just incredibly meaningful—to see the type of community that you can build through entrepreneurship.

Callan Harrington 05:16
So you wanted to create that. You wanted to—which is interesting—entrepreneurship does give you the choice to run that company however you want. It kind of reminds me of the Small Giants concept. Are you familiar with that?

Matt Veryser 05:27
I’m not.

Callan Harrington 05:28
Small Giants are companies that have decided to be great as opposed to getting as large as possible. This is totally different than kind of venture tech. Not all tech—there are definitely Small Giants in our tech space—but companies that, and a lot of it was the employees, build this family atmosphere, not grow at all costs. And these companies... I mean, it doesn’t mean that they’re small companies, but they’ve gotten really large, and they did that largely because they had total control of the cap table, so they had total choice in how they did that, which I know sometimes can be challenging in the venture space. But that Small Giants concept, I think, is really intriguing. There’s a great book on it—I can’t think of the author at the moment, but it gave me a totally different perspective. So I think that’s interesting that you say that. So you started a company while in college. Is that right?

Matt Veryser 06:18
Yep.

Callan Harrington 06:19
Tell us about that. How did that come about?

Matt Veryser 06:21
When I was between my freshman and sophomore year of college... I am a child with some amount of privilege. I grew up in Grosse Pointe, which is an old money suburb of the Detroit area. Through the church network, I was fortunate enough to land an internship with one of my neighbors, helping them out with... They had this really boutique investment firm, and it was basically just, you know, the father and the son-in-law, and they had a variety of business units that they dabbled in, and one of them was venture capital. They would source deals for the state. This was not their core business. This wasn’t their core focus area, so they just would send the deal flow through me. Every time a new business plan came in or a new deck came in, they would have me review it first.

Callan Harrington 07:02
That’s pretty standard, though—most people look to freshmen in college to review those deals, so that makes sense to me. That doesn’t throw me off at all.

Matt Veryser 07:10
At the same time, I was an engineering major, but I was also going through this finance, kind of like investment banking boot camp over the course of the summer. This club that I joined was running me through it. So between this investment banking perspective that I had and access to deal flow, the engineering background, my aspirations to run an engineering organization... I realized that I’d be much smarter in the way I was approaching my career, and that I could make a much larger impact on the world. You know, this whole idea of making the world a better place and building high-quality environments—I could make a much larger impact on the world if I aligned myself with venture capital. Really early on in my career, I decided that I wanted to get into VC, so I switched majors and used their network. They had this software called StreetSites, which had literally all the banking professionals in the entire industry and all their backgrounds, contact information, and all this other stuff in it. I found every single alumnus of the University of Dayton that worked at a venture capital firm, and I spent my Christmas break reaching out to all of them, trying to get an internship in venture capital. I did not get an internship in venture capital—it was 2008-2009, and all of that work just didn’t lead to a job. It’s a really difficult industry to break into, especially at that point in the economy.

Callan Harrington 08:26
So what happened? You reached out to all of them. Did you get any hits? Did anybody respond, or was it just cold?

Matt Veryser 08:33
I got some really polite "Thanks for reaching out" emails. I don’t think I got a single "Circle back next year, please."

Callan Harrington 08:39
So I went through this whole process, and I was still dead set on getting into venture capital—that was my goal after college. So I said, "Well, what’s the next best thing?" I talked to some other friends who’d gotten into VC, and they were like, "Well, you have a couple of routes—either you can go into investment banking, or you can start a company." And I was like, "Well, I’m just going to go start a company because that sounds up my alley." Again, I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, so I was comfortable with that risk. One of my friends saw this trend that was happening in Europe and came back with this idea—he was an exchange student—and he’s like, "Hey, this open innovation market is really hot in Europe, and I think it’s going to be coming to the US soon, so let’s make an open innovation marketplace." Basically, brands and engineering firms would work with us at a company called BrainRack to come up with fresh, new ideas to solve the problems that they were facing. They would write a challenge, a prompt for our site, and we would charge them a fee to host it on the site, and then we would handle and distribute prize money as part of that. In the first year, we did like, I don’t know, $30,000 in revenue, and we had enough validation that we felt like we were a big deal. You know, on a college campus, that sort of success is pretty exciting.

