September 29, 2022

1097: Self-Awareness Makes VC Investing Sane and Reasonable with Matt Melymuka

38 minutes

Matt Melymuka is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at PeakSpan Capital. Growing a business does not follow a uniform path. Matt shares their different approach to venture investing that is, in his words, sane rather than shooting for the top at all costs.

He digs into their incremental value creation method that aligns with where the company is and where it can reasonably go. Their philosophy is anchored on self-awareness and it is this mindset that they bring to the table when working with businesses in the emerging growth phase of their development.

HIGHLIGHTS

There is no one path to success: Bespoke growth maintains optionality

Status quo KPIs are not always the best metric to measure a business

Offering specialization and focus that has proven to grow companies

Incremental value creation and selling better during an economic slowdown

QUOTES

Be self-aware that not every company is a billion-dollar company - Matt: "We are just huge believers in real transparency, thinking about not what are you going to tell people at a cocktail party about how much money you raised or what your valuation was, but rather what kind of company goals are associated with this growth plan, what's the resource you need to get there, and let's talk about how we get there together."

"And, let's talk about a two, two and a half year sprint because the fog of war is so thick beyond that that presenting your billion-dollar case to my partnership in five years is just crazy. That's trying to pick up the Powerball winner. So we just really pursue things incrementally and iterably"

Assess companies from the ground up and be reasonable with expectations - Matt: "We're setting up these sessions with these operating advisors to really just diagnose and get a baseline check of kind of where each functional group is, where do we have holes, where do we need to supplement the team, where do we need to build better process and infrastructure.”

“And the sane and rational point from all of that is really coming out of that work, we will kind of build from the ground up what does this all imply in terms of the resources we need for the next year and a half, two years, and a reasonable expectation of where we could scale to. And so that work will dictate what the plan should be and what we should all align around versus starting with the plan."

Find out more about Matt in the links below:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-melymuka-98b5a617/

Email: [email protected]

Website: https://peakspancapital.com/