Improving founders’ mental health | Matus Maar, Talis Capital
This week, Lloyd delves into entrepreneurship and mental health as he welcomes Talis Capital’s Matus Maar.
As Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Talis, Matus has overseen early-stage investments in such FinTech giants as Onfido, iwoca, PriceFX and many more. Talis is also a leader in mental health amongst VCs. Recently, the firm announced a new initiative that offers mental health support to founders at its portfolio companies.
On this episode, Matus tells Lloyd why Talis is such an unconventional fund, why the company has focused largely on infrastructure investments, and why he avoids investments in consumer P2P lenders. Then they discuss the mental health burdens of founding a company, why support networks are critical and how the pandemic has affected employers’ mental health.
Listen here:
Learn more about Talis Capital’s mental health initiative
Episode Highlights:
08:11: How Talis finds cutting edge infrastructure companies
16:12: Why Talis is an unconventional fund
19:15: What Matus loves about venture capital
25:12: Why Talis doesn’t invest in consumer P2P lenders
31:46: The mental health burdens of starting a company
38:32: COVID-19 and mental health
46:40: Why success and unhealthy behaviour are not synonymous
50:09: Lloyd’s advice for founders
54:10: The importance of self-care for founders
Transcript
Lloyd Wahed
Welcome onto Searching for Mana Matus Maar.
Matus Maar
Thank you, Lloyd. Glad to be here. Thanks for the invite.
Lloyd Wahed
Absolute pleasure. Fuller introduction – Matus is the co-founder and managing partner at Talis Capital. They are a venture capital firm that currently deploys circa $100 million per year. Matus has lead Talis deals within FinTech innovators, like Onfido and iwoca, and many more. Recently Matus has spearheaded an initiative to provide mental health support for founders at Talis portfolio companies. We want to take the chance to really deep dive into that topic. It’s something that is very dear to my own heart as somebody who’s founded a search business, who is also trying to promote wellness in environments that traditionally can be very competitive and demanding. Hence, the skulls in our logo are actually a play so I can’t wait to deep dive into that. Matus, it would be really kind of yours if you could just talk to the audience about what’s going on right now with you and Talis Capital.
Matus Maar
Sure, all VCs this year was very busy. It was obviously a turbulent year like for everyone. The Q2 was very challenging because everything was new, COVID was new, no one really knew what was happening the markets were tanking at some point. We come out of this really weird year with markets in the record highs, M&A activity, sparks IPOs, multiple evaluations, everything in sky-high. I think everyone realized this year that obviously technology is the element that almost in any business will power growth and competitiveness. It was going that way but every time we have this kind of years in history, it obviously accelerates all of the things that were clearly going to happen but instead of five years it just happened in a year, which is very interesting because obviously, your thesis or our thesis, were that we’re going to see these things happen in two, three, four years time. It just suddenly happened now, completely new companies have been set up and we can talk about it in terms of FinTech. You see all of these things like remote teams everywhere, what does that mean for their payrolls and paying them and getting their taxes correctly, etc. Following regulations in those countries where you’re suddenly not bound by geography, which was kind of happening in engineering, but fairly new into all the other departments of companies now companies are realizing that they can be remote within London or within the UK or within their own country. Suddenly the market for talents opens up almost to anywhere which obviously in your own line of work you must see. We see a lot of regulation, tech, new companies coming up and FinTech companies that are trying to solve this and it’s interesting. Things accelerate and things change so it’s for everyone and the mental health. I think everyone somehow is suffering from this year in their own way, some more some less, in various ways. Obviously, founders and business leaders are usually the ones, who even in the normal year, find themselves much more prone to mental health issues and this only just makes it worse. It’s something that we think about a lot more. I guess that’s why we’re talking about it today. In terms of Talis, we had our busiest year ever, we deployed, I think, over $110 million this year, a lot of opportunities. It’s a really busy time and it’s exciting time because there’s a bunch of articles and things people call great stagnation what we were in the last, let’s say, ten, even fifteen years by a lot of adjusted metrics, the GDP growth has not really been exciting, not that much innovation really happened. I think that’s going to accelerate now, especially when, suddenly, pretty much everyone has an Apple Pay now. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what demographic you are or people who did not want to get an Ocado or waitrose.com, or whatever food shop accounts because they like to go local, they had to get those accounts. Once you use these things, it’s not going to go away, even if the pandemic goes away, you will stick so I think it’s the most significant change in how we live our lives and how we work in very long time, probably the largest in my lifetime. It’s going to be interesting few years.