Callan Harrington 09:51
Yeah, that would be huge. I was slinging shoes at Dick’s Sporting Goods. What you were doing was way better.

Matt Veryser 09:58
We also raised like $100,000 from a venture capital fund and then got into an accelerator fund down in Cincinnati, so we had a bunch of momentum.

Callan Harrington 10:08
Wait, hold on. I’ve got to reverse here. So you couldn’t get anybody to reach out whatsoever. You cold-called all of these VCs, which I respect, to try to get in there—got a "Thanks, but no thanks." And then you raised capital for Company One? I think it’s interesting that you decided to go the entrepreneur route as opposed to going into investment banking, which would have been a much easier leap into venture capital than starting a company from scratch. So you took the entrepreneur route and raised capital. How is that different from when you were trying to get a job? Now you’re raising capital. What was it that clicked on that side that was a bigger challenge on the other side?

Matt Veryser 10:47
I think with raising capital, the proof was in the pudding.

Callan Harrington 10:50
Gotcha.

Matt Veryser 10:51
We were succeeding—we were making progress. Whereas if you just looked at my resume, I was an engineering major from Detroit with a background in high school robotics who wanted to get a job in venture capital. It’s not an obvious "Great hire."

Callan Harrington 11:05
Fair enough. Your words, not mine—just to clarify that. So, okay, raised capital, had some success, got some early traction. Let’s kick it off there again.

Matt Veryser 11:15
Yeah, we felt like we were a really big deal and probably let a little of that get to our heads. A big part of it was, you know, in that day and age, right? We went through the Brandery in 2009-2010—accelerators were new, and in the Midwest, raising $100,000 and getting into an accelerator fund felt like you had made it. But the reality is, we didn’t have a sustainable business that could maintain three college graduates and the contract software development. After college, it pretty quickly petered out. There were, of course, some founder dramatics as everything kind of fell apart. We sold off BrainRack to another entrepreneur in the Netherlands, which was probably both the best and worst decision that we could have made, because we were putting ourselves in a position where we were going to have to rebuild the app to help us get to this next-gen version. But of course, we didn’t have the capital to get to the next-gen version. That was one of the biggest mistakes we made tactically. And from a team perspective, I had issues with one of my co-founders. I saw a number of red flags, and by the time I decided to leave, I had invested another $10,000 in credit card debt or something like that into the business. When I saw the red flags, I should have departed earlier than I did.

Callan Harrington 12:37
Did you address those red flags when you were there?

Matt Veryser 12:40
The really short answer is, I tried. I was really transparent with my co-founder when I left that the red flags I saw were why I was leaving. That’s ultimately why we parted, why we went different directions. I didn’t see a change in behavior, and so it just wasn’t worth it for me.

Callan Harrington 12:59
What would you have done differently in that scenario?

Matt Veryser 13:02
What I really should have done differently, and this is full 2020 hindsight, is just take the momentum that I had going through the accelerator program and then go work at another tech startup—just immediately transfer that momentum into a company that was scaling and would have been a really productive environment for me to learn and grow inside of. I could have used that to validate and put an incredible brand stamp on my resume. I don’t think that experience would have been productive enough to get me into a Bay Area VC firm, but I certainly could have tried. In hindsight, I should have left BrainRack before I did.

Callan Harrington 13:45
Let’s fast forward a little bit. You did ultimately get into VC. How’d you get in?

Matt Veryser 13:51
After BrainRack and my time in San Francisco, I moved back home and worked for a consulting firm down in the Cincinnati area as a product manager for a couple of years. But again, that was scratching an itch around product management. It wasn’t the career direction that I wanted to go, so I spent the better part of a year applying to VC funds around the nation. I started out with the traditional method—look for job posts and send a resume. And again, I wasn’t hearing a whole lot back. I didn’t have the investment banking background. I honestly was kind of damaged goods from my startup failing and had taken that really personally. So I wasn’t super confident when I would get interviews, either. I needed to change that mindset when I was going into the interview. But I also decided to differentiate myself in the application process by, instead of sending a resume when I would see a job posted, making a pitch deck for myself. I leaned into one of the skill sets that I knew I had, that I knew a VC would respect—my ability to tell a story around a company and an idea, and in general, there’s a lot that goes into a good deck. To oversimplify it,

