Matthew Schmidt with Peoplelogic

Intro: [00:00:04] Welcome back to the start of Showdown podcast where we discuss pitching, funding and scaling startups. Join us as we interview winners, mentors and judges of the monthly $120,000 pitch competition powered by Panoramic Ventures. We also discuss the latest updates in software Web3, Healthcare, Tech, FinTech, and more. Now sit tight as we interview this week’s guest and their journey through entrepreneurship.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:38] Lee Kantor here another episode of Startup Showdown, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get into it, it’s important to recognize our sponsor Panoramic Ventures. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Startup Showdown, we have Matt Schmidt with PeopleLogic. Welcome, Matt.

Matthew Schmidt: [00:00:56] Hey, Lee, thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:57] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about people logic. How are you serving folks?

Matthew Schmidt: [00:01:03] Yeah, fantastic. Great question. So people logic is all about helping make companies organizational help be simple enough to be actionable. And when we talk about organizational health, we’re talking about all the messy things around your people and your processes, helping you predict attrition and burnout and where you’ve got people working on things that don’t necessarily move the business forward and help you strategically plan and all those fun things that help businesses grow more effectively.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:32] So if they don’t have people logic, how are they going about that right now?

Matthew Schmidt: [00:01:37] Yeah, that’s a that’s a great question. Usually they’re getting surprised when people are when their best people are leaving or when they find out that they’re somebody they thought was a high performer, was was not being as effective as they thought they could be. And if they’re doing strategic planning, they’re usually taking a best guess and using their expertize and their their gut feelings around the things that they’re doing. A lot of companies are relying on surveys and those types of things, but we found that our customers tend to be more data driven than that and find see all the pretty well known problems that exist within beating your team over the head with more surveys.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:19] So how does it work? Like where are you gleaning the information? Where are you getting the data so you can make these informed decisions and assessments?

Matthew Schmidt: [00:02:29] Yeah. So we connect right to the tools that that your team spend their day using. Right. So it’s your zooms, your salesforce is your HubSpot, your JIRA is your GitHub. And we’re just consuming the exhaust data from those tools, the things that are left on the floor from the usage. Without getting into the specific details and content of those things, we’re able to glean really useful insights about how your teams are interacting and where there’s potential risks to the business.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:02] So from looking at those kind of breadcrumbs, you’re able to see, Hey, Bill is, you know, we think Bill’s a top performer, but maybe it’s Mary who’s really the top performer.

Matthew Schmidt: [00:03:14] That’s certainly one of the insights. One of the more common things that we also see is where you thought that a team was actually distributing the work across the entire team. But really, you’ve got somebody that’s standing there at the bottom of an inverted pyramid holding everybody up, that they’re doing all the work and or an outsized amount of work, which puts them really at a risk for burning out and for also for feeling like they’re carrying more of the team than everybody else, which can lead to a toxic culture as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:48] And and the other side of that is that somebody might be kind of a gatekeeper, that maybe you don’t want them to be a gatekeeper.

Matthew Schmidt: [00:03:57] Exactly. Exactly. There’s very often as organizations scale, you get somebody who was was the person that everything had to go through when you were ten or 25 people. But as you get to 50 people, that person still being that bottleneck is no longer effective. It doesn’t help the business. And so you sometimes forget that those things are still in place because organizations move so fast that that you don’t pay attention to it until it’s too late.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:27] Now, is this solution like a nice to have for smaller organizations? But as you get to x number of employees, it becomes a must have.

Matthew Schmidt: [00:04:36] Yeah, that’s what we started to see it. As you start to become a growth company, moving from a startup to a scale up as you go past 50 people into 75 to 100 and up to probably 1000 or so, it becomes much more of a of a need to a must have. Right. As you get bigger than that, then we begin to see it break down into the individual departments and the teams and those sorts of things that operate much more like companies. And then there people begin to use this for things, for understanding a baseline, for changes that they want to make, or for doing a planning around whether they have enough of the right kinds of people to do the work that they want to do. Those types of things, it becomes bigger, more here’re problems as you as you get bigger.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:25] Now in your career you’ve worked on several startups and and scaled several businesses. Were they always in this space?

Matthew Schmidt: [00:05:35] No, this is. It’s my first one. And what I think now it’s safe to call it the future of work. My last business was a design and answer hub and we were in the developer engagement, developer community space and so very different. But at the end of the day, business is how businesses grow and how they run. Have a lot of similarities and so you’re able to apply your learnings from one into the next.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:04] Now at the beginning of your career where you always on an entrepreneurial track, or did you work for a large organizations and then kind of pivot to startups and more entrepreneur?

