Matt Wyckhouse - Founder & CEO of Finite State: Building Resilience, Stripping Away Ego, and Cultivating a Feedback-Rich Culture

Matt Wyckhouse 00:00
I had a nice bottle of wine, my wife and I were planning to celebrate the fundraise and starting the company, and got sued. We literally kept that bottle of wine, we kept trying to open it during the first, like, couple of years of the company, and then there was always just another punch in the face. And eventually, we realized you just have to celebrate even when you're getting punched in the face.

Callan Harrington 00:21
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. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of That Worked. This week, I'm joined by Matt Wyckhouse. Matt is the founder and CEO of Finite State. Finite State is the leading provider of software risk management solutions for connected devices and software supply chains. Prior to Finite State, Matt was the founder and CTO of Battelle's Cyber Innovations business unit, where he oversaw dozens of intelligence and national security programs. I love this conversation because Matt was brutally honest about the ups and downs of founding a company. We talked about the process of when to hire employees, how they've built a culture of feedback at Finite State, and we also dove into how to balance your ego as a founder. This is a constant challenge. You have to be confident in your decision-making when starting anything from scratch, but you also have to keep your ego in check as you scale and work with more and more people. And I loved hearing Matt's thoughts on this subject in particular. With that said, the part of the conversation that I loved the most was talking about building resilience. Because there's no way to sugarcoat it—you’re going to face many difficult situations when founding a company, and you have to build resilience to lead the company through those different moments. Matt gave a great breakdown around this, and I think it's a must-listen for any founder. So with that, let's get to the show. I'm excited to have you here. Of course, the fact that we grew up like two blocks from each other was a big motivation. But where I want to start this out is, tell me about these summer camps that you are running. I'm super curious to get the full download on these.

Matt Wyckhouse 02:36
First of all, thanks for having me. This is exciting. And always, it's great to meet someone who grew up a couple blocks away from me and wound up in the same area. So I spent a lot of my career working at Battelle, and if you don't know Battelle, Battelle is kind of mysterious, but they've been around for almost a hundred years. It's a nonprofit research and development company that does really cool, impressive work. A lot of that is for the national security agencies, intelligence community, DOD, law enforcement, as well as the Department of Energy. They do biotech, all sorts of crazy stuff happening in Columbus that, when I came here for school, I didn't even know was happening in Ohio State's backyard.

Callan Harrington 03:17
And nobody does. It's like the Area 51 of Ohio.

Matt Wyckhouse 03:21
Exactly! The summer camps that you're asking about. I wound up having the opportunity to be the CTO and the founder of the Cybersecurity Division at Battelle, which was doing research and development on really complicated cybersecurity topics. And one of those things we were working on was helping automotive companies secure their vehicles more because, at the time, cars were just starting to connect to networks. If you think of, like, back when there was OnStar, and it was like a big deal that you could do that in a car, or you had an infotainment system that could stream Spotify for the first time. That was, you know, like ten years ago, maybe. And a lot of the auto manufacturers weren't thinking about that being a cybersecurity issue, like a threat to a vehicle that someone can hack into it and do something. And so we tried to bring some awareness to the auto industry. A lot of their response was, "Can you help me install antivirus on the computers and the workstations in my office?" And when we were talking to the leadership, we were like, well, you need that, but you need to secure the cars. And so the way we approached that at Battelle was we took, you know, our mission of education, which was part of what Battelle does, and the cybersecurity mission, and we put it together, and a group in our business formed this summer camp that they called the Cyber Auto Challenge. They brought high school students who had never coded before and put them alongside auto industry executives and security teams, and spent a week teaching them how to hack cars. The first, the first one of these, the end result was multiple recalls for vehicles. The students were able to hack into cars in various ways. One manufacturer, not to be named, had to pause production because there were vulnerabilities that were found by high school students who previously didn't even know how to write software. And so it absolutely resonated that more security investment was required. And then the summer camp Cyber Audit Challenge, I think, continues on even to today. So now it's education, outreach, and awareness for the industry.

Callan Harrington 05:30
What an interesting idea, because one, okay, before we even jump into all these questions I have—well, the first question I have is, so you had to have been so confident that you could teach these high school kids that had no experience. Was that a matter of the vulnerabilities being just that obvious if you had minimal skills to be able to do it? Was that the thought process around that?