Callan Harrington 14:55
To recap that, you went the traditional approach—couldn’t separate yourself from everybody else, despite having a significantly stronger resume. You now have real startup experience, you had founded a company—that’s at least a separator, or it feels like a separator—but still couldn’t get the traction that you were hoping for, so you decided to create a story with yourself. When you say "the elements of a good deck," because I agree with this—I think that how you set up a deck, whether that’s a sales deck, pitch deck, whatever it may be, is important, and I also firmly believe in the power of storytelling—how do you construct a presentation like that, and what are those key things that you believe need to be there?

Matt Veryser 15:40
The VC that I... it’s actually the first and only VC I used this with because it worked. It got me the interview. It teed me up. The hiring manager was really excited about me, and so I can’t claim to have customized this for a bunch of different funds.

Callan Harrington 15:56
Could you tell the whole story? I’d actually love to hear this story. What did you do? Who’d you reach out to? You don’t have to go through names if you don’t want to, but what did you do? Who’d you reach out to? What was in the deck, and how did this process go once they got it?

Matt Veryser 16:09
All right. So I’ll go back to being frustrated with where I currently was. I was helping organize and set up a co-working space in the Dayton area. I vividly remember doing a call with Andy Artz, who is a partner at Social Capital, which is one of the marquee VC firms. He was connected with me through the investment banking program that I told you about, that I was doing the training with. I was talking to Andy, and I was like, "Andy, what the hell do I do?" And he was like, "Man, you gotta find a way to make yourself stand out." I was like, "All right, what do you think about this pitch deck idea?" I probably saw it floating on Twitter or Hacker News or something. He was like, "Yeah, I don’t know, it doesn’t hurt. Give it a shot." And I was like, "All right, cool, you’re right, it doesn’t hurt." So I saw a job posted at Rev1 and immediately knew this was my shot. I’ve got to take this one super seriously—this is in Ohio, the brand, the reputation of the brand. So I was like, "I gotta go all in on this one." I opened Google Slides and started going through the standard investment deck template that we had, then flipping it around to see how I could make it apply to a person. How could I talk about Rev1’s need to hire someone through the lens of problem, solution, value prop, traction, and market size, all of that? Then I tried to take my story and overlay it into each of these standard investor deck slides. When you’re thinking about something like traction, that’s what’s most relatable, right? That’s what most people think about when they’re writing their resume. On the traction area, I was like, "I’m helping around this co-working space right now, I’m running a Meetup group, I built this company before, we raised all this money," blah, blah, blah. The traction slides were pretty easy to do. The problem-solution slide, thinking about the market and what trends might play to my favor—that took a good bit more work to piece together. I think I spent two nights on it. I also bounced it off of my cousin-in-law, Rob Green, who was at Baird Capital. So it probably took me two or three nights to get this all together, and then I shipped it off to Greg Pugh, who was the hiring manager.

Callan Harrington 18:17
How’d you get his contact info?

Matt Veryser 18:19
So Rev1 at this point didn’t have a job board. It was like, they made a LinkedIn post or something, and they were like, "Hey, send resumes to Greg Pugh." So I shipped it off to Greg Pugh, and I was anxious because this was a totally new strategy. It was definitely putting myself out there. I remember setting up a camera from work on a tripod, doing a really professional selfie shot in front of my house, and trying to make sure I had all the details right. But I was anxious about it—really put myself out there. I got a response in like 30 minutes, and Greg was like, "Love this. Let’s talk. Set up a time for next week." And I had a job in like a week and a half or two weeks. Greg made a decision like that.

