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Hardi Meybaum

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24
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2016-10-05
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2016-10-05
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1
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  1. “That's a great question. So I have two investments that I've done recently that are not public yet, but I will still mention this, the sketch tech deal. It's a YC company that I spoke earlier. And I said yes, because I would have used that product. I would love to have that product when I was running Rabcat because I knew that I wanted our designers to focus on a product and we didn't have extra resources, design resources to design the other things like web pages and marketing material. So it resonated to that problem. And I really like the CEO Chris there who I think is extremely thoughtful guy. And the moment I saw him and I'm very opinionated and I had a lot of opinions how he can improve his business and he, when we met first time, he had thought about all of those things and he was very”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It's interesting. I'm reading less blogs nowadays, but I do still enjoy reading David Scock blog called ForEntrepreneurs.com. It is now other partners are starting to write stuff there as well. And I just found those blog posts interesting. And sometimes I go and meet one of the companies where I made an investment. And our challenge is figuring out the right onboarding. And I always go and referring back to David's blog and before the meeting and going and refreshing my memory, I used to know every blog post from the heart, but those are really long blog posts. So I still go back to those and go read them.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Right now, I have chosen a road to help entrepreneurs, and if in 10 years I've been able to play a small role of helping a big company that does something good and really helps people to work better or really influences how people live their lives, that for me would be an amazing win.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think definitely it's been sell of grab GATT because clearly I have not had yet wins at Matrix. And GrabGat was a great, great outcome for everyone involved. And that was just very hard work. For me, if I work really hard and then achieve something, that is definitely makes me feel good. So it was very, very hard work, very long six years and to see such a great win for everyone involved. Definitely was a great moment in life.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Everything looks simple when you see, oh, that's logical that this company needs that solution because that just makes sense, but they don't understand our underlying reasons why nobody has built it. So even in GrabCad, I saw a lot of competitors coming after us. And when I saw that these guys didn't have a domain expertise, GAD is a very, very difficult space. I would never take them very seriously because I know that there was just not going to get traction. many times where there were MBAs junior associated VCs and coming to try to compete with us, but they always quickly failed after some great original boss. So always super biased here, but those are the reasons why I've been biased.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “towards the guys who have a domain expertise and clear edge and clear problem. And I think the other reason why it's important, especially in the B2B space, and not only B2B, B2C as well, is that today's great companies are not just great products. They're great products, they're great marketing, they're great sales. And what makes them great is just a high empathy for the customer. So if you have been customer of that product or that industry, you know what tone to use when you're marketing machine, when you're talking with these guys, you know what tone the salespeople should be using and you can design and build absolutely the best product because you know the workflows of the customer. So that's why I'm also very, very biased towards domain knowledge. And one of the things I've also seen is that when an MBA who has no domain expertise, they realize that, oh,”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And then when these guys left McKinsey and started their company, they had this problem. They wanted to have something designed. And they were like, wow, in McKinsey, we had this thing, but now we don't have it. Probably other small businesses have this problem as well. And then they started this company around. And similar to GrabCad, like we had this problem where we thought it's crazy to redesign everything from scratch and we built this massive library that has now more than 3 million engineers using every day that are uploading and downloading designs and reusing each other's designs. But we started with our own problem. So I'm a very big believer of backing founders that are solving a problem they have their own. And I'm already coming to the meeting always when you have the MBA that's starting a smoothie company that's always kind of a bad sign. I don't say sometimes it works, but I'm definitely more biased.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “This is a great question. So I'm very, very biased towards founders who are solving some of their own problems or solving company problems that they've had, right? For example, I led an investment in a company called SketchTech, and those guys, basically what it is, it's a marketplace to get great design. So if you are a CF, a company or a VP of marketing and you want to have a new white paper design to your company design guidelines, but all the designers are busy building your product, you can go to their marketplace to have vetted designers and they do the work. And the founder started this company. They were at McKinsey before. And although they have this little bit of the MBA profile, McKinsey had their internal resource of that type of resources where you can go and have the instincts designed.