336: Matik: How This Founder Got the First 20 Customers for His SaaS Product - with Nik Mijic

all right Nick welcome to the show hey Emma thank you for having me do you have a favorite quote something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us yeah um I think one of the things that a former uh manager of mine told me that's always stuck with me is that don't let Perfection be the enemy of progress and I've always loved that and I think it's really applicable to to startups in general right where where you have to iterate and I think that's a that quote personifies that cool so tell us

about Matic what does the product do who's it for and what's the main problem you're hoping to solve Matic really at a higher level if I've given give it the elevator pitches we automate uh data-driven narratives right um in PowerPoint or Google Slides today the way that uh we kind of came up with this idea was I was at LinkedIn prior to starting the company and before that I worked at a customer Success software startup and that was where the idea initially came from was we had a lot of our customers saying hey we do

these things called business reviews renewal decks where we have these 10 templates in PowerPoint or Google slides and there are placeholders that will say hey Nick go to Salesforce to get this data point go to Tableau to get this chart it'd be awesome if there's a one click button that pulled in all that data for a particular account and spit out a presentation and narrative and so when I was at LinkedIn I had worked on building out internal tools and narratives and had an opportunity to rebuild an internal tool and that's really when it kind

of got me thinking hey there's probably other companies out there that have a very similar challenge where their sales and customer success teams are putting together this data driven collateral whether it's a qbr whether it's a quarterly Business Review an Roi deck a business case it's very very impactful right when you share data with your customers and Prospects the likelihood for Better Business outcomes are there but it's very tedious and it's very time consuming and so our hope and our goal with Matic is to help alleviate that problem and and help automate and streamline the

creation of that data-driven uh content within PowerPoint or Google Slides okay great so I want to talk about how you got started but before we do that let's talk about kind of your your background I I know you you you grew up in in Bosnia so why don't you tell us a little bit about you know how you ended up in the US yeah so I was born in Syria or Bosnia uh for so for those who know there was a Civil War uh former Yugoslavia I was really young when the war broke out um

and we ended up fleeing the country and going to Hungary for about a year and a half and then we ended up in Germany for about four and a half years and wanted to stay but there's so many refugees that were coming up out of the region that we weren't able to get citizenship and so you know parents decided to apply to a variety of places we applied to Canada Australia Us and got accepted to the US and my mom and dad were like hey let's do it let's let's you know American Dream let's let's

go over there so we were choosing between two cities uh you know when you come in as an immigrant or a refugee they'll ask you hey do you have any friends or family that can help you get on your feet and so we had some friends or cousins in Chicago and then we had some family friends we went straight from the war to Salt Lake City Utah and my mom and dad ended up picking uh the cheaper options so we ended up going to Utah which was uh you know went to school there uh high

school college and then ended up coming to the Bay Area after after college I've been here for about almost 11 years now so how old were you when your family left Bosnia so I was I was a year and a half old when I was a baby when it all happened and then I went to elementary school obviously in Germany um spoke you know like I said fluent German came over to the U.S we didn't speak any English and uh definitely obviously I think a lot of people say oh tough upbringing but at the same

time I think it's shaped who I am today and I think it's a lot of those lessons of perseverance that I saw through my parents is one of the reasons why I started Matic right because I don't think I would have had this opportunity to work at LinkedIn or start Matic if it wasn't for the sacrifices that that they made and picking up not just once but you know we went from Yugoslavia to Hungary from Hungary to Germany and then doing it a third time and coming to the US it really kind of showed me

that the sacrifice that they made right yeah okay great so you you grew up in the the US you've you've worked for a number of different companies you you land at LinkedIn uh you know nice nice place to be great benefits good company and uh and then you uh you decide you're gonna leave all of that and and start a business so what was your parents reactions to that oh man um telling them was probably the heart one of the hardest things I've I've had to do and ironically LinkedIn does bring your parents to work