Callan Harrington 19:06
Interesting. I think this is really timely right now with what’s going on in the market. Calling it what it is, people are getting laid off left and right, and it sucks. Good people are getting let go—cuts are going deep right now. I see it on LinkedIn quite a bit. People are offering tips, and I think these tips are excellent. One of the ones that comes out quite a bit is how you can separate yourself, and reaching out to the hiring manager directly. I mean, this was kind of set up for you to do it, but I think this is a great example. I can tell you, if I got that, my initial reaction would be, "What is this?" Then I would look at it deeper and think, "Okay, this person actually took the time, they did the research." At first, I’d look at it like, "This is crazy," and then I would look at it in more depth, and it would definitely stand out. Because here’s the reality—you and I have probably had this conversation before. Think about interviewing somebody out of college—everybody says the exact same thing. Everybody’s trained, it’s professional, it’s exactly what you should say, but everybody’s saying the exact same thing. You have to do something different if you want to stand out at those jobs that everybody’s applying to, that everybody wants into. VC would have been really hot at this time that you were going into it. So anyway, you got the job. What was it like once you got there? What was it like? You got into VC—you’ve been wanting to get into VC forever. You got in—what’s it like now?

Matt Veryser 20:26
Rev1 Ventures is a really unique fund. About a third of the assets they manage are from the state, and a portion of their operating dollars comes from the state of Ohio too. A lot of VCs that don’t have state funding have a portion of their business that they call platform—it’s basically entrepreneurial support services. Rev1 had that, but on steroids. We were basically running an accelerator or a startup studio within the construct of the fund. When I got there, my understanding was that I was going to have some sort of venture analyst job and that my role was going to be handling deal flow, which is a really typical first gig. But within a week, Greg realized that I could use my prior experience really productively to help coach entrepreneurs through product-market fit, finding their first round of financing, hiring their first team members, and going through a lot of the really early product validation steps. I honestly did not do deal flow for two and a half years—the first two and a half years I don’t think I touched deal flow at all, which is crazy.

Callan Harrington 21:34
Why is that crazy?

Matt Veryser 21:36
Because that’s where you start—that is the typical first gig, and that’s really what I was hired to do. I was hired to be an analyst, and they immediately shifted me into more of an entrepreneur-in-residence role.

Callan Harrington 21:47
How’d you like that?

Matt Veryser 21:49
I gotta give Greg credit, because later on in my career, later on in my time at Rev1, I did shift over to the Investments Office, and I only lasted like nine months in a traditional investments role. I found it to be a little bit too repetitive, and I found it to not be as well aligned with the interests of entrepreneurs—these people who are trying to change the world. Instead of negotiating term sheets and going through deal rooms, digging through all of your contracts—that’s nowhere near as fun for me as building something and solving problems. I really have to give Greg credit for putting me in the right spot and using my talents most effectively.

Callan Harrington 22:29
Isn’t that interesting? You finally got the job that you wanted, and I wouldn’t even be surprised if when you got that first, when they were like, "Wait, I actually need you helping out with entrepreneurs," you were like, "Man, I really want to learn this. I want to be involved with the money." And then you weren’t, and then you got into it. So you finally got it—you were cold calling people years ago, and you finally got in there, and it was like, "This isn’t that great at all," which is interesting, because it’s so often that we, like, I found it throughout my career. It’s like, "Oh man, once I get here, this is what I want to do." Well, no, once I get here, this is actually what I want to be doing now instead of that. It doesn’t work that way, right? Some of the things I try to do now are pay attention along the way to the actual tasks themselves, narrowing in on the task and saying, "What is the task that gives me energy? What is it that I’m doing?" Narrow that down and shape a career around that. You can do this while you’re in a job. I always reflected after, but I was already in the next job, so it didn’t do me any good. So, okay, you did that, didn’t last very long, and I’m gonna fast forward a little bit. You went into SafeChain, and that transition from Rev1 to SafeChain, which is where we met—we worked there together. So you tried forever to get into VC, got into VC, and then jumped to join a company. Why’d you do that? What was it that led you to do that?