Lloyd Wahed
When you have so much opportunity, and this happens in our world as well, I refer to it as looking across the ocean and if you do that it can become overwhelming, stressful. The skillset is really not looking for what to necessarily say yes to. How to eliminate and focus on some clarity where you feel you have an advantage of opportunity? I look at the portfolio businesses, and I know you’re at a stage now where there will be different strategies, but how are you clarifying that as we’ve had, what, as you say, is two, three, five years of progress compacted into a year? Of course, you’ve taken stock, like you say, you’ve been deep thinking, you’ve been reading, you’ve been trying to evaluate. Where’s that strategy at the moment?
Matus Maar
We are generalist funds, but what we do a lot and maybe more than other funds is each year or every couple of years, or whenever the timing is right, we really deep dive in certain we call them CC. We have kind of three pillars in terms of how we research. First thesis, which is been around since we started, we call it tech infrastructure. We were always more interested in investing, let’s say in Onfido, that powers all the near banks than picking which near bank is going to be a winner or not. It’s been clear to us, you know that there will be newer banks and they’ll they will become big, but at the same time, the old banks will want to catch up with all the tools that the new banks are using so everyone, the whole banking sector will need remote ID verification, and that’s on top of other industries. Hence, we would go and try to find an Onfido rather than are we going to invest in Monzo or Revolut, etc. Although obviously those turn out to be really good investments we are just more interested in the tech infrastructure that powers these things. That goes through not just FinTech. Our third thesis before skipping the second, our third thesis is on the new generations because Gen Z, the oldest Gen Zers are, I think, twenty-four, twenty-five now, they’re working, they’re really becoming and every time that happens, that generation becomes really influential. We’re looking at things like gaming but we’re not going to look at gaming in terms of we’re going to invest in the studio and that hopefully going to develop the best new game. We’re looking again, from the tech infrastructure piece. We have made a couple of investments recently which are not announced yet so I can’t tell you what they are but they are more powering the immerse worlds that gaming now needs. Gaming needs fastest speed of everything, everything is huge and these are multiplayer worlds but they have to have no latency and everything has to happen fast. That’s why you see, even in the music and video, etc., a lot of the platforms that are very original design for gaming platforms so we are looking more and more on the infrastructure. We don’t care which game is going to win, but we like the infrastructure layer. That’s what we were looking in cybersecurity with our investment dark trace. We think construction is the next big thing to be disrupted. Again, we like the tech infrastructure that’s going to come in in the construction. The third pillar is how we live our lives, how we work, and under that obviously, there’s various things that can go to healthcare, and healthcare tech, wellness is part of that, but also financial management, education, EdTech is obviously very interesting. Again, something that has been really accelerated by this year, because suddenly all education or most of it had to go remote, 90% of students worldwide are receiving education remotely through COVID-19. That’s huge. If you look at whatever the number was before, it’s obviously a huge jump and once people get used to something, it’s just going to stick so it’s obviously a huge area. We have those three pillars, and then each year, there might be like two, three under that thesis at stake and with them we particularly believe in some things within that and we research that a lot. Within FinTech we are really looking at the regulation state at the moment, for example, we’re in the thesis of how we live our lives, which also cross borders to the new generations. We have added sustainability takes a sustained take, we believe that next ten years is going to be really big for sustainability. It’s something that the new generations are really influencing the older generations do really care about. It’s something that the companies that will not adopt sustainability as part of them, as part of how they do business, they’re going to really suffer because the ones that will have that incorporated they will be supported by governments, they will get their planning permissions, which they need some faster, everything will happen much easier for them. This is the time where technology first time comes in and allows investments in sustainability or sustained tech that are going to give you venture style returns. Before that, impact investing was always hindered by not returning the same as other areas and people saw it more as a charity. We believe technology is allowing these companies with core sustainability at their core to really give you huge returns. We have investment in something called Ÿnsect in France, which has built the largest insect-plant that creates protein for food industry, pet industry and the feed material for all fish farms etc. Amazing because they’re certified B Corp, they absorb more carbon than they create, they clearly are helping the fishing out of oceans and the ocean sustainability but it’s actually amazing business. The business model is great, the margins are great, this is what’s happening now. That can happen because inside the plant, when they’re feeding the insect, a lot of this is through robotics, a lot of it is through machine learning and computer vision. They can see the whole colony, the motility of it every time it’s being fed so they know if there is a disease they can catch these things. Only technology is allowing it to work. Otherwise ten years ago this would not be possible.