Matt Wyckhouse 05:56
So a lot of the security issues in the early days of what we call now the Internet of Things were that they were pretty obvious if you thought about it as a computer, but no one was thinking about it as a computer at the time. We had a lot of expertise working in national security, thinking about this for all sorts of very critical systems for a very long time, that we knew we wanted to raise awareness in some of these industries. And we knew very clearly that there were a lot of problems.

Callan Harrington 06:23
Yeah, I find that super interesting, and I want to talk more about some of these cyber threats, and how you respond to those, and what you're doing at Finite State. But before we go there, could you walk us through a little bit? So you were an intrapreneur at Battelle with this division, right? How did that form? How did that start? What did that look like?

Matt Wyckhouse 06:41
Yeah, so my journey was really interesting and very fun, and I'm very lucky, in retrospect, that I started by walking into the lobby at Battelle, this, you know, Area 51. And back then, when you would walk in, it literally looked like you were walking into, like, the Men in Black lobby. There was this metallic glow behind this big empty lobby with, like, two people sitting there waiting for you, to check you in, they take your phone. You know, it was a surreal experience that I literally will never forget, going in there the first time, interviewing, and then was hired pretty quickly to start working on projects. And my background was in computer science, and I started working in modeling and simulation, which, long story short, we had built video games for soldiers to train them on using the bomb disposal robots that were being used in Afghanistan and Iraq. And so I spent several years doing that work, which involved high-performance computing on graphics processors and other stuff. Because I was doing a lot of really complex computing, that got the attention of the people who were working in signals intelligence. So that started my journey into cyber intelligence, cybersecurity, signals intelligence. I built out kind of a portfolio of programs with different government sponsors, and at the same time, Battelle's board was looking at how Battelle didn't have enough of a cybersecurity offering across the company, and that that was an important mission for Battelle to be involved in. The leadership of Battelle said, okay, we're going to build a business in cybersecurity. Who knows about cybersecurity? And people pointed at me. And I was an engineer doing technical work, got a call from the global manager for the National Security Division, the head of that division one day while I was sitting in my lab, and he said, you know, "Hey, Matt, it's Steve, can you talk?" I'm like, why are you calling? And he said, "Look, you know, we want to start this new business unit, we're going to put you through this business training class, it's going to be a couple of weeks, we're going to have some other people take over the work that you're doing, we're going to send you to this accelerated MBA for a week or two, you're going to work with this other guy, you're going to launch a business." And I was very confused as to what was happening and agreed to it. It sounded like a great opportunity. And that's what we did. They sent me to this internal class that they had started to do, you know, market back strategy and building a business. I had never taken a business class in my entire life. And then I was paired up with someone who's still a very good friend of mine, David Fisher, who was the manager of the business unit on the business side. I was the technical leader, and we set out to build a startup inside of a ninety-year-old company. That's how it all started.

Callan Harrington 09:35
I think that intrapreneur role is such a cool role because you really get this opportunity to experiment, try things, with the safety of a very large company. One thing I want to circle back to on that; did anything that you learned in that two-week course have an impact on what you did, or was it more of a check-the-box?

Matt Wyckhouse 09:56
No, it really did. And that's primarily because I had no idea what I was doing. That was all I had to go on, was how do you do market segmentation, how do you think about value propositions? I mean, I still have a book on my shelf, I think, Value Proposition Design Business Model Canvas that I learned in that class for the first time. It was really the starting point of what it is, to even what intrapreneurship really is, but it helped to frame it, and it helped us to have a vocabulary to explain this to internal stakeholders who were funding us with a very large amount of money every year to build a business.

Callan Harrington 10:32
So you grew this up. And you made this into, as I understand it, this was one of the, one of the bigger business units within Battelle. Is that right?