day where this is probably like two or three months before I I told them we brought them in and you know the LinkedIn office in San Francisco is unbelievable we have a cafeteria they saw all the food they had all these activities also when you're when you're an immigrant Refugee I think your parents want you to be like one of three things they want you to be a doctor they want you to be a lawyer or they want you to work for a big company like Microsoft or Coca-Cola LinkedIn that they can brag to their

friends back home but honestly I ended up flying back to Utah because that's where they're base out of right now and I want to tell them in person and the feedback I got from them was like Hey like do it like you're at the point in your life where you have the ability to go and take this risk and that's why we came to the U.S was to give you this opportunity and if we need to sell our house if we need to do anything like we're here to support you and I think that really

gave me the confidence to be like hey I know LinkedIn is great the perks are amazing the culture is amazing pay is amazing but I don't want to have that regret later on in life knowing that like I I wanted to try to do something and I never did right and the other turning point for me was not just my parents but I had a nephew that was born right around that time and I remember being in the hospital with my brother and thinking like it doesn't seem like yesterday we were kids playing in the

playground and now we're raising kids and it was the first time in my life where I realized how quickly time flies right like when you're in in high school you can't wait to get to College when you're in college you can't wait to become a working professional and time does go by quickly but you don't understand the magnitude of how quickly it goes and then seeing my nephew born it just really hit me and so I think two reasons right one my parents I wanted to be able to show them that hey uh the sacrifice

you guys made this is a sign of me of appreciation for you guys and then two I didn't want to have that regret later on in life um to be like hey I should have tried to to start a company and I never did right and I know how quickly time flies so Zach uh is your co-founder and uh CTO how did you guys meet yeah so we met through a mutual friend um so I wasn't quite ready to leave LinkedIn I met one of my mutual friends like hey you should chat with my one

of my childhood friends he was an early engineer at box was there all the way to post IPO so him and I just kind of got together I told them about the idea and I was like let's just do some research right like I haven't worked with you you haven't worked with me I'm not quite ready to quit my job and we did that for about five to six months and we really just hit it off um I would say our core values really aligned the way that we kind of work together just worked and

so um you know at that point I was ready and I was like hey this is me getting down on one knee and proposing like let's do it let's let's uh let's get a joint bank account and uh you know start this thing so that was kind of the initial starting point what kind of research did you do in those five or six months were you going out and talking to customers were you guys just kind of Googling and just Gathering data what what did you do to kind of get to that point where you

felt confident enough to take the leap there's three things that we did I think one we wanted to make sure that the problem that this problem actually existed so it wasn't just something that we thought was cool to solve for but other people other companies had this problem right so we were one was just validating that this is a problem we're solving for right and the way we did that was a lot of conversations right and that doesn't mean that every conversation we had was positive but majority of the conversations that we had were saying

hey thumbs up this is a problem that we have and we'd love to solve for a secondary piece which is more of Zach's realm was kind of the technical components like how we're gonna go and build this like what is the tech stack that we would use right what are kind of the base requirements that we would start to build a prototype so that was kind of the the secondary thing and then I think the third was I guess and I just kind of feeling each other out right because we had never worked together before

we wanted to make sure that we were on the same page and we had we had the same goals going into starting a company okay so you guys um decide that uh you want to stop dating and actually you know get going with this thing uh did you at what point did you raise money did you self-fund the business initially we started the company in January of 2019 no funding at that point we worked out of my apartment for the first five or six months I had a roommate a former roommate of mine who had

just sold the company to Autodesk and you know I caught up with him and I was kind of giving him the idea I wanted to kind of run some things by him and he was like Nick like I love this idea like our company could use this like I want to invest and I'm like well we don't really have any customers like this is just these are wireframes like we're still you know building prototype he's like I think there's something here I I think you should think I want to invest and so we did a

safe we did a small safe two hundred thousand dollars it wasn't it wasn't a big big save and that kind of helped us um build the initial prototype and then we um got a few companies that were crazy enough to like try out the product right feedback was overwhelming positive and that's what led to us raising a three million dollar seed round with Menlo Ventures and a few other uh uh seed funds so that's kind of how we we got our start did you just start charging for the product from day one or were you

just going out there and saying hey can you just try it and tell us what you think um so not initially so the first so the first company um uh again I don't have a sales background uh the first company I met someone at a dinner party when people were gathering together this is pre-covered um a woman that was at the dinner party was like hey what do you do I was like oh I'm starting a company this is kind of what we're trying to solve for we automate you know presentation building and PowerPoint of