Lloyd Wahed
When you’re talking about the pillars and how you look at investments I find it so fascinating because in essence, this must have come from you and your few founders a decade ago or so. What I’d really like the audience to understand is – what the journey was for you? I think it’s three others, I think there’s four of you. Is that right? How did you guys go through the process of establishing? You had the same ethics and philosophy but you were bringing a bunch of different attributes so the firm will be successful.
Matus Maar
We are a little bit unconventional fund anyway, for example, we have annual vintage funds, rather than just usual three, four years investment cycles. That’s for various reasons. Our LPs are ultra-high net worth business leaders or entrepreneurs, we do that on purpose, we have about thirty-five of them, super successful people from various industries who can write and write institutional size checks to us but maybe they don’t necessarily want to do that on three-year or four-year cycle. It works really well for us as well because we create a platform where every time we invest in a company we think how can that company benefit from some of our LPs and then we plug them in. We let the series A for doctraise. The first thing we did was get them to our LPs companies that led into multi-million dollar contracts with those companies so the series B that summit led for was four months after our series A because suddenly the AR are doubled, etc. so we try to think how we can create this opportunity. We have thirty-five of them now. There’s various industries that they come from, there’s always at least three or four or five that are somehow really relevant to particular company we’re investing in. On top of that, the way we started back in 2009, it wasn’t necessarily the setup that we are now. Originally, the other two co-founders, Bob and Rohini Finch, Bob was the largest shareholder and very involved in a trading company before. They originally did not know what the thesis are going to be. They just knew that they want to invest their wealth in private companies and we came in, me and Wassily, and we really first had to educate Bob and Rohini on technology. This is 2009 and 2010. This is not like now when everyone gets it that this is the next thing. They were still hangover from dot-com boom, the iPhone only just came out, a lot of these things were new and it wasn’t clear like now to everyone that technology is the one that’s going to change everything. We said we want to invest for a long term, we are not here to go and buy public stocks and trade them. Even though we did capital of private equity style investments, we’re not we did not want to do with private equity because that is basically flipping assets. You buy assets, you can do some things there, you bring some operating partners, you change management, you squeeze more EBITDA and then you trade the same multiple, three, four years later, and you hopefully made three times your money. To me, it’s just to make money. It’s financial engineering to me. What I love about venture capital is that you are from very early stage with the people whose idea it was, who I knew going to be with them for a long time, you’re going to go through the ups and downs. It’s never a straight line, hardly ever, the business model that succeeds is the one that at the beginning was presented and that’s fine, because it’s a lot more in what you’re doing, finding the talent that you see something in, that they will eventually succeed and that’s exciting. We were fortunate enough or lucky enough that we have really great track records, good returns, it’s great but it’s also a lot of fun. It’s a long answer how we started but it was a combination of people who are super successful business people, but not in the technology space but fair play to them, they got it really quickly. From 2011/2012 all we do is just focusing on technology investments. They’d be great supporters of us and they’re part of the investment committee, because as I said, even if you don’t come from technology background, you don’t need to be an engineer but if you’re a super successful businessperson, you will ask the right questions, in the end of the day, these are still businesses. Just because they are powered by tech infrastructure or they’re doing something more digital than physical it does not mean that you don’t ask the same questions. That’s how we got together and the very first theme that we had is the tech infrastructure theme because back in 2011, and 2012, we saw