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “One of the first things I really look for, and I know it sounds very, very obvious, but I'm looking this drive and it's really amazing that like when you're looking at these young founders or typically the older the founder gets, you can see that the drive is starting to reduce. But I think the best founders have this incredible drive to do things. And you can recognize it very quickly. Literally, it takes two minutes to sit with a founder and you can see that drive or not. And that's really the one thing that I'm looking. And then if you then go down and try to understand why they have this drive and really try to start to understand why they're building this company. And that's something that I'm trying to really, really understand quickly. And I believe that this is definitely one of the most important things in a founder.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “That's one of the things that I've been doing. The second thing in order to start to have it is really go, like I've been very heavily focusing on founder and trying to figure out what makes a great founder. And ironically, I've spent a lot of time in the last 10 months not reading science fiction, but reading books about great inventors, reading books about great entrepreneurs, and really try to understand what makes someone great, meet with some of the CEOs who I know well who have accomplished a lot, really try to understand their motivations, their drive and draw lessons from there, and then become smart about when meeting founders, do they have a right characters to become a successful CEO and build a big company.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So one of the things where I'm focusing, because I need to look at myself and think, okay, what are the things that I'm strong at? And one of the things I do not have is I do not have a massive experience in looking of thousands and thousands of companies and working with them closely to draw conclusions. So the way I've been thinking about that is first is creating that pattern recognition. And the way to do it is I've started to select very specific fields where I'm going in instead of being very horizontal and seeing everything that comes into the door, I become very thesis driven. So I go and look very specific vectors and I try to go and find every single company in this vector so I can start having comparison and pattern recognition around this vector. So just decreasing the data set.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Feel that time is right now, I should go on and do it. So that's some of the things that these guys have encouraged me a lot. And then most of the stuff are very, very, very specific. For example, if you're looking at SaaS companies, what are the right metrics to look and what really matter? Like a lot of B2B SaaS investors typically look, oh, is this?”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think there is a lot to learn from all the partners here. Obviously, I am more closer to David Skock because he was on my board and we're looking similar investments, but not only him, we have another partner, Antonio Rodriguez, who I work closely here in our Boston office. I would say the things that I have learned from these guys is trust my cut, like listen, but trust my cut. And it's something that I've always thought that I'm very cut driven person and I will have a feeling about if something feels right or not. And because the average VCC, so many things, so many companies, and especially if your data experience like David who have done it for so long, you have seen so many companies fail that try to do something else. But maybe the time was wrong.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I would say so because I just started this joke 10 months ago, I do not have a big portfolio of boards similar to David Scott. So my time allocation is definitely towards you finding and sourcing new companies. And I would say it's right now it's 80% of doing new deals and meeting new companies and 20% spending time with existing investments, whether they've been made by me or helping some of the other portfolio companies that some other partners have done.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “They don't give you money, they hate that product, and they tell you why they don't, and you improve and you have this great, very quick feedback lobe while in this job you really don't have it. So I think those are the two areas where I definitely have challenged the most. And luckily I knew going in that this is how it's going to be.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Entrepreneurs are doing the hard work. I'm spending a lot of time trying to make investments and meeting companies and trying to help companies, the new ones or the ones I've invested already. But that definitely doesn't give me the satisfaction that I had when I was an operator. So that's been definitely some of the things I've been struggling. No surprise I knew that will happen. And the second one is that there's just no feedback loop in VC. You do not know if you're good at your job because, okay, you can measure yourself if you're doing deals, but you just don't know if those deals become good till five, six, seven years. And you need to do a lot of work without any kind of feedback loop. Again, as an entrepreneur, you build a product, you launch the product, your customers love it, they give you money. That's a great, great feeling and you know you're on the right track.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I did take quite a lot of thinking and due diligence when I decided to come over. And to be very honest with you, it's been pretty much the challenges are the ones that I thought will be. And, you know, I would say the two big challenges if an operator becomes a venture capitalist is that first, when I was a CO of GrabCad, I went home Friday night to have a dinner and wine with my wife and I felt I earned it. I felt that I worked really, really hard during the week, but every day we push things forward. Like everything we're making small improvements in the business. And I felt great. Like it was hard work. It was like a lot of hard problems, but I felt great. I felt that I have achieved something. Now I work the same hours. I go home Friday night and I do not have that feeling of achievement in most of the weeks. And it's just, I feel...”