Google and she's like oh our customer success team at our company could definitely use that I'll send you an intro and so she ended up sending me an intro to their enablement person and kind of showed them the initial prototype they really liked it and I remember them like okay great what's next where do we sign and I remember going back to Zach I'm like we don't have a purchase order we don't have like legal terms like kind of contacted a few folks I'm like do I what do I charge them so I literally just

came up with a number and I said hey 2500 right so it wasn't a lot um and they were like great uh send us to the DocuSign and that was really our first customer and then they ended up expanding from there so they did test the product before they bought but it was a it was also that was a huge milestone for us because now I wasn't just people trying it people were willing to put their dollars in behind us right and actually buy the product so you're definitely onto something here that when you're telling

people about the problem and what you're solving people are leading in they seem to be some level of excitement about this and people are saying yeah I got this problem you mentioned that you didn't have a sales background and neither did sac was was selling the product fairly easy despite that no not necessarily uh and the main reason I mean I think the first 10 customers is always the hardest I think that's a lot of people will say that right um and I think the primary reason is like hey are you guys going to be

around in six months right so we're gonna invest all this time we're gonna rest all these resources into implementing Your solution and having our teams use it like how do we know that you guys are going to be around right and I think the raising a seed round helped give us some credibility right so like hey there's institutional money behind us now it's not just two guys working out of an apartment or a wework it's it's legit like there are there's backing here at at a VC level so that was definitely a hurdle early on

that we had to overcome and I think another one is just we connect to data sources right so our primary Persona that we go after is obviously customer success and sales teams and for customer success in particular a lot of the data that they show in these presentations is usage data where you're connecting to a CRM or you're connecting to a database and that's very sensitive information and people security was really really important so we invested a lot in security up front whether it was getting certifications like sock 2 type 1 sock 2 type 2

investing in Technologies for monitoring that was a big part of how we were able to kind of handle that objection up front how did you learn to sell were you just like winging it did you go out and find a mentor like what did you do I think all the above uh it is going yeah I mean it's all the above so I definitely had some folks we had some advisors that had a sales background where you know svps of sales at you know pretty decent sized tech companies and I would lean on them quite

a bit right like 9pm at night hey I don't have an order form do you have an order form or like hey I got this objection what do I do how do I respond to it so a lot of it was mentoring and coaching from our advisors and folks in my network and the other was iteration and just trial by error right so I would see what messaging would respond I would see what messaging didn't respond and again you're iterating constantly just like you're iterating on the product we were iterating on the go to market

process as well how did you find those uh initial leads and customers I know you were doing something interesting I know you were working through your network but tell us about the little uh LinkedIn hack that you were using as all to find people yeah so I had worked on a similar internal tool at LinkedIn and um so the sales team and the customer success team at LinkedIn use that product quite a bit and they understood the value of it and part of that was just reaching out to people on my network that were at

a new company but we used to work at LinkedIn and knew what we were doing and that was kind of low hanging fruit so um so first basically Target group was people in my network then I would look at former employees of LinkedIn that are at new companies and and that really resonated because they're like oh you know I don't have those same tools internally here uh I would love to take a look at your solution and what you guys are doing and so that got you to how many how many customers did you get

by just taking that approach and I would say the first like 15 20 customers um were kind of along those lines where it's very very uh relationship based um like I said very Network heavy would lean on those relationships and then from there you know we started scaling uh you know the team right so hiring account Executives hiring on the marketing side to like really start building the outbound and inbound motion did you figure out the pricing by then like oh were you still like 25 2 500 question mark or or like had you had