Matt Wyckhouse 10:40
Yeah, it became a really large one. We started with about twenty people, and over about five years, when I left, we had about 160-170 people in the business unit, and I think it's much bigger than that today. We built facilities at the time, like it was right when the movie, The Social Network, had come out, and so some of what leaders knew about startups was from that movie. And so as we were designing spaces, we designed areas for, like, there to be a bar, but then it turned out we couldn't have alcohol on Battelle's campus. But it was supposed to be full of Red Bulls, so that we could fuel the hackers who were going to do stuff. You know, there were a lot of the cliché stuff happening at the time, but it actually let us recruit a very different type of employee into Battelle. Most of the people working at Battelle had advanced degrees, PhDs, hard science backgrounds, and we were able to bring in—we hired people who had no college degrees whatsoever, and put them to work on really interesting problems, and so it was effective in that sense. We also, like you said, had a lot of capital to use, and had the brand of Battelle to build out. And so we were able to grow it pretty large pretty quickly and make a really big impact on country and global cybersecurity.

Callan Harrington 12:00
Yeah, and you know, it's funny, I remember when Social Network came out. And I think the original, you know, the purpose of Social Network was to create this, in my opinion, to paint Facebook in this negative light. But behind the scenes, all the people that were in tech were like, this is awesome, I am beyond motivated. Maybe this says a lot more about me personally, but I watched that and was like, okay, I've got to start something. This is amazing.

Matt Wyckhouse 12:25
Yeah, that's absolutely true. It's kind of one of those things where, if you were in it, you can recognize that this is really a scary story in many ways. But if you were outside of it, it was inspirational. And that's because that's kind of the dichotomy of a startup, right? There are crazy things that happen, but also, it's exciting to be able to jump in and take those risks and go on that, that journey. You should avoid a lot of the, you know, major HR problems that they created in that movie, but I think that that was new and exciting. And it exposed startups to a large audience of people who had never really had any understanding of them.

Callan Harrington 13:06
Yeah, I completely agree, which is the perfect segue. So you built this up into a big unit, you're in this intrapreneur role, with the safety of a very large company that's thriving. Why start a company?

Matt Wyckhouse 13:20
So there are a couple of reasons. One, I think the best marketing-safe way to put this is, I did accomplish what I set out to do. We grew it, and it was successful, and it became a business unit. For me, I didn't want to run a business unit. The day-to-day of that is very different than the day-to-day of starting a new thing. And so it was about P&L, and getting certain contracts, and managing lots of people, in a way that was inside of a large organization. There are people who love that and are very, very good at it. That's not my passion. And what my passion was, as it turned out, I didn't know it at the time, my passion was about starting things, and exploring, and bringing innovative ideas, and bringing people together to go solve those problems. The other driver for me was, a lot of the work we did was in supporting intelligence operations, how to collect intelligence from things, which is an important function of our national security, so that we don't get surprised as a country, and every country does it. It's—intelligence is maybe like the second-oldest profession that exists. And so it's really important, that mission, I absolutely love it. The people that we worked with are some of the best people in the world, just great public servants who love what they're doing and sacrifice a lot to do it. However, from a kind of subjective standpoint, from my personal view, the country was over-investing in intelligence and under-investing in security. In particular, if we go back to those—to that story about cars, there were all of these new things that really were computers that were being connected to networks that we weren't, as a country, as even globally, thinking about as security risks at the right level. We weren't investing enough in that. And in some cases, we were holding back on what we knew. We weren't raising that awareness, like we did with the auto market, and that put us in a very vulnerable position, because companies that build products that have vulnerabilities in them sell them globally. So the US has the same stuff as our adversaries have, in many cases, and the same vulnerabilities, the same risks, that we were not paying enough attention to. And that was the problem I wanted to solve was, let's raise the bar everywhere, make our world more secure. That doesn't mean that, you know, intelligence professionals can't do their jobs—they'll still be able to—but we want to prevent random ransomware attacks and criminal organizations from being able to do really bad things to very critical stuff.

Callan Harrington 15:59
So what, for lack of a better term, what was the biggest punch in the face that you had from making the switch from intrapreneur to entrepreneur?