Matt Veryser 23:56
So I spent about three years on the venture acceleration side of things, the platform side of things, at Rev1. I really enjoyed that. The organization moved me up—they were trying to move me up, give me access to more pay and more long-term growth opportunities. They moved me into the Investments Office, and it really reinforced how much I preferred to be a builder. I wanted to make an intentional move to replicate the success that I had earlier in my career. As I was looking at the next step, what I mean by that is I felt like I outperformed as a seed-stage VC because I had experience at the seed stage. I was able to bring in better deal flow than my peers, I was able to connect with companies oftentimes better than my peers, and I was able to build really trusting relationships with the companies that I was working with. I felt that for me to level up, to get to the next level, for me to land at a Bay Area VC firm or a firm with a stellar reputation, the best route for me to do that would be to go and get experience at the next stage. What would it look like to go to a Series A-stage company, a company that had successfully raised millions of dollars, and done it in a manner that exceeded the expectations of the region? I really wanted to go somewhere—this is a super important part of my decision-making criteria—where I would have influence over the management of the company. I wanted to be in the room helping make decisions and learning from that experience. It wasn’t going to be useful for me to go to Root and be employee 50, for as much growth as they had and as much as that was an opportunity. There were two companies in the Rev1 portfolio that I had really tight relationships with, that I felt I could bring value to. Ultimately, SafeChain—I’d introduced the three founders to each other. I had been there from the very inception of this company, helped facilitate all of that. I knew the risks going into SafeChain—I knew the pluses and the strengths and weaknesses of the team, the strengths and weaknesses of the market. I had written the deal memo for it. Eyes wide open, I decided to take this bigger risk because I felt like it was going to give me the experience that I felt was lacking on my resume. I candidly really admired the fact that they were able to raise at terms that were outside of the norm for the region. I really admired Tony’s ability to challenge the status quo.

Callan Harrington 26:12
Yeah, I learned a lot from Tony throughout that experience, and still do, right? I mean, so much confidence, and he was phenomenal at telling a story. He lived in the future—he could see where those things were coming together, and he was phenomenal at it. That makes total sense. So you went there to level up, and I’m assuming you got what you were looking for from the standpoint of you got to be on the leadership team, you got to understand how we all function together. The reality is, one of the things that I took away from SafeChain personally was that we were really tested as a leadership team because we had so many ups and downs. We had so much momentum from a national perspective, and we had really high highs, we had really low lows, and that tested me more on a leadership team than any position I’ve ever had. Other companies have been more successful, but what I learned there, I don’t know how I could repeat that. I don’t know if you feel similar, but I learned so much from that experience. You just don’t learn everything when things are always going well—you need those lows. You need to understand how to handle that, in my opinion.

Matt Veryser 27:23
Yeah, whenever I look at my resume, I cannot believe that my tenure at SafeChain was less than two years.

Callan Harrington 27:30
I think the same thing all the time—all the time.

Matt Veryser 27:34
It just doesn’t add up. The urgency and pace that we were running at required really rapid growth across the whole team, and then also just the personal decisions that you have to make, the sacrifices you have to make to be in an environment and role where you’re growing so quickly. One of the best habits that I built at SafeChain was being in the gym a couple of days a week, just putting on an audiobook and burning through these leadership audiobooks that have provided really good advice, really good insight. I go back to those books all the time. That habit that I built at SafeChain was really productive.

Callan Harrington 28:18
I want to fast forward a little bit. After SafeChain, you and I actually posted this—tried to start a company. I know you tried to start a couple, right? So you wanted to go back onto this pure founder route, and then you made it into Ascend, which was very similar to the role that you were doing that you really enjoyed at Rev1. What was that like? You went in to try to start a company and then moved back into it. Why did you make that change, and what was that like to make that change?

Matt Veryser 28:48
After SafeChain, I had this aspiration to build a consumer startup, a consumer product. I had a couple of different consumer product ideas that I kicked around, took through validation cycles, and then one of them I put more time into than I should have. The nice thing about unemployment is that you can’t be unemployed forever, so it put a certain degree of urgency around running these experiments and declaring them dead or not. But it did give me the space while I was running these experiments with these other consumer ideas to take a step back and say, "Okay, what is it that I really like to do, and what are my strengths? Do I really want to create a watch company, or do I really want to create a carbon credits company? What has brought me a lot of joy in the past? What have been the industries that I’ve really thrived in?" For me, as I was looking through my prior successes and failures, the industry that I’ve really enjoyed working in was healthcare. I also asked myself, "What’s the stage of the company that I’ve really enjoyed working in?" The early stage, product validation, figuring out product-market fit, figuring out distribution models, making a lot of the really early assumptions—you’re making decisions around those early assumptions that can determine the outcome of the business. That early stage, that seed stage, is where I have the most fun. So between having the most success in healthcare and having the most fun at the seed stage, I decided that I wanted to find an opportunity that blended those two together. I got crazy lucky that I ended up finding it here in Dayton, where my wife has a wonderful career, and that the consulting firm I joined happened to be thinking about preparing for and planning to start building up the startup studio at the organization. That just came through networking, honestly. I was just getting coffee with entrepreneurs around Dayton, asking them who I should be talking to, talking about the various opportunities around here. I had just gotten married, so I was trying to make some decisions to really prioritize my wife and her career, but I knew a small town like Dayton isn’t flush with these opportunities. I honestly thought I was going to end up in Cincinnati or Columbus again. Then Josh Schraeder, now the CEO at Ascend, we grabbed coffee. He took a risk—he kind of extended the company a little bit in picking me up because he saw my skill set, knew that there weren’t a lot of people like me around, and knew that I was going to be grabbing a job in the next month or two. So he made me an offer to come on and help build the startup studio there. Now that wasn’t as much of a straight shot as you might think it would be. I joined, and then COVID shut the world down like three weeks later, so we didn’t get to go straight into building a studio. I really have had to display a decent amount of perseverance over the last couple of years to get to the point where we’re now finally ready to build these spinouts on a much more consistent basis.