certain things like the phase when near banks starting to popping up more. This was 2012 when I woke up. It was one of our first seed investments, obviously super successful. The founders are super clever. We love them from beginning. They had the perfect combination of understanding FinTech and coming from big banks, but also understanding how to write algorithms, the two co-founders, one is more commercial, one is more technical so it was perfect combination. We believe that what’s going to happen to the FinTech space is going to get digitalized. We’re not talking about AI and ML as much. Back then it was still big data, which probably is actually more accurate for most of the people who claim ML anyway but it’s looking at data, writing algorithms and through that, I worked out being able to in seconds, decide who we were going to lend to or not. When I first started, it was meant for Amazon and eBay and online sellers, where we got an API and you can just analyze is this company or this person, top seller on Amazon, and that kind of things. Obviously, they evolved enormously where it is now, but that’s how it started.
Lloyd Wahed
Matus, if I think about ten years ago, or several, when I walk around, peer to peer lenders, or SME credit providers, regardless of what the website might have said, or people would set a pitch. Their decision science team would be a few people who was very discretionary, of how to lend. The difference now is the majority of individuals in those businesses, as you say, have AI or ML capabilities. Most people would be competent with Python and R and SQL and so on and so forth. We’ve really seen the makeup of the individuals become technology and then finance in preference to finance and then digital. You’re looking into the future, of course. How do you suspect it evolves even further? What are the technology trends that we will look to see in it? I’m just going to ask do you suspect that’s moving onto the blockchain?
Matus Maar
Before I get to the blockchain, I think the reason why we also invest in iwoca, and we’re looking more B2B lending rather than B2C is that whichever way we looked at the consumer lending, we were just not comfortable with the ethics of it. I still think that is the case and we’re not comfortable with that.
Lloyd Wahed
If I just interject, there’s some headline businesses right now who are in buy-now-pay-later business propositions, you wouldn’t look at those types of businesses.
Matus Maar
Now in the consumer side, we’re just not comfortable with that and I know there is a lot of new business models, which came up in the last five years, some of them get paid today what you earn already this month. That’s not necessarily lending, because that’s your money that you already earned which kind of makes sense for some gig economy. These days people who are delivering your food or driving you, etc. they might have three, four different jobs and it’s great if they can have it consolidated, and if they want to get paid not whenever the company decides to pay, etc. make sense. However, if you need to get paid on the 25th day of the month, or 20th, instead of the last day of the month, it’s probably going to leave you with some difficulty when you have to then pay rent on the first of the next month. So it’s not something that we find, I’m not saying it’s unethical, we’re just not comfortable with that. We’re not necessarily want to do that whilst with B2B lending, lending to businesses, especially we like the SME space because this will be businesses that might be doing well but how banks would look at them traditionally, was just not suitable. Show me your last three years of profitable accounts. Who could do that when you just started buying and selling via Alibaba or something three months ago, yet, you might have great business model and that’s why through data and things, you can really get it much quicker. I think there was the arbitrage. Banks were so behind in SME lending and B2B lending, not using any of these tools, that there was a huge, huge space.
Lloyd Wahed
The trend I’m looking at and now I believe it’s a fundamental trend or not a fad that we move onto blockchain and then we build applications on them. This is obviously happening on Ethereum and Polkadot already, which look really exciting. Looks like we’ve got the big institutions into bitcoin. And if you just think how there can be an evolution, I suspect, definitely is it’s potentially one of the biggest trends of the next ten years. That’s my view. I wondered what yours is? What you’re looking at?