Matt Wyckhouse 16:07
So I have a lot of punches in the face. And the biggest one is where it becomes a question. There are a lot of things you don't expect to have to deal with. When you're founding a company, you think, I've got an idea, I'm gonna go build a team, I'm gonna go take that product to market. The reality is, I think, you have to be really resilient. You have to be able to wake up and take a punch in the face every day, and get back and do it again tomorrow. And I was talking to another founder, who's a friend of mine, and the way he phrased this really well, "you have to be willing to take punches in the face so much that you learn to like the taste of your own blood, as a founder, and then just keep doing it." That's the, quite honestly, the reality of, of startups. And I don't know any founder who's not really in that situation. There are a lot of punches to the face. So, you know, to answer your question, the first kind of big one was, I mean, the day I started the company, I was sued by someone who claimed to be a co-founder, and they weren't. So we, you know, had a big legal battle to deal with at the same time I was trying to hire, you know, the first set of employees. That's all public. That happened, you know, I'm not gonna go into a lot of the details of all of the legal side of it, but that was, I literally—I had a nice bottle of wine, my wife and I were planning to celebrate the fundraise and starting the company, and got sued. We literally kept that bottle of wine, we kept trying to open it during the first, like, couple years of the company, and then there was always just another punch in the face. And eventually, we realized you just have to celebrate even when you're getting punched in the face.

Callan Harrington 17:45
It's so, so true. Because like—or you never will. Or it's, you know, it's one of two things. It's either another punch in the face comes, so you've missed a moment, or you've hit the goal and the next goal comes, and it's like, I'll celebrate when I hit this goal, this will be a better goal to celebrate for, and then you never do it. I think that's such good advice. So one of the things I—without getting into those details, what I'm actually probably more curious about is how did you manage that personally, right? Because that can easily become a gigantic distraction and a stressful, a very stressful distraction? How did you—did you have to compartmentalize that? How did you go on from that?

Matt Wyckhouse 18:26
Absolutely. I mean, that's, I think it's a learned skill, is being able to compartmentalize those things. So right now, I'm focused on hiring. Right now, I'm focused on product. Right now, I'm focused on the sales call. And then next, I'm gonna go back to this other thing that I have to deal with, whether it's a legal thing, or HR thing, or something else that's hard, or a personal thing. You have to be able to switch back and forth. I think I was able to do that pretty—I was able to learn that pretty quickly. I think I had plenty of personal struggles growing up, and had lost my dad to cancer when I was growing up, had some family challenges, lost my sister, and I think kind of going through some of those hard things teaches you that skill a little bit, to be able to keep moving forward, even when you have hard things that are happening. And for me, yeah, it's very much it's about focus and knowing, like, that thing is going to be there when I'm done with this thing. I'm going to go do this, then I'm going to come back to that, and then I'm going to push it away and go back to the next thing.

Callan Harrington 19:30
Yeah, it's really just prioritizing those things that are absolutely the most important. It's not that that's going to go away. It's not like you're forgetting about it.

Matt Wyckhouse 19:37
Exactly.

Callan Harrington 19:37
It's just not right now, right? Being able to run a company, run a startup in general, is really very much about prioritization and knowing what needs to be done, what is very important, and what is very urgent, and what's in the box in both of those, and doing those first.

Callan Harrington 19:52
Do you have a process for that, and how you prioritize what you personally are putting your time towards?

Matt Wyckhouse 19:58
I would say it is not as much of a, you know, established process as it could be. I would call myself reasonably organized, not hyper-organized, as a person. I think there are a lot of founders who are just vigilant with process and scheduling and prioritization, I'm more in the middle, I do some things based on gut feel, knowing, hey, I know the business really well, I know what's happening, I know I need to go work on this presentation because it's so critical what the future of the business looks like. Or I know I have—really what it comes down to is, I know when I can delegate things and when I can't. And most of the time, at this point in the company, I delegate just about everything because I have a team. And if I find myself not being able to delegate a set of things, that means I need to go hire someone. So I think about it in those terms.

Callan Harrington 20:51
That's really interesting. So what I'm hearing you say is that you're reasonably organized, and you've gotten very good at delegating those tasks to your team that you have. And when you're taking on too many of these tasks, that's a leading indicator that you need to bring on somebody to take that on. Is that right? Did I hear that correctly?

Matt Wyckhouse 21:10
Exactly. And that's how my managers and leaders in the company also think, because that's a signal, right? If you're becoming a bottleneck, which is what that is, right? If you're a leader, and you're having to do all of this individual contributor work, you're not leading. So then you need an individual contributor that can do that work. There's a balance, right? You're—we're still a startup, and people wear a lot of hats and have to do a lot. But you know, when you're the bottleneck, it's pretty clear. And I never want to be the bottleneck in the company.