Matthew Schmidt: [00:06:15] That’s a that’s a great question. I think I started my first business when I was 12 or 13 doing web development. Back before everybody had the Internet and you could remember where to go on the Internet by remembering the domain. And there were only a handful of them. So I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart. And this is I tend to to go all in on my startups. And this my last one took about 15 years to navigate its way, bootstrapped to an exit. And this one, we’re on a very different path in venture back and choosing to go at it much more aggressively.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:53] Now, what was the learning there from, you know, going from bootstrap to exit now going to venture backed to hopefully eventual exit.

Matthew Schmidt: [00:07:04] So I think the biggest learning there was that. When you’re bootstrapped, you’re very, very focused on making sure that you’re funding everything with the cash flow from adding customers, and that you do need to solve a problem immediately versus trying to. Here we’re very much focused on we see the problem, we understand how to solve the problem. But we’re also we’re building something that hasn’t been done before and there’s intellectual property behind it and that is allowed. We needed the additional funding to be able to really bring that bigger vision to to work. Right. And so the big learning, I would say, is that you when you’re bootstrapped and when you’re somewhat more cash strapped in that way, you make different decisions about the things that you prioritize that maybe don’t serve you best for accelerating the business forward. Whereas when you’re down this path now with having raised a small amount of money here, people logic, we’re making choices around how do we hire the best people for the job to be able to to get us to where we’re going as quickly as we can.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:23] Rather than just hiring the person to solve the problem today.

Matthew Schmidt: [00:08:27] Yeah. And then what’s going to take us into the future, which is what we’re looking at now and aiming for something that is going to have a much larger impact on the business. And so that’s we are we’re very focused on. And the other difference being that when you’re funded and you’re backed, when you’re using other folks as money, you’re very focused. You’re always thinking about how you’re going to build the right relationships that are going to get you to an exit. And when you’re bootstrapped and it’s your own money, you’re not necessarily thinking about that. You’re going to look for an exit. You’re happy when one comes. But that’s not ultimately for most folks the the way that they run their business.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:16] Now, what about from as a CEO, as a leader, the feeling when you’re bootstrapped, you know, kind of the buck stops with you. But when you’re using other people’s money, now you’ve got other people yelling at you.

Matthew Schmidt: [00:09:31] Well, you know, ultimately with the team, the buck stops with me. And and it’s now not only do I feel an obligation to my team to make sure that I’m doing everything that I can to to clear the roadblocks for them. I’m also very aware of the obligation that I have to our investors to make sure that we ultimately get them a return on their investment and that we’re incorporating them into the processes where it makes sense with our own business and keeping them updated. And so you really now are beholden to two different groups of stakeholders within the business. When you when you’ve taken other people’s money and there is a saying that that used to that I was used to know and it was you spend your money differently when it’s other people’s money. But the truth is, when it’s other people’s money, you are actually accountable to them for how you spend. And so it’s for me, it’s important that we do that in a in a way that is conservative and appropriate for what they expected to get out of their investment in us.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:47] Right. And aggressive enough to get to the milestones you need to get to.

Matthew Schmidt: [00:10:51] Exactly where we are certainly beholden to the model that we put in front of them in our projections for where we expect to get to, that’s for sure.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:00] Now as a leader, is there a mentor or an advisor or somebody that’s kind of your true north that you aspire to be? Or is this something that you have just been kind of picking up on your own and, you know, just figuring things out on your own?

Matthew Schmidt: [00:11:17] Yeah, that’s. Until recently, I was not someone who really took advantage of having coaches and mentors and advisors. Over the past couple of months, I’ve made a pretty concerted effort to start to incorporate more of those types of people into my into my world so that I get different perspectives as I try to figure out how to run the business and that I have people to turn to when I’m looking to figure out how to solve problems. And so I have different coaches for the different types of challenges that might come up in my world. Some are useful for helping me understand challenges around product market fit and go to market, and others are useful for helping me just understand the day and day out stressors of being a CEO and I think I have begun to see how that why people turn to those. And I’ve had some great other CEOs that have leveraged both of our both of my coaches and others to. Have them be able to tell me the value that they’ve seen from from working with people like that and how it’s helped them accelerate their business.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:33] So what was the kind of reason for taking that leap into coaching? Did something happen or was there something that you were like, other people are doing this. Am I missing something that’s like right in front of me that I should just be checking out?

