Why Matera’s Company Culture is Great and Why It Matters
“Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the “me” for the “we””
- Phil Jackson, head coach of the Chicago Bulls from 1989 to 1998
I have more than 10 years of experience in M&A and tech start-ups/scale-ups. Having graduated from a business school and coming from the financial world, I had considered company values and culture topics as buzz words during the first years of my career. For me, the real criteria for efficiency were just to have smart, ambitious and hard-working employees in the team. Until I read Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and before I witnessed it in action at Matera.
In M&A, what does culture even mean when seniors are looking for “machines” as they say, someone who has to be available anytime, including at 3am to finalize a deck? I remember being at the office working on an excel model during the 2010 Soccer World Cup Final on a Sunday night, or printing decks at 6am after a sleepless night, before running to the station an hour later to go directly to a client meeting three hours away from Paris. Do the bosses care about their junior teams, or do they only see them as productivity tools to attend as many meetings as possible and maximize their own bonuses?
I have recently heard that in one of the top investment banks in Paris, while bosses would like to have juniors at the office, they prefer to work remotely. This is the case in many other companies. Likewise, I know so many companies which refuse “rupture conventionnelle” (French mutual agreement to terminate a work contract) when an employee requests it, because they are scared to create a jurisprudence. Can you really enjoy working in an environment where teams are so misaligned and when a key component of retention policy is to force employees to stay? This is exactly what I felt when I worked in M&A, and part of the reason why I left after three years as an analyst.
In my other previous experiences, I have felt the same cultural issues where top management was somehow disconnected from the rest of the team. I don’t want to criticize the companies I worked in which have other great assets and talents, but I just want to highlight some cultural pitfalls I have identified.
In one of the tech companies I worked in, despite being in a less formal environment, you could barely see the CEO at the office and confidentiality was everywhere. Financial communication was very limited (for instance, market shares, losses, cash position or valuation were never shared). Salaries were opaque without any salary grid. There were significant differences in compensation between people at roughly the same levels, depending on where they came from and who had recruited them. Only a few people had equity incentives, and no explanation was ever given on how it worked. We saw people leaving overnight without any explanation. Overall, the team often complained about a lack of strategy and vision, which was more a lack of communication and transparency. There are obviously many other factors determining success, but I am convinced that with more alignment and a better company culture we could have drastically improved our group performance.
In another startup (small team does not mean alignment), I remember spending time with the founder and CEO discussing our values, going through Google and Amazon values to find inspiration. We aimed for excellence, ambition, velocity, etc. During a company workshop, we asked the team what important values were for them, as a group. They focused more on values such as team spirit, solidarity, fun, etc. and it ended up in an argument with the founder who thought the team was not ambitious enough. Again, there was a misalignment between the management and the rest of the team. We not only disagreed on words, but this was also reflected every day in how we worked as a team. We, as managers, were not satisfied with the pace we were moving at and we tried to find people to blame. Meanwhile, we thought we had to find solutions by ourselves, without our team support. By the book top-down approach. Worst of all, I was misaligned with one of the C-levels. During our last discussion, he complained that my approach was too business and finance oriented. When I tried to explain him that we were a business and that decisions should be sustainable from a financial perspective, he replied “if we are just here to make money, I am not interested”. Strong cultural misfit can generate low empathy, where one cannot even consider his teammate’s role and point of view.
I recently read the best-seller Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, whose main thesis is that emotional intelligence is more important than IQ as a success factor. Quoting the work of Robert Sternberg, psychologist at Yale, and Wendy Williams, a graduate student, he explains that a group performance is more driven by how people work together with their hearts and emotions, rather than the sum of their individual IQ. He writes that “the single most important factor in maximizing the excellence of a group’s product is the degree to which the members are able to create a state of internal harmony, which lets them take advantage of the full talent of their members”. In other words, a group sharing positive energy, trust, fluent communication, and empathy will overperform. It sounds pretty obvious, and the same conclusions can be observed in team sports, but it is interesting to see (i) that it has been proven by experiences and (ii) that so many companies still miss this point. I have to admit that I missed it as well for a long time. We always want to recruit the best profiles, with the most famous names on their CV, who have already succeeded in doing what we want to achieve. It is obviously part of the equation, and a smart guy is better than a dumb one, but it is not the only important aspect to consider. Unfortunately, when we have a good candidate in front of us, we tend to forget it.
“Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
By coincidence (or by experience, or even luck), I joined Matera (proptech disrupting residential property management) in April 2020 and I have been experiencing this collective intelligence for months now. So how does this actually mater(i)alize?
During the interview process, I had a very good fit with Raphaël, the CEO and one of the three founders of the company. I found him smart, focus, transparent and mature for a first-time founder aged only 28. After three follow up calls, while we were finalizing the recruiting process, he asked for my girlfriend’s name, which I found a bit weird to start a professional relationship (I must admit I am a bit chaste on my personal life). At the end, I accepted the offer and started working as a CFO. A few days later, I received at home a backgammon board with a note inside: “I hope you will enjoy playing some games with Marion”. I have been passionate about backgammon for years now, playing some official tournaments at an amateur level, but I did not even remember having mentioned it during the interview process. This is an example of a great personalized and emotional present, much more powerful than any welcome kit with a branded t-shirt that you would find in most startups. I knew that I was in a good place, where caring and kindness were truly embodied by the founders. Obviously, this was just a first positive signal, and I was impatient to see if this was also reflected in the day-to-day operations of the company. Unsurprisingly, it was…and it still is to this day. Unsurprisingly, the company performs very well and delivers very quickly. I think we are extremely efficient as a group, and that our culture is a key performance driver. No one can say where the company will go from here, but we find ourselves in an ideal position to succeed. So, what are the components of this positive culture?