Matus Maar
I think we don’t have that as a thesis, let’s say crypto but quite a few of our companies are using distributed ledger technology for parts what they do. Most of it is for keeping things secure. Onfido does use bits and pieces on that. Quite few companies in this space use directly or indirectly or part of what the solution is to use distributed ledgers. I think that’s going to continue. I think it’s a very good technology for security.
Lloyd Wahed
You yourself have founded a couple of companies so perhaps if we ask you, in your experience, how taxing can that process be on a founders mental health?
Matus Maar
I’ve been very lucky that even the companies that I have co-founded or been involved since beginning I am never the person who is the CEO. I am not the one who’s everything’s on that person shoulders but what I’m trying to do with pirate.com or Threads Styling, or recently, a sneaker platform that we launched called Laced. These were founded by people who run them, who absolutely understand the product-market fit and they have something special, they have special vision but they’re first time founders. What I found before is that if you’re first time founder, you don’t necessarily know what the journey will look like. And even though people will tell you it’s going to be the hardest thing you have done ever people think it will be great, it’ll be fun etc. What I’m trying to do and my role there is A – being venture capitalist, help them when you fundraise, how, what is a good timing, all of those things to being on the other side of the table. I try to help with when to do hiring as well, when do you start looking for CPO or CFO or where is more appropriate to. For next couple years, we only maybe need a tech lead. I just help in how it really works and it’s working with great search firms like you guys. That’s what I’m trying to connect the founders with and we work on that which is super important. You can make a really great hire, but if the timing’s too early, it’s not going to work out. If you leave it too late, you are going to suffer. So these kind of more like what to do at the right timings. At the same time, what I try to do is to be there when there is challenges, which can lead to obviously mental health because sometimes you do everything right and it’s just a macro or you’re just unlucky. It is challenging. It is what people don’t realize. I think this is the hardest bit about being a founder. Most founders I see they start something because they have a great idea, great vision but as you grow the company, you have more and more employees if things are not going well or if you’re worried that things are not going to go well. It’s never about the money. It’s not like, “Oh my God, I’m going to lose money” because founders eat last anyway. They usually pay themselves the last, everyone else gets the market salaries before they do etc. so it’s not about the money but they start realizing, “Well, I’ve got fifty people and I really care about them”. And it becomes, I know it’s cliche, but it’s kind of like a family. But most of them do really take the burden on and then they realize it’s really lonely at the top. I can’t be the one who’s going to show any signs of weaknesses or worry. I have to be the one who will tell everyone it doesn’t matter, it’s going to be fine. I have to do it really convincingly because if it’s just not convincingly people can tell. They are in this mode, that everything is fine all the time, go go go, positiveness, etc. And they don’t necessarily have anyone and what we are trying to change at Talis is that we realized they don’t even have us as their VCs or board members to talk about, because in front of us, they have to be again the same, they have to go, “Everything’s fine, everything’s great.” Yes, I know this quarter does not look good so what we’re trying to do, more and more is, there are board meetings but that’s not important to me necessarily, I’m much more likely to catch up every couple of weeks or once a month, one on one with the founders and just be like, “Okay, just don’t give me some graphs on how the performance is going, just what’s worrying you? What’s really happening”? And just trying to encourage the founders to be true and real and I always say to them, “Look, I can’t take the investment back, I’m not going to disinvest and we are together on average, I think it’s 7.3 years from series A to exit. It’s a long journey together. Nothing is going to change if you’re going to tell me really how you feel and I know that it’s not always going to be great. You can tell me and maybe I can help”. Or maybe I can just listen because sometimes just listening is what sometimes people need who are suffering at that moment so consciously we’re trying to do that, consciously I’m trying to do that. Consciously I’m trying to go on less boards, to be honest with you because once you are a director on the board that comes with fiduciary duties, you have done fiduciary duty to the company and that goes in the order of company creditors, company employees, not even to other investors, not even to the founders. You just might become conflicting, if you actually really want to just help the founder to succeed and you are obviously you. We always have a fiduciary duty to our own investors, but that’s easier to overcome as a conflict, because I can argue that being close to the founder and just really helping them and is always going to, even eventually going to make that more likely to succeed.
