This week's guest is Matt Cook, Matt is currently the VP of Engineering at Tilled; before that, he launched his own startup, and before that, he was head of platform for Shipt. As you may know, Shipt was started in 2014 and was acquired by Target in 2017 for $550 Million Dollars. As you know, we live in a growing gig economy where people get to work in flexible ways that were not possible before. This is powered by technology, consumer needs, and how platforms bring together service fulfillment quickly, trackable, and cost-effectively. Even if you are not interested in how businesses like this scale and what it takes for them to operate well, you can still learn many things that can be automated with your own day-to-day experiences and where the world is continuing to move from a technological perspective. I hope you enjoy this week’s episode with Matt Cook.

 

RECAP

00:12: The first real interest I had was the game StarCraft as a predecessor to world to Warcraft, the really popular modern game. But yeah, it was a real-time strategy game. It required a lot of keyboard usage and there were just a lot of variables, you built up an army and attacked other players

9:09 My challenge would be to take it one level further than wherever you're comfortable now, so let's say, for example, maybe you're comfortable with Microsoft Excel and inputting some data and maybe generating a chart, I take that one level further

13:03 All of you guys and girls data ambitious, and does that ambition or drive carry over to other things, there's... It merely just this engineering and creating possibilities where there's currently no possibilities

13:21 certainly the best engineers I've worked with at their core are very curious, and so the idea of taking a challenging problem and solving it, just bringing into the light a solution

15:35 Just whatever your current problem is, take that to someone who's got a technical background and really just brainstorm homes, get in front of a white board and map out how long is the process we'll get 17 steps

16:52 You get obsessed with what the problem is, they can really use their creative energy to devise solutions that you wouldn't have actually described as the business owner.

18:12 You really have to push yourself to stay focused on the product and even sometimes make sub-optimal in engineering decisions, because at the end of the day, if you don't make a product that users love

21:22 What you measure improves, so if you tell the team consistently, hey, here's what we're measuring is our conversion rate on the funnel, if you give that data back to the people who are actually building the product, they'll find all kinds of creative ways

24:42 I get pretty obsessed with whatever the problem is that's the most valuable to the company, and so I really tend to focus on whatever kind of the biggest fire is

40:03 One of the key moments in ship's trajectory taking off, I was actually Amazon purchasing Whole Foods

47:13 one of the changes that it's just hard to understand until you experience it, but the company is constantly changing, so the things that you did to launch one city, they don't want to launch five as you have to adapt

 

RESOURCES

• Matt Haaga State Farm: https://www.matthaaga.com/

• https://abjets.com/