you got to a point where it kind of made more sense we definitely found at that point we we had enough conversations where we kind of knew what that price point was and you know uh we took those learnings and just like anything else you're constantly iterating but we had a really really good sense as to like what people were willing to pay for our product tell me about uh your first sales hires so both of you guys as we said don't have a sales background you you still manage to go out and get the

first 15 20 customers and then now you're going out and saying okay let's let's build a sales team what was that experience like was it was it easy finding the right sales people and what was the transition like to moving from founder-led sales to relying on a sales team to go out and sell for you yeah I think um definitely was was it was a challenge is because we don't have that background so again leaning on our investors leaning on our network of sales advisors to kind of help us made a higher really early on

great individual wasn't there for very long I was like right during covid um and I think the hardest challenge is finding someone who wants to work at an early stage startup where there isn't all this infrastructure there isn't product marketing there isn't sales enablement right you don't have a ton of resources um but it's not just so Junior where they're like leaning on you and that that's kind of a tough hire to find and so we ended up hiring um someone who was a had some big company experience but was really eager to get into

startups and she did a fantastic job of just kind of building that initial playbook for our sales team and she did some of that initial hiring on the SDR front and we worked really closely together to to build that out so it definitely was a challenge um and you know like I said one of the learnings that I had there too was you got to hire in twos especially on the sales side I think a lot of Founders are probably wary because it's costly but at the end of the day hiring in twos allows you

to really see if it is the person that you hired or if it's the process and having those two there's a benchmark you kind of know like hey one person's performing one isn't or both are not performing so maybe it is the process or the other way around right so that's definitely a big learning that I had early on I was hiring twos on the go to market side so did you do that with sdrs and AES like everybody was coming in twos uh well initially right like I think like your first hire is like

higher make sure that they have somebody that they can compare themselves to so like when we hire these account Executives yes iron twos same thing with sdrs hiring twos because also they can learn from one another right and you want to build that culture of collaboration and it's hard to do that when you're just on your own who who's managing the sales team was was that you or uh it was uh basically the the the head of sales that I had hired uh she was kind of and I was helping out right so um still

helping out on deals right I think that's one another key learning is you you never really remove yourself from selling um as a Founder so as you transition from founder let sales to a more codified process you're still going out there and selling whether you're not necessarily managing the end-to-end cycle but you may be coming in at the end or you may be coming at the beginning and it also helps me kind of get a pulse on the market and the pulse on on how our prospects are responding to our messaging how our customers are

responding to our products so I've really enjoyed that aspect of it how long did it take to get that uh Playbook figured out I mean one of the things that I often see is you know with founder-led sales you can go in and you can have these meetings with customers and you can kind of make up the pitch as you go along and you can adapt the offer as well because you're the founder right and especially if you're the tech guys as well it's like yeah we could do that probably whatever but once you're then

relying on a sales team to do that and they can only lean on a Playbook or whatever training they've had it's not as easy for them to navigate their way through some of the questions that customers may come up with that you haven't addressed so far so how how long did it take for you guys to figure out a Playbook that you felt pretty comfortable with that was working well yeah definitely did not happen overnight and I would even argue that you know we're constantly tweaking or constantly iterating right so even though what we have

today is much better than what we had two years ago you're still learning we're still in the early stages we're still learning from what we're hearing from the market uh what we're hearing from customers and how we can constantly improve so it does take time but I think the key key thing here is that that growth mindset that iterative mindset where and the hope is that the people that you hire those account Executives can embody that type of mentality where they're okay with ambiguity they're okay with a little bit of you know chaos but they

can help provide structure to that chaos and they can help provide structure that ambiguity and so a big part of it is not just the Playbook or the process that you're implementing but the people behind that that can constantly go back and iterate and tweak based on the learnings that they're having right okay great so you've got this sales team built out or at least the initial people on board what happened to sales did they did sales start taking off yeah so we've seen a few things one sales obviously you start getting you start getting