Lloyd Wahed
Absolutely love the mentality of what you talk there. I’m a second-time founder, and not to make it too much about myself, but on the first company, there was a moment where a couple of years into it, I literally collapsed, physically, tried to open the door and just collapsed. It was because the make-up of the team that I brought in, was incredibly junior, also. I had to project this extreme confidence the whole time and actually things were going really well. Nonetheless, there was never a soundboard that I felt gave me the support that you’re talking about, because the individuals who are peers or investors, clearly I understood that behind the smile, they were looking for the graphs, and this is awesome that you have to project so at that moment, I was like, “Okay, I need to take this really seriously”. I can’t before going to bed be reading business strategy books the whole time. I have to build this support network around myself so I went and found a bunch of people who didn’t really have an invested interest in the business doing well apart from feeling like they could give me some support. That was a seminal moment in the difference of how my stress levels when I was operating in the business. I’m really lucky this time round that there’s a bunch of people in the business, who are certainly my seniors, peers, and juniors. I’ve just learned to be a lot more straight with people. Of course, you’ve got to caveat anything, when you’re catching that it’s not going quite how you wanted to. But I’m comfortable to do that as long as I feel like the business board as much as possible, are enjoying their work and feel like they’re on a mission that’s greater than them, then we’re all in it together. This is something that I slowly learned from founding a second-time. What I’ve been seeing over the last year, during the pandemic, if somebody’s fragile, it’s like a car might be able to go at thirty miles an hour and if suddenly, if you race it 100, it can break down. I feel like the pandemic has done that for a lot of people’s mental states, and maybe no place more than high growth founders. I wonder how you and Talis have seen the change in what you’re doing about different levels of supporting founders and your community through the time.
Matus Maar
It’s really difficult to replicate strategizing, being just talking, it’s just very different. It’s just hard. Sometimes when you in the same space, just one remark there. You can have impromptu conversations without scheduling them. That is something that I can see that even people who are doing well as their companies and revenues are doing really well, they have still struggled in the pandemic. What we have done, and we talked about is, it actually came up on one of our team meetings in early last year, in early stages of the pandemic. We were saying to ourselves, we are suffering ourselves, and we’re just a small team because the beauty of venture is that you don’t need that many people. That’s the beauty of it. We’re a small team, we’re about 15 people, but we are struggling. Our portfolio companies, their founders, they must struggle so much more. It must be really hard. What can we do to help them? We came up like, “Well, why don’t we ask them?”, rather than just guessing. So we went to all of our founders and all our business leaders and we asked them and overwhelming top ask was they would like to know how to spot that other people, my peers, or even themselves are suffering. Just to detect it first because sometimes you have every half an hour new zoom, blah, blah, blah. Again, you’re not in the room with someone, you’re not really getting the subtle signals. How do you get it? That was quite eye-opening for us, it was by far, the most uncertain kind of question but that’s what people want, and how to then deal with it. Because the founders not necessarily had a training how to detect it with someone, the colleague or someone, what should you do? So we’ve partnered up with a company that helps us run these workshops. We have done series of workshops for our founders they were paid by us, free to obviously join for the founders, and even the executives from the companies. I think it was really great. I mean, a lot of great feedback, I was almost, I don’t know why but surprised. Almost all of our companies came on this workshops, they found it really interesting and then we were like, “Okay, this is really good”. We got really great feedback, people really loved it. What can we do next?’ Obviously, now, let’s say they have learned how to detect it, how to little bit talk to people who are suffering or deal with a little bit, but how can we give them more training and more tools even for themselves and for their colleagues to deal with mental health. We have not launched the second phase yet, but we are about to, which will again, be covered by us. We’re teaming up with a different provider. It’s going to go a lot deeper. It’s going to teach various things our founders and executives. There’s couple of Americans, I don’t think we have seen anything like in the US, that there is a funding in Europe. In the US, there is a fund called Alpha Bridge, which has created this portal or whatever you want to call it a tool or a program for the founders. I think they call it Atlas, which is really interesting. We have looked at that as almost something that resonates most with us because everyone else provides, and historically provided to their business leaders, how do you become better leader in terms of your performance, your management skills and things like this, but not necessarily how do you deal better with the mental health issues. There is some good statistics, you can go on Alpha Bridge website, they have done a really great job to do that. They have done a lot of surveys, and I think 50% of entrepreneurs are likely to report on themselves mental health condition. That’s huge notice.
