Episode Transcript
Julia: I'm Julia Hoggett CEO of the London Stock Exchange, and I'm delighted to be joined by Matthew Scullion, who's the CEO of Matillion, to talk about the journey the company's had so far, and where it's going from here. Matthew, welcome to the Stock Exchange, somewhere you're pretty familiar with actually.
Matthew: Indeed, always good to be here Julia, thank you very much for having me on the show today.
Julia: So let's start by talking a bit about Matillion. So you started it in 2011, in Altrincham, and you've grown it from there to a global organisation already. Tell me a little bit about what Matillion does and what your vision for the company is?
Matthew: Yeah. Gosh. 2011. It doesn't seem that long ago. So I'll tell you a bit about Matillion. We're a software company. We manufacture a software platform called the Data Productivity Cloud. We make data engineers wildly more productive, and we make it easier to do data engineering, by making it what we call 'low-code, no code'. It's a big problem. And it's a problem that's being accelerated by this new generation of generative AI technology. And so increasingly our platform, and the use cases that our customers are doing are AI based and AI augmented. And yeah, that's what we do. It's not what we always did. The story behind the company really, is that we found it hard to be as productive as we'd like to be. We were using cloud technology. We were integrating data on behalf of our clients, and we thought we need to be faster, and we think we should be able to be faster. We couldn't find any software to do it, though and so we built our own, and that's what we launched in 2015. I think we were about 10 or 12 people then, the company is more than 500 team members now, tens of thousands of users, over a thousand large clients around the world. And yeah, that's what we do.
Julia: So that solving a problem piece is critical. The number of CEOs I talk to who have identified a problem that they were coming up against first, before they then try and figure out how to solve it and build the company around that solution. Do you have a sense I mean, we've talked about this before, you've mentioned it to me, that being making cloud software and data software is in a sense a bit like being a paper manufacturer. You don't know whether that paper is being used as a jotting pad or to write Harry Potter or Shakespeare.
Matthew: Yeah.
Julia: And so you're making data processing more straightforward. But that data, those data elements could be anything?
Matthew: Yeah.
Julia: How do you develop that capability to really solve for a usability across such a broad range of use cases? Now, one of the things I understand about your technology is the ability to basically have logical processing so you can't make mistakes in the way you're processing data. But that's a really interesting way of looking at it, to really think through how would the client experience of trying to work through my software be?
Matthew: 100% This comes to the heart of high-growth business building, I think. So it really, you have to be