more inbound on the marketing side you start getting more outbound on the other side and then we also saw a big uh expansion play as well so a lot of those early customers that we signed on were getting a lot of value in our product and we're now starting to say hey we only bought for a certain segment within customer success now we want to buy for the entire team right or hey we think our sales team could also use this yeah they're not their presentations aren't as like data heavy as maybe customer success but

they do business cases they do Roi calculators uh some of the pitch decks are a little bit more Dynamic we'd love to use Matic to automate that process so a big part of our motion too was also expansion which we've had a lot of success with this year how many customers do you have today uh not something that I want to necessarily this goes but we're definitely like I said we're at that series a series B level um and so a lot of our customers are like B2B tech companies you know Asana store Greenhouse sales

Loft that's kind of our sweet spot in terms of customers what I'm trying to figure out is we talked about the first 15 20 customers sort of founder lid sales you you brought on the the sales team just to start you know hopefully starting to scale uh the the growth what's what's been the kind of one of the hard parts of of scaling right that's what I'm trying to understand is like it's sort of I hear the story so far and it's like the problem resonates with people um you didn't have that much of a

hard time selling okay you had some objections and things you had to overcome and and certainly raising the seed round as you mentioned helped to build some credibility and maybe overcome some of the concerns people had but beyond that what have been some of the difficulties we're trying to scale sales and get to some of these lands from these customers that you have today that one say this is targeted at sales in general I think this is just uh scaling a business overall um you're moving a million miles an hour and hiring your you got

renewals you're trying to close that new business and I think that's one aspect that I'm always constantly trying to work on myself is like how do we make sure that we're all rowing in the right direction right and so as you know this year as we've had the growth that we've had you know we raised the series a last year with Andreessen Horowitz we raised 20 million uh 20 million series A now it's like okay we made a lot of these highers but how do we continue to execute on our long-term vision of where we

want to go and how do we ensure that as a team continues to grow in size they're not going into their own silos they're all rowing in the same direction so that that's something that's like really top of mind for me as well as just Talent like I'm a firm believer that it's not the technology that wins it's the people behind the technology that wins and if you can build a great team right and you Foster a great culture um I think that is like one of the main ingredients to success like I said I'm

a first time founder so I may be naive in that but um from what I've observed and the startups that I've worked at that have been successful the ones that haven't been successful you know I think culture is such a big part of it and that stems from your core values your Mission Vision all of that and making sure that your team really knows where you want to be not just today but where you want to be five ten years from now one of the things that you mentioned before we started recording was about The

Importance of Being even keeled as a first-time founder and I guess that also is connected with building the right culture because it's not just an internal thing as a leader it's also how the rest of the the company sees you so tell me tell me a little bit about that what what what's the lesson you've learned how do you try to be even killed as you run this business well what I mean by is like you can't get too high in the highs you can't get too low on the lows right so there's days where

you know you close your first six figure deal you're you feel like you're on top of the mountain right and it's unbelievable huge milestone in the company and then there are the days where you know maybe you have a bad meeting with a prospect or they didn't really understand what you're trying to say and maybe you had back-to-back meetings where that happened and you just feel like wow I'm just you know and so you don't really want to be too high in the highs you don't want to be too low in the lows and I

think another thing that's been a learning experience is last three years four years not just in business but in society a lot has happened right the pandemic the war social injustice and all of that is now like is starting to collide with business and so having to learn how to cope with that with your team how to address that with your team how do you navigate a business through that type of climate that's outside of work that's all been something that's been definitely a learning experience and I think in times like that you lean on

your core values you lean on your culture and one of the things that Zach and I first did before we started writing any code before we did anything was like we literally wrote down this is kind of cheesy but we wrote down the things that were really important to us like what are the core values that you want to this company to live by what are the core values that I want to and what is that framework that we want everybody else to buy into and I think that's really helped us navigate the last four