Callan Harrington 21:41
I'm curious, how do you know that you're the bottleneck? Does that come up through feedback from your team? Is that being self-aware? What does that look like?

Matt Wyckhouse 21:49
It's both of those things, but you know, we try to create a culture of transparency. It's really important. Feedback is just absolutely key to that. Feedback is the hardest thing to do well, and the most important thing to do well, in a company. We both grew up in the Midwest. We know that, like, everyone tends to be passive-aggressive. You can't do that inside of a company; you need to be direct. And so yeah, my team tells me when I'm the bottleneck, and I also will recognize it too, because I'll realize that, hey, I'm working, it's midnight, and I'm working on a thing. Why am I the one doing this right now? Who else could be doing this? Are they capable of doing that? Or are they just overloaded? And then we start thinking about how we need to continue to scale the organization.

Callan Harrington 22:21
From a feedback perspective, to dive into that one a little bit more, how do you make sure it happens? And one of the things I'm really curious about is, how do you make sure that continues to happen as the company scales?

Matt Wyckhouse 22:42
So, multiple things, but kind of one of the simplest, most obvious unlocks for us is we have a system and tool. We use Lattice to manage our team, from an HR standpoint. And it turns out that Finite State is one of the most active users of the feedback function in Lattice. Like, we talk to our rep at Lattice all the time about it. And so we have Slack channels where any—anytime someone gives, like, positive feedback to someone, it shows up and the company can see. And then we have channels for direct feedback written to each other, we have feedback that can go to someone's manager, so that when the manager's having their next one-on-one, they have it right at their fingertips, and they can talk with their direct report about that. That's a piece of it. The other piece of it is culture. And culture is ambiguous and squishy, but it's by leading by example. And that cascades down through the whole organization. I need to do it. I have to—everyone that works for me has to know that they can give me feedback directly, and that I want it, and I'm not going to bite their head off. I'm going to try to understand it, if I don't immediately just agree with it. I have to show that I'm open to feedback, and then they can reciprocate with me, and then it continues on throughout the organization.

Callan Harrington 24:04
So you have systems in place to make sure that that happens, and to monitor, and actually what I'm hearing you say is really to reward it and make sure that the people that are doing that are recognized for doing that, which really starts to cement it within the culture. And then number two, it starts with you as the CEO. You have to be a good representation of taking feedback well and making sure you get it. Is that—is that essentially it?

Matt Wyckhouse 24:33
Yeah, it is. And I will say a lot of the journey of being a founder, from a psychological standpoint, is about stripping away your ego. You have to—especially, you're getting punched in the face all the time. You have to have enough ego to believe that you can go conquer, and go do the thing that you're setting out to do, and startups by their nature are hard. It's always David and Goliath with startups. That's the reason they exist, right? We need to be able to outmaneuver, outflank, out-innovate our competitors, and there has to be a market with competitors. Otherwise, it's not worth doing, most likely. So it's always hard. You will always have to have confidence. But getting rid of your ego is important. One of the things I've struggled with personally is, I deliver messages to the company, I will explain the direction we're going and the strategy that we need to execute, and there have been times where I felt like, I have explained this, like, over and over and over, how is this not landing? And instead of saying, no one's listening to me, I'm thinking, why is my messaging not working the right way? How do I need to change my messaging in order to do that? And that's the getting rid of the ego part of being a leader.

Callan Harrington 25:48
Yeah, it's taking the accountability for it, as opposed to saying, they just don't get it. Because it's funny, right? When you think about it. How many employees does Finite State have right now?

Matt Wyckhouse 25:57
We're at about sixty right now.

Callan Harrington 25:59
Okay, so if sixty people don't get it, one person gets it, it's more, okay, there's got to be something that I'm doing here at this point. I could totally empathize with that. How do you strike the balance, right? Because right, like, that is one of the things, especially with something that you're doing, you know, you're—you have what I would call a disruptive technology, and by nature, you have to do that because you also sell to very large enterprises. So you have to have a level of extremely high confidence that, if they spend a lot of money on this product, it's going to work. How do you strike that balance of when to use the ego and when not to?