I have listed below a few examples and patterns that I have identified and that I have found interesting and different from what I had experienced in the past. These are not our company values, since they have not been defined on papers. Indeed, when I asked what the company values were during the interview process, the two other founders replied: “we have not written company values, since most of the time they are what the companies are shooting for, but not the reality, which is often the exact opposite”. There are exceptions, obviously, but that is often true.
We are a team — personal mistrust is banned
As a manager you always find yourself evaluating and judging the team. You can often raise some issues and suggest improvements, or even fire people. However, personal mistrust is banned. A few times, the founder and CEO stopped me when I crossed the line, just because I used the wrong word or because I was criticizing someone for little or no reason at all (as we can end up doing, sometimes). Recently, when he had to solve a conflict, he clearly asked for trust, caring and positive energy. No personal mistrust. Consequently, an employee recently made me realize that, at Matera, people do not criticize their colleagues or their managers at lunch, while it is often the case in many companies. Likewise, a few days ago a new joiner coming from a law firm mentioned during his first day introduction that it stroke him to see people smiling. I think this is a key asset to perform as a team. We trust each other and are aligned and focused on the same goals.
Uncompromising recruitments
A couple of times, we had good candidates for strategic positions. But no matter their experiences, strong achievements, or the urgency to fill up that position, whenever there was a small doubt on cultural fit, we decided very quickly not to hire the candidates, without any doubt.
Collaborative work vs. top-down execution
Our founders really pay attention to collaborative work. Feedbacks from the teams on the ground nurture the way we build operations. OKRs are built with the feedback of ALL employees. Our priorities are defined based on these feedbacks, the same way a product roadmap is based on user feedbacks. Also, our CEO does not like top down requests but prefers to raise issues that we will have to solve together with the team input. No one should be a mere executant. During our weekly all-hands meeting, different team members present a project they are working on. In companies when top managers hold the information, all-hands meetings are a CEO (or C-levels) update, while at Matera, the information is more distributed between team members. This is a proof of trust (and low ego).
Low ego / disagree and commit
Similarly to many companies, we often disagree at Matera. This can be on compensation, recruitments, investments, organization, etc. However, we handle it way differently than in other companies I worked in the past:
- There is very low ego in discussions: sometimes arguments can be blunt, but I have never seen anyone being offended or taking something personal. Because it is not. Never.
- Consequently, it is much easier to recognize mistakes and set things rights. Managers focus on finding solutions, not excuses nor someone to blame
- We never come back on past decisions: when we have decided something (even if we disagreed during debates), we follow the decision-maker (ultimately the CEO). If it was the wrong decision, we come back to the second point. We do not care about who was right or wrong, we care about getting better and moving forward
Freedom
Once you have trust, collaboration, and uncompromising recruitments, productivity does not depend on the number of working hours or presence at the office. At Matera, we do not push for full remote because we think the collective energy requires to meet at the office on a regular basis, but we definitely do not judge people’s individual performance or commitment based on their presence at the office. And we allow unlimited remote work. But what is really striking is that despite this, most of the people come to the office. Because they enjoy working together. Remember the investment banking example?
Transparency
Transparency is a consequence of all of the above. If we trust each other as a team, if decisions are fact-based with no ego, if we focus on finding solutions, what do we have to hide? As I mentioned earlier, I come from environments where confidentiality was a golden rule, with gatekeepers to protect the organization (actually the management). Do not get me wrong, it has been pretty hard to adapt and we had some tough discussions with Matera’s CEO. However, I have been following him and I am now convinced that transparency is the way to go:
- we are transparent on all our KPIs, even sensitive ones such as burn and runway rates, and we communicate regularly on them through a monthly newsletter
- we have implemented a salary grid and we are transparent on how compensation is determined (not all salaries are transparent because we think it would not be productive for people to compare their compensation with each other, but we would be very comfortable if salaries happened to be disclosed. We know they are fair)
- We are transparent on tough discussions with suppliers or partners
Transparency allows us to increase trust and team engagement. People know the rationale behind the decisions we make or their salary increase. Then, as a CFO, it allows me to give autonomy to head of teams. They know the numbers, they know the constraints, they know their KPIs. Since we have the same level of information, the head of the team just has to do what he thinks is the best for the company. If he needs a new tool or recruit, he knows the KPIs he has to control and the global constraints of the company. We obviously keep discussions open, but sharing knowledge allows to transfer ownership and give more velocity and flexibility to the team instead of waiting for the CEO/CFO’s approval every single time they have to spend money or sign a contract.
I remember Leetchi’s founder Celine Lazorthes recalling the early days of Leetchi in a Medium article called: “Worst case, we would have had fun”. I think this is the main benefit of a positive and caring culture: the company maximizes its odds to succeed, but worst-case scenario, if it fails, at least people would have had fun. And is it not what we all look for, ultimately?