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I'm very competitive person one side and I want to win and I don't want to give up. Like I think those are the two things that just doesn't suit well with me. And also I live my life with the principal that I want to give everything I have if I do something. And then if I fail, it's okay. If I've given everything I got and I fail, it's okay. I don't feel bad about that. But if I fail and I feel that I really didn't give anything I caught, that makes me really unhappy. So I think just those things really pushed me forward in this situation. And I love the company I was building. I loved our users and customers and the team and the space. And I really wanted to make it work. And I wanted to be an entrepreneur and do this and change the design and manufacturing industry. So I wanted it really badly. So just giving it up would be a bad idea.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “From Boston, and it was so bad that like literally it was November when we were here, that the wind was blowing through the door. And I don't think the doors were like you could lock the doors and it wasn't very nice neighborhood. And it was really, really frustrating experience. And then as a mechanical engineer coming from Estonia, I met all these American CEOs who were just fantastic in pitching their ideas. They seem so smart about everything. And all of them were already raising money and had an impressive business. And I'm like, wow, this is a pretty crazy journey. Like everyone are better than me and we live in this shithole with my six-year-old daughter. Like, this is not working. This is clearly not working. So I actually wanted to fly back and get back to my company.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “David, who clearly didn't immediately invest in me, and I met a lot of other VCs in Boston as well and in Silicon Valley. And every single VC turned me down. And not only Boston, not only Silicon Valley, but also everyone in London. And that was quite a frustrating time. And also I had a six-month-old daughter with me. And Estonia has a pretty high quality of life. I had a very nice day job before I started grabcat. So we had a pretty nice apartment and we came over to Boston and was quite expensive. So I said that I'm not taking salary while in Boston because it's really expensive for a company and I will only pay for the housing here and just a plane tickets for myself. And those were already really expensive. So we ended up staying in a mortal that cost $50 a night and it was hour and a half.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Wow, yeah, okay, I made it sound easy. It definitely was not an easy road. So we can start by, I think, the journey from Estonia to US, where everyone said that you should go to Valley. And I was like, okay, I'm going to Valley because everyone are saying that you should go to Valley. And then I booked a trip. And when I was booking the trip, I was like, wait, in some recent old cat companies that I was filling GrabCad in the CAT space and CAD means computer-aided design. So there is 5 big cat companies and four have big teams or headquarters in Boston. And I'm like, wow, I should really maybe come by here. And so I made a quick stop in Boston for a month and a half. And then I spent month and a half in Silicon Valley. And because of the visa situation, I really wouldn't stay this country longer. And the idea was that hopefully I could raise money. So I came to Boston first. I did met.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “That is an interesting idea, and that's how I joined Matrix. And because I would say it was a big part because I knew the partners in Matrix already so well, because I've been working with them since almost day one at CrabCat and I really treated them as my co-founders. So I knew the team extremely well here. And that was definitely a big reason why I become a VC.”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Raised money from Matrix partners in Boston and I moved from Boston, from Estonia to Boston, and then raised the seed round from Matrix, Matrix-led A round and did a big part of B round. And I really grew close to David Skock and built a company. And then we sold the company end of 2014. And I made some money. I started to do some angel investment and really enjoyed spending time with entrepreneurs. my plan was to go and start another company. And then the Matrix guys came to me and said, hey, Hardy, you're already spending this time with all these entrepreneurs where you're doing the angel investment. You should come and join us full-time. And I'm like, no, like I'm not VC. I'm a builder. I want to build companies. I want to start another company. And they're like, hey, but you're already doing that. You're already helping entrepreneurs imagine how great it will be to it full time. And I was like,”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “That's a great question. If someone would have asked me two years ago if I would be a VC, the answer would be definitely no. And if someone would ask me 10 years ago if I would become a VC, my answer would be, what is a VC? So I think in order to answer that question, I think we need to go back around seven, eight years where I started a company called Grabcat. And I started this company in Estonia. And by that time, the startup culture in Estonia was not that big. And I just wanted to build a product and solve my own problem. And we started to build it. We were actually profitable from the day one, but we wanted to build a bigger solution. And then someone said, you should go and raise money. And I said, what do you mean, raise money? Oh, you should raise money from CCs. And I was like, what is a VC? So fast forward a year after that conversation, we”

    2016-10-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source