Matt Wyckhouse 26:34
I think it's that you have to get to a point. And I will start by saying every phase of a startup is very different. In the very early stages, when it's you and a couple of people, like, your ego needs to be strong, like you need to have thick skin and confidence. And when you're selling your product in those early days, you're oftentimes selling yourself as an expert, your team as an expert. And so it's different than now. So now, we're a much larger company, we've raised a lot of capital, we are a startup, but we're more established in the market. I'm not going in selling Matt Wyckhouse. And that's—I think that's the distinction. It's not about me, it's about the company. It's about our product. There's a book that talks about this, Good to Great, and there's a concept of the Window and the Mirror. I don't know if you remember that, but great leaders look in the mirror when things are going wrong. And they look out the window when things are going—right? I think that's the concept that I try to adhere to as much as possible.

Callan Harrington 27:38
It's a great example. You brought up something I'd love to dive into. You said that there's this transition where it went from Matt Wyckhouse to Finite State. What was that transition for you? When did that happen?

Matt Wyckhouse 27:52
So it probably happened around our Series A, as a company. So we started with a large seed round. Drive Capital led our first round. We raised seven million dollars on a concept of a team and a PowerPoint deck. And we're very lucky to be able to do that. When we got into our Series A, which was led by another fund called Energy Impact Partners, we started scaling out, our product started to land in more companies, the team started getting bigger, and we started building more of a brand somewhat through them because they helped us in the energy sector, because they've been incredibly supportive and helpful on go-to-market. I think as I started adding new leaders to the company, as it went from everyone reports to Matt, to, alright, we have teams with leaders, that's when a lot of that dynamic started to change.

Callan Harrington 28:48
Yeah, how was that transition for you personally? How did you make that transition is probably what I want to ask?

Matt Wyckhouse 28:53
So, it took some time. It was bumpy. When I look back at how I was as a leader at the beginning of this journey versus how I am now, it's been very transformational. And it has to be. It has to change. Because running a seed-stage company, versus an A-stage company, versus a B-plus company, versus a public company, are completely different things. They are completely different companies. And when I started, it was about, like, actually overseeing the code that our team was writing, the products that we were shipping. It was about hiring, making sure that we have really great people, but mostly from our own network. And it was using a consultant to do marketing, and sales were just also me too, right? It was founder-led. It's a hub-and-spoke model at the beginning. You then—you can't scale that. It doesn't work after a certain point, after maybe, I mean honestly, eight to ten people. Hub-and-spoke means you are that bottleneck, no matter what, and can't do it. And so my transition was trying to bring in leaders and enable them. Personally, I struggled with being, like, very, like, too hands-off, saying, We're gonna hire a great leader, they're gonna know what to do, they don't need a lot of my help. They didn't ask for a lot of my help, and then that not—you know, then we didn't have great alignment. Versus being too hands-on, where I felt like I was micromanaging things, finding that sweet spot, to me, it came down to building a leadership team and culture in that team. We actually brought in help, I brought in an executive coach to help with that. And we started thinking a lot more about the soft skills of leadership, being able to talk to each other, how we talk to each other, how we give each other feedback. We actually would take a step back from the business once a month and work on the business, not in the business. So we would actually talk about, how are we communicating? What is our cadence? How are we planning? How are we interacting with each other as a team? That's when it really changed.

Callan Harrington 31:01
When you got that executive coach, was there an instant buy-in from the team? Or what did that process look like? I think it's a great way to go. And when we've done this in the past, it's had a big impact. But I'd love to hear that experience from you.

Matt Wyckhouse 31:14
Honestly, yes, we worked with someone who came in and was—immediately took charge. And it worked pretty well. Not everyone was completely bought in. You will find it's uncomfortable for humans, for leaders, for anyone, to sit there and talk about, like, feelings in front of each other.

Callan Harrington 31:35
Yeah.

Matt Wyckhouse 31:35
No one wants to do it.

Callan Harrington 31:37
Yeah.

Matt Wyckhouse 31:37
And it's also critical to have transparency in a culture that works really well, is to be willing to be vulnerable with each other. That's how you build trust, to be willing to talk about the actual issues at hand. That's how we get stuff done. But bringing someone in who is an expert on doing that did make a significant impact very quickly. It also gave me someone to give me feedback and coaching that I needed as a leader that, at the time, my team didn't know how to give me that feedback. And in facilitating that made all the difference, and it happened actually, very quickly.