years not just from a business perspective but also all the stuff that's going on outside of the business right give me an example of one or two things that you guys wrote down on that that list of values so the first one's trust I'm a firm believer that any relationship whether it's professional or personal the foundation or the pinning behind that relationship is trust so you need to be able to trust me and I need to be able to trust you and one of my favorite sayings is like trust is consistency over time it's not

one of those things that I meet you you meet me I hire you or you hire me and boom there's trust we are you know it is your actions over time that prove to me that I can trust you and vice versa the the the second one that we really wanted to really focus on was compassion and this is something that that LinkedIn Jeff weiner um the former CEO the chairman now he would always talk about leading with compassion and I really took that to heart because we all come from different backgrounds I'm a refugee

my co-founder Zach grew up in Sonoma right and totally different backgrounds that doesn't mean that his upbringing was better than mine or vice versa but we may have different ways of looking at a problem we may have different views on on how to tackle a problem and so that's fine but we should always try to understand and put ourselves in the other person's shoes you know let's say you and I disagree on something well maybe Omer had something happen to him over the weekend that I don't know about outside of work or maybe in his

past job they try to solve for the same exact problem and they went right down this route and it led to a disaster right so those are probably the two like I said we have two others one is quality and the fourth is uh being customer first um but those are two examples great I love those um the the other thing you you also told me that has helped you is building a a good support structure around you yeah what what does that mean to you yeah so before we took the the leap of faith

into entrepreneurship um I had a mentor of mine who was like hey you're about to go into something that's really unknown and you're gonna be testing you're gonna be iterating and you really need to have a good support structure and he told me he said go find a brother or sister go find a mom or dad or go find a grandma or Grandpa and so when he told me that I'm like what do you mean by that and he was like the brother or sister is the person in your in your support structure that you

can reach out to when you've had a long day and you're like hey let's just go grab a beer let's go grab lunch or dinner I just need to vent right and they're going to give you that pep talk okay remember why you're doing this push through it okay the mom or dad is someone who is on the same Journey but there may be two or three years ahead of you so an entrepreneur that like I said is three years ahead of you that can give you tactical advice like hey I don't have a purchase

order what did you guys do here hey I'm hiring this role share some learnings that you had when you were hiring for similar role and then the grandma or grandpa is the Persona or the person that can give you that 50 000 foot level they've done it multiple times right and they can kind of help you navigate that that high level uh overview how did you find these people and and did you was it kind of a formal relationship as in terms of advisors or it was just like you know just just kind of having

these conversations more frequently and it's not like a formal there's no like a formal agreement these are people in my network that I trust um and you know they you set expectations with them right like hey like you're the type of person that I can go and grab a drink with and I can just vent and I apologize in advance but I'm probably gonna do more of the talking and I hope you're okay with that and like I said set those expectations and the other is you you want to rotate them right so everybody has

you know those friends who come to them constantly and always complaining and uh I didn't want to ruin those relationships so you know I try to rotate every you know six to 12 months try to get a new brother or sister try to get a new mom or dad that I can lean on and a lot of that is just the people uh the relationships that I've built during my professional career so you founded the business in 2019 which I guess is like about three three and a half years ago you guys have raised over

23 million dollars to date if I need some good good brands some good logos can you mention some of those I don't know if you mentioned them earlier but give us uh our glass door um Asana uh Greenhouse uh sales loft or some of our our customers keep tracking now motive they do software for truck drivers um Seattle's are some of our our bigger logos so things have gone fairly well right but when you look back over the last few years if you could go back what's uh what's one piece of advice you might offer

yourself to have made your life a little bit easier or maybe avoided some of the mistakes that you made you know don't be afraid to make a mistake right I think there's times as a first-time entrepreneur first time founder uh you tend to over analyze every decision that you make and it's like hey the name of the game is you are going to make mistakes so going back to the quote earlier don't let Perfection be the enemy of progress things are not going to perfectly align like you want you're going to make decisions and even