Matthew Schmidt: [00:12:48] You know, that was I probably started down that path in a moment of self doubt of whether I was doing the right thing as a CEO. And so they in speaking with some other CEOs and to some of our customers who actually referred me to one of my coaches, they they spoke of similar problems and how that had helped them. So I don’t know that there was any one thing other than that I knew that I wanted to be a better CEO and a leader and that this was a way that had worked for others that were at our stage in place to be able to get there.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:27] Now, where do you think your your superpower is as a leader?

Matthew Schmidt: [00:13:34] That’s a that’s a great question. I think that typically my superpower is being able to see around corners and to see the whole picture. That tends to be where I had the most value and which gives me a different perspective than the rest of the team has. And being able to understand where we need to to make changes and do that in a way that’s not going to just disrupt the entire organization.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:05] Now. Any advice for other founders out there on building that team of eight players? The team of people, they can kind of take your vision and make it real.

Matthew Schmidt: [00:14:18] I think you can’t stress enough how important it is to have a players on the team and to go and get the best players that you can. I’m a sole founder here and people logic, but the people that I’ve put around me on the executive team are people that I’ve known forever and who have been important into the growth of of people logic. And so if you you’re going to have a much harder time if you don’t figure out one way or another how to get those players in at the moment where they have an impact, it may stretch your exit or the ability to get another round of funding by months or years if you don’t bring those people in at the right time. So my advice is definitely one way or another, figure out how to bring those people in, to get them to buy into your vision and get them to help you make it real.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:18] So it sounds like you’re saying that those are must haves. Not nice to have.

Matthew Schmidt: [00:15:23] I have come to the position that having those eight players, particularly around you, on your senior leadership team is a must have.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:32] Now, how did you hear about Start, Showdown and Panoramic Ventures?

Matthew Schmidt: [00:15:38] Oh, gosh, it’s it’s been a couple of months. I think know in this case, I think I was. There was an outreach from Panoramic Ventures. We were in the middle of raising our our pre-seed round. And I think they invited us in to fill out the application. And we went through the process and went through the first stage and the second stage and then were eventually selected as a finalist and got to present on the stage, which was fortunate that they had moved back to to being in person. And it was in Charlotte here where we’re based in Durham, so we North Carolina. And so we were able to go and be a person and present as a finalist for their second ever event, I think.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:25] Was there any aspect of the process that was most beneficial or that you felt like that was a good use of our time?

Matthew Schmidt: [00:16:33] You know, just getting to basically the first couple of stages of it are really basically lightning pitches. 2 to 5 minutes. Getting to do it over and over again. And that part was super helpful. After that, being a finalist. The getting to see the other founders and hear how they talked about it here, that they were having the same challenges and being in the same stage that was that part was also super helpful. The actual presenting in person in front of other people was entirely too nerve wracking, particularly after having been virtual for the last two years. Right. So suddenly going back and being in person and presenting and doing your pitch and walking down a stage and you forget how different that is from just being a head on a zoom screen.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:28] Yeah, I think we’re all relearning that nowadays. We’re all relearning that in real life experience.

Matthew Schmidt: [00:17:34] Exactly. Your real life social skills of having to get dressed and put on and actually interact with people is is something you have to relearn. So. But the act of I was appreciative that they pushed for that in person and we’re able to do that in such a way that we were able to get out and pitch to an audience and really got some really great feedback even though we didn’t.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:01] So what’s next for people? Logic. How can we help?

Matthew Schmidt: [00:18:06] Yeah, the next we’ve just finished our our first round here of funding and we’re really very focused on adding new customers and growing the business that’s getting that revenue in the door is really the thing that we’re most focused on now. We’ve got a great team in place and now if there’s companies that that have the problems that we solve around attrition and burnout and ineffective processes, where we’re here to help and always looking to find ways to work with great companies.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:39] And those companies are what, 50 plus people with that are growing rapidly.

Matthew Schmidt: [00:18:45] Yep. 50 plus growing rapidly, usually in the tech space.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:49] And then what are some symptoms that they might have a problem that you can solve?

Matthew Schmidt: [00:18:54] Yeah. Usually they’re worried that they’re going to lose team members or they’re starting to hear people talk about burnout. Those tend to be two quick signs that they need to do something.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:07] Well, Matt, thank you so much for sharing your story today. If somebody wants to connect with you or learn more about people logic, what’s a website?

Matthew Schmidt: [00:19:15] Yeah, it’s people object I. And you can also reach me at math and people object I.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:23] All right. Well, thank you again for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Matthew Schmidt: [00:19:28] Thanks so much. I appreciate it.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:29] All right. This Lee Kantor. We will see all next time on Startup Showdown.

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