Lloyd Wahed
I wonder if part of what makes a majority or a portion of successful entrepreneurs, or quite frankly, business individuals, I don’t want to say is having a mental health issue, but actually, is having some ability to be an outsider have an outside perspective? I’m talking of statistics if you look at in the 80s, the individuals who are at the top of investment banks, when surveyed, came out relatively high on the psychopath test. This is because, at that point, some of the traits that would allow you to get to the top and succeed were Machiavellian, were ruthless and meant turn up early finish late, big effort, and quite frankly cutthroat attitude in business. If we look at somebody, as an example that everybody would know, like a Steve Jobs, there’s this Marmite reaction to him which is either, “Well, the products are fantastic, I really love them” or, “He’s a complete bastard and incredibly ruthless” and these two things made him a great innovator and a perfectionist. It’s tough for you because everything that you’ve said on the show so far I know comes from wanting to do the right thing. I can tell with the way that you talked about consumer credit lending, and so on and so forth. That’s awesome but this is tough because a lot of the traits that you might be looking for and what you deem, as a successful founder, could come from some type of outsider mental health perspective. But of course, all you can really do or one of the things you can do is, this is probably going to be a seven to ten to fourteen-year journey, how can I protect their wellness through it? It’s convoluted how are you thinking that through. What are you seeing there?
Matus Maar
I think a lot of the things you said about the investment banking, etc. it’s still an industry that I would not wish to work in but I think improving. What you said about, Steve, I think those were just excuses. You can take away all the sexism. You can be ruthless in terms of determination, and you can be ruthless in the way that, “Look, I’m not going to necessarily carry people who I don’t think are good for the company” because, at the end of the day, you’re thinking if the company succeeds, it will employ a lot more people, and therefore I’m going to create a lot of jobs, etc. But to do that, I do have to sometimes get rid of people who are just not a good fit or not performing well. You can be ruthless in determination but how you do it does not have to be the 80s investment banking. Then your example of Steve Jobs, look, maybe he was suffering himself, maybe if he got help maybe he would be as determined, and as brilliant as genius as he was, but maybe he wouldn’t be as much of an asshole as some people claim that he was. Maybe even if we just improve by 10%, the founder’s mental health themselves, maybe they will become better leaders, and they can maybe cope it all better. It’s just small improvements but I think if we can make that improvements, it does not mean that we are not going to look for the most driven people with the biggest vision to change the world and do what they doing in there. That doesn’t change. We’re still going to back the people who are that, but we think that no one is giving them or there is very little support through on the mental health side. And we think that it can make change.
Lloyd Wahed
Matus, absolutely love what you guys are doing. Thank you so much for your time, I’m going to say that your mana is bringing wellness to the founder community and supporting them, and I fully respect that. I just like to finish giving you the opportunity to perhaps give any condensed advice to founders or anybody in high growth businesses or anyone you want to talk to, that you think would be really useful.