Callan Harrington 32:12
Out of curiosity, do you still use a coach? Like, for yourself personally, do you still use a coach?

Matt Wyckhouse 32:16
So, not today. We had a great coach. And I'll give him props, Scott Brickell, who's been amazing. We wound up—so, you know, part of the fun of running a startup over the last few years was going through the macro downturn that was happening as well, so we had to cut budget. We had been working with Scott for a couple of years at that point, and we said, hey, we've got to actually just take a step back and focus on execution a little bit more for a bit. We haven't reengaged the coach yet. Part of the reason for that is we actually have an internal resource, our VP of people, who also is, you know, she has a psychology degree, she's focused on this. So we've kind of elevated her into a role that allows her to do a lot of the coaching throughout the company. And so we also push that down into all of our managers and leaders in the company, even the individual contributors in the company, will do some of this work on a periodic basis too.

Callan Harrington 33:10
I think it's so helpful, especially as the founder and CEO. I just hired one, and I've worked with them in the past at different companies in a similar fashion to what you're describing. I hired one personally, and already it's had a significant difference. It's only been a month in, and so I think it's such a great route to go. So Matt, one of the things I'm curious to ask is, you know, you mentioned, so you guys have had success, you've raised a good amount of money, you've got some gigantic clients that are using the platform. And you mentioned that you had to transition, you had to transform yourself, from those early stages to where you are now. What are those things that you needed to learn to be successful in your role today?

Matt Wyckhouse 33:49
Yeah, I would say, again, I think I said it earlier, the number one thing is resilience. And one of the ways this was phrased to me in the past is, running a startup is an exercise in knowing which fires you need to just leave burning. That's kind of resilience and focus, the panic, right? It's, oh my god, what are we going to do, this customer saying, you know, isn't happy about something? All of our customers have always been so happy about everything, like, it's all hands on deck; go! But we've got to solve this problem. And then you realize when you do that, like, oh, we let all that other stuff go, now we just created another fire. Now we've gotta go over to that one, and you can't operate that way. It's about just, like, trying to stay calm during chaos. And that is 100% a learned skill anyone can learn. If you listen to, you know, Huberman, there's a part of your brain that actually, the more you go through difficult times, gets reinforced so that you can maintain your cool a little bit. That's one of the biggest skills is just learning how to operate through chaos at times, or, and yeah, it's a challenge. You just have to do it and know that it's going to be okay. Even when you have near-death experiences, which we've had as a company, you get through it, and it makes you stronger, literally, and you just move forward.

Callan Harrington 35:12
It is funny. You know, everyone feels like it's the end of the world, and then it happens, it's like, okay, we're still, like, we're fine. Nobody died. We're fine. We're continuing to move on. And yeah, I listen to way too much Huberman. So, Matt, last question I have for you here is, if you can have a conversation with your younger self, age totally up to you, what would that conversation be? What advice would you give them?

Matt Wyckhouse 35:36
Oh, you know, I honestly feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be right now. My advice to my younger self would be all about just hanging in there. And the more you know, it's gonna be okay, it—my journey has not been an easy one by any stretch, but it's also a lot easier than a lot of other people in the world who've had much worse stuff. And I'm in a position where I'm incredibly privileged now, and I'm grateful for that. And if there's one thing, one piece of advice that I don't think I was given young enough, early enough, is more important than what you know, is who you know, and the relationships that you have. And that's the thing that I think I learned too late in life, because I was so focused on the technical side of stuff.

Callan Harrington 36:21
Yeah, it's funny. I always think about the times in my career when they stagnate. Am I networking? Am I meeting with people? Am I deepening relationships with those people that are important to me? And when that's not happening, I'm stagnating. So I love all of that. I think that's great advice. Matt, it's been a lot of fun. Thanks for coming on today.

Matt Wyckhouse 36:38
Thanks so much. This has been great. Really appreciate you having me on today.

Callan Harrington 36:42
Absolutely. I hope you enjoyed Matt and I's conversation. I loved hearing Matt's stories about resilience, and I think resilience is critical for any founder. If you want to learn more about Matt, you can find him on LinkedIn in the show notes. Also, if you liked this episode, you can find me on LinkedIn to let me know. And if you really want to support the show, a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify is very much appreciated. Thanks for listening, everybody, and I'll see you next week.