if it is a mistake that is still progress because now you you've learned something to hopefully not make that mistake again so I'll probably say that's the biggest thing is don't don't uh you know don't be afraid to make mistakes and and you know go go for the home run like really push forward when I was researching for this interview one of the things that hit me was that you are a big data guy right and so does that make it hard for you to be able to make those mistakes and make faster decisions do

you tend to lean more on data to help you or is is that something that you naturally kind of are able to find a balance between intuitive versus sort of data driven they're great questions I think if you look at the beginning of the company's Journey right when we first started there is no data to lean on like it is all gut it's all hypotheses I mean that is literally how you're making every decision right there is not you don't have a massive data set that's statistically significant that you can say hey we lead this

is why we should make this decision and I think this is where we're kind of at the at the life cycle of the company where a lot of the early decisions were gut it was hypotheses and now we're going to the point where we've collected some data now we've got to change our mindset to now not couple that qualitative feedback not qualitative data with quantitative data right and so I would say now we're starting to lean more towards okay we have historical data we have a data set that we can use to make decisions but

early on that was not the case right and I think that that was hard right because when you're working at LinkedIn or you're working on other companies you always have that data you use data to go and make those decisions and you know when you're first starting the company there is no data to lean on it is all you know research and and that gut that you're kind of having to lean on yeah yeah I think you and I come from similar backgrounds you know when I was at Microsoft you know we were we would

we were making decisions based on like petabytes of data right I don't even you know once you once you're outside of that organization I don't even know what that what that scale looks like right it's just it's just it's just a completely different world all right great so we should uh we should wrap up and uh move on to the lightning round I've got uh seven quick fire questions for you uh just try to answer them as quickly as you can you ready yeah let's do it what's the best piece of business advice you've ever

received uh I would go back to the earlier quote uh that one stuck with me don't let Perfection be the enemy of progress I think that's something that uh I try to use every single day uh in my day-to-day what book would you recommend to our audience and why oh I just finished uh Carlo ancelotti I don't know if you know he was uh the famous soccer coach um he wrote a book on it's called quiet leadership he's more of an introvert he's not the the Yeller type of a coach and it was really just

kind of fascinating how you don't have to be this charismatic very outspoken person to be a great leader so I really enjoyed the book I'm a big soccer fan as well so it was nice to blend business leadership and soccer all in one cool that's a good one uh what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder um someone who's who can adapt right a lot of unknowns and uh just having that ability to where you can adapt and pivot constantly is is I think a great trait to have what's your favorite

personal productivity tool or habit oh my favorite is I really like the tasks um aspect within Gmail I I love Gmail I love using my inbox and they have a little like a small task it's not quite asana-like I still use Asana but for just everyday tasks I feel like it's very helpful to be able to mark email as a task what's a new crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time ooh I don't know if I have like a particular idea but maybe an industry that in the future could be

something I'm going to do I like um like healthcare so something that can maybe help disrupt that space or go into into that industry would be something I'd focus on what's an interesting little fun fact about you that most people don't know I have a twin and we don't look anything alike so we are we are complete opposites and everywhere not just looks but behavior and personality as well and finally what's one of your most important passions outside of your work I just got into golf over covid and so that's been something that I've been

really really getting into and have enjoyed learning the sport and going out there and playing I gotta get back into golf I'm I'm uh I suck really badly but uh it's something that I just do not want to give up on I mean I I suck don't get me wrong but it is nice to be outside for three to four hours and it really kind of helps you take your mind off of things I've really I've really enjoyed it totally awesome well Nick thanks so much for uh joining me and sharing your story and some

of the lessons that you've learned along the way if people want to find out more about magic they can go to matic.io that's m-a-t-i-k dot IO and if folks want to get in touch with you what's the best way for them to do that yeah definitely feel free to reach out via LinkedIn pretty active on there but uh yeah check out our website matic.io a lot of good stuff on there awesome thanks man it's been a pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success awesome thank you so much for having me

appreciate it my pleasure Cheers Cheers