Matus Maar
Thank you so much for having me, it was a pleasure. I really resonate with your questions and maybe I’ll flip it onto you this last question because you said you’ve done it a couple of times. One of the things you said is how you constructed your team around you. That was one of the outcomes. That was a big improvement for you. What else did you learn and what else you’re doing different now? What would you give an advice? Obviously, there’s not that many serial entrepreneurs so it’s good to know. And just before you answer that, maybe gives you a second just to think about that but that’s the trick in the venture capital as well because you would think we’re only going to back people who have already done it before. The trouble is that once we have done something so hard already, sometimes it’s difficult to do it second-time. Even if people think that they can do it second-time, because they had some time off and they come back into it, they might realize that, “Why? Why am I doing this to myself again”? So there is no formula on that.
Lloyd Wahed
I speak the whole time to CXO founders and at the point where, from an outside perspective, they’re incredibly successful, they typically at that point have a lot of paper money but they’re looking, and I’m like, “Why are you looking”? Take this to a close. This is then going to allow you to either go, perhaps into venture, perhaps you can be an operator and have refined what you’re focused on or just go just go peace out whatever it might be that you want to do. The difference in the response comes from why my whole business is called mana. It’s what are the drivers. And so, for me, my driver was very much always I was going down the path of professional sportsman, this is very cliche, didn’t happen for whatever reason. There was an ability to captain and ability to be good at self-motivating, but then it needed to be aimed at something which wasn’t sport anymore. I was interested in economy and I was interested in psychology, and after some derivatives trading, I found headhunting and I walked into the space and was like, “Okay, this is amazing. This brings all the things I love together”. The really key thing was, it’s terrible, the industry is absolutely ripe for disruption so I can be an entrepreneur when I’ve learned in this space. After some experience, I went and found it and I just learned a load from that experience. Maybe the most important thing that I learned was what I was talking to, which is how to manage myself, how to have patience with my ambition to see the vision, come to fruition, and how to surround myself with a support network. Then there’s a whole load of practical things I did, where I drew various lines, which had to do with, as mentioned, looking at just being myself. I’m not trying to put a corporate veneer on it. Okay, what is it that I really enjoy that’s nothing to do with this? So I do a lot of painting, where I can completely relax and switch off, and it has absolutely no ego attached to it. I don’t think I’m great. I’m not trying to commercialize it. Since I’ve had a family, so I have a daughter and a partner, that is the sole priority, everything else comes in phases below that. I just think nothing would surprise anybody. It’s like when you read a great book, you’re not necessarily saying, hey, that page is something I’ve never heard before. It’s just being conscious of all of these great, tiny little hacks. I think the main one is, when I wake up, I absolutely love what I’m doing. I just wouldn’t want to do anything else. And I find myself now for sure working on weekends, but it’s because I really want to do it because I’m really excited about what I’m doing. It’s not driven by ego or stress. It’s like you say, absolutely not to do with money. This is my passion so I’m very fortunate to have found what that is and then just make sure that my timeframes don’t put pressure on me. The definition of stress is when you perceive that you have to achieve something in a timeframe that is less than what you have, therefore, you have to manage very well. I’m sure when people are considering what their runway is. For me, I’ve really controlled those and I’ve put them into the future. And I’m realistic with them.
Matus Maar
That’s great. I agree with those. I think a lot of times self-care comes last with founders because it’s almost like they feel guilty that they’re not working every single minute. I tried to say sometimes is that well, okay, take it rationally. If you do the self-care, maybe do take half an hour and go for a short run at lunchtime, you’ll be more productive in the afternoon. It’s chemical, it’s proven so you don’t have to feel guilty about it. It’s scientifically proven that you will do better job if you’re doing that. Get up and take the time to get dressed properly. Those things are important – the small rituals in every day. Do not abandon them because it’s a slippery slope.
Lloyd Wahed
I completely agree. I’ll hopefully carry on these conversations with you separately. I like the sound of some of the companies that you’re investing in. I suppose, along with what you can do for your founders, where you can make a huge impact on them on everybody’s wellness, particularly now it’s moving digital. Matus, thank you so much for your time. Absolutely pleasure.
Matus Maar
Thank you, Lloyd. It was a pleasure. Thanks very much
Also published on Medium.
