Matin Movassate, CEO and Co-founder of Heap, used his experience as a Product Manager at Facebook to build a company that now boasts over 6,000 customers.
Matin Movassate, CEO and Co-founder of Heap, used his experience as a Product Manager at Facebook to build a company that now boasts over 6,000 customers. His strong background and leadership are key to the company's success and fundraising efforts.
Alejandro: Alrighty. Hello everyone, and welcome to the DealMakers show. I’m very, very excited about the guest that we have today. He’s a guest that has been at it for quite a bit as an entrepreneur, and I think we’re going to be learning a lot from his journey on the ups and the downs because we know that building a company is not a straight line. So, without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Matin Movassate. Welcome to the show. Matin Movassate: Thank you so much for having me, Alejandro. Alejandro: Originally from the Bay Area. Your parents, I’m sure, had a great influence on you. They immigrated from Iran, so I’m sure starting over and building everything from scratch was an amazing inspiration for you. Matin Movassate: It was, indeed. I definitely feel very spoiled. They had to go through quite a bit to make a transition to a new country, to a new culture, and I was the
beneficiary of that. Alejandro: Do you think that inspired that entrepreneurial bug for you to see them working hard and developing a life for all of you, and then, especially being in the Bay Area, which is this incredible ecosystem of innovation? Matin Movassate: It definitely is. It’s hard to not get the bug if you’re in the Bay Area. My mom and dad actually are entrepreneurs themselves. They have a construction company. They build houses. That’s one way in which they influenced me. A second way is – I first got into software by doing a bunch of work for my dad. My dad enlisted me to do a bunch of menial tasks for him, like moving files around on his computer and organizing it. I was really lazy and didn’t want to do that work and wanted to get back to playing video games, so I learned software to automate a lot of that work for me. So, in more ways than one, they definitely
influenced my entry into this area. Alejandro: Software, so, solving problems – when it comes down to, for example, problem-solving. What would you say got you into software? What was that bug because that problem-solving, you’re applying it today as an entrepreneur, so what really hooked you on software, engineering, and on solving problems? Matin Movassate: I would say it’s two things. One is laziness. As I previously mentioned, when you write software once, you can have it run infinity times on your behalf, and that’s a pretty cool and unique thing. The second thing I would say is, there’s something really gratifying – do you code, Alejandro? Alejandro: No. Unfortunately, not. Matin Movassate: What’s interesting and unique about it is there’s a really tight feedback loop. I would say there are very few things, as an entrepreneur, that have a tight feedback loop, which is to say, you
make a change, and you see the results of that change immediately. In software, you can do that, which is really cool. It allows you to improve rapidly, and it’s super gratifying. I think those things got me interested early on. Alejandro: Got it. After this, you did the route of going to Stanford and doing your degree there. You did computer science and economics. That’s quite an interesting combination. Matin Movassate: It’s interesting. Actually, I always enjoyed computer science, and it’s funny. What made me want to explore economics was I took the computer science AP in high school and didn’t do as well as I wanted to. Back then, I was a dumb high schooler, so I could only think in terms of grades as the primary proxy for what I should pursue and what my passions are. That made me start with economics for a bit, and then I did all of those factors that I mentioned previously about
just how gratifying it is to write software and learn about software and change your pace within that field. I found myself back in computer science. And, of course, I don’t know if you noticed in my background, I had to make sure to enter a Master’s program so I could drop out as the ultimate badge of honor in Silicon Valley. That, to me, is the most important part of my educational background. Alejandro: Talking about that education, it’s interesting how you were part of some of the biggest corporations in the Bay Area before you actually went at it as an entrepreneur yourself. I’m sure that during that time, you really learned what works in some of those rocket ships. You were at Mozilla. You were also at Google. You were also at Facebook. I’m sure that you identified patterns during the time of working at these different corporations that you knew that one day you would apply for
something of your own. So, what were some of the things that you learned from working, let’s say, at Google and then also from working at Facebook, two of the biggest companies? Matin Movassate: The things I learned might not be what you think. I’ll caveat a little bit. Most of those experiences that you’re mentioning were internships, so I wasn’t at any of these companies for very long. I don’t want to pretend I understand their inner workings. I’ll tell you something I had to unlearn even though that’s not what you asked me, Alejandro. In places like Google and Facebook, I think a lot of the teams take for granted the massive stage that they can already take advantage of, like the brand name that they have that makes it easier to recruit, the existing infrastructure they have that makes it easy to scale, the existing user base they have that makes it easy to get distribution. I think
what that can create if you’re not paying enough attention is laziness around finding product/market fit. You can just get away with not being quite as good at it at one of those companies. You can force it in a way that you can’t if you’re starting something from scratch where nobody knows who you are, nobody cares about what you’re doing, and you have to build value from nothing. So, the pattern of product ratio at those companies, I think, took a page from the stereotypical Steve Jobs model of I have a vision of how the world should work, and I want to force that upon people. I think that can be a very dangerous mindset to have as a startup founder because you need to be extremely good at listening to the market. You need to be extremely good at humility, and you don’t have many chances for failure. I had to unlearn a lot of those things and be super humble and super honest with
myself and grounded in a way I really didn’t need to be at those companies. Alejandro: You were talking about product/market fit, and product/market fit is, obviously, the Holy Grail for startups. What have you learned? We’re going to be talking about Heap, which is your baby, your own company, which Facebook was the segue for Heap. What did you learn during this time around product/market fit? Why is product/market fit so important, and what does it look like? Matin Movassate: I think there’s been tons of literature and talks out there around how to find product/market fit initially. You’ll hear founders talk about it in terms of product/market fit is the market pulling for your product, people signing up that you never talked to, people using your product in ways that you didn’t anticipate, versus pushing a boulder up a hill is the rule of thumb. If you find yourself pushing through
headwinds, you haven’t found product/market fit yet, so you should keep going. I think there’s a lot there. I think what’s more interesting to me is that once you find product/market fit, which we were lucky to do in the first couple of years at Heap, that is not the same as you are ready to start scaling your company. That became clear to me early on, at Heap, where we had product/ market fit in the sense that we had happy companies and retained customers using us in all of these different ways we didn’t imagine. But product/market fit is not a binary thing, and it’s not even a single product in a single market fitting together. You might have multiple markets and multiple use cases that you’re serving, and you cannot scale unless you have been really crisp with yourself in your team about the exact parameters of that product/market fit. I think the first step is you get product/market
fit. The second step is to be really clear about what that product/market fit is to yourself and your team. Then, at that point, you can start scaling to the next step of growth for your company. I don’t think enough people talk about that. Alejandro: Yeah, 100%. In your case, after the time at Facebook, it was time to go at it on your own. What was that process like because after being at Facebook in 2012, you started probably to incubate the idea to think what’s going to be next? That essentially ended up being Heap, so what was the incubation process like? How did you come up with the idea? How did you think about that team that you would recruit for it, and what was that journey like? Matin Movassate: The experience that I had at Facebook that had informed our initial thesis at Heap was, I experienced just how difficult it was to use analytics in practice. As context, Heap is a
product analytics platform…