Callan Harrington 31:47
You brought up another important point—another one. You hit on a couple of points actually on getting jobs, which I think are huge, and one is standing out. You said that earlier. I think that is huge, and building a pitch deck like that—I’m curious, I bet that still works. If I got that, if I was a hiring manager and that came across my desk, it would automatically bump up near the top. I’d think they were crazy at first, but then once I looked into it more and saw the research, it’s like, "Oh man, this is a no-brainer." Then you mentioned another one you kind of glossed over, but I think it’s so important—you just started networking, and you just started meeting people. I know networking can be a cringy word to some people, but I firmly believe in it. Every job I’ve ever had came from networking. I’ve never applied for a job and got it in my entire career—not one time. One thing I’d love to know before we jump off is, if you could have a conversation with your younger self—and I’m purposely leaving that open, no specific age—what would that conversation be? What would that advice be?

Matt Veryser 32:47
This is something that I think you’ll really appreciate. Callan and I both have the experience of working with Chris McAlister, who’s a professional coach in the Columbus area and has this wonderful framework called SightShift. If there’s anything that I can pass along to my younger self, it would just be some sort of... if I could pass along knowledge and awareness about some of the insecurities that I was carrying around as a high schooler, as a college kid, and even early in my career, just to help acknowledge some of the things that motivated and drove me. I am someone who is a community builder, and that’s a huge strength of mine. A part of that probably comes from feeling like a dork or a nerd or an outsider when I was growing up. So to develop some self-awareness around that earlier in my life, I think, would have been really, really powerful in helping me understand how I show up, how I treat the people around me, and how to be the best version of myself, day in and day out, with all the relationships that I have around me.

Callan Harrington 33:53
If I can play that back, in other words, accept who you are, accept the reality that made you who you are today, be comfortable in your own skin, and don’t feel like you have to put on this show in front of everybody. Follow what it is you want to do. Is that a way of saying it, or am I off?

Matt Veryser 34:09
No, you’re on the money. We both worked with the same coach.

Callan Harrington 34:13
It took me years to do that, even having that coaching. I love Chris—Chris was excellent for me. Honestly, it didn’t happen until I started my own company. That’s the first time I was like, "Okay." We talk about being your authentic self—it gets talked about a lot, and that’s tough because it’s like, "Well, what does that mean?" So much of it, I think, is we’re all told what we should do. Everybody will have an opinion. That’s the hardest part when you’re looking for your next career move—we are all told what we should do, and everybody has an opinion based on what they know about you and what you should do. All of it sounds interesting, and all of it is somewhat true, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to follow what’s going to be best for you, and be honest with yourself and who you are and what you want to do.

Matt Veryser 35:03
I am where I am because I’m being more honest and authentic with myself. I’m at a startup studio—I’m not at a VC fund. That’s really because I’m no longer as worried about the narrative or the arc of my career as much as I am worried about doing work that I love with people that I want to work with.

Callan Harrington 35:22
I can’t think of a better stop than right there. That was excellent. Matt, thank you for coming on the show, brother.

Matt Veryser 35:28
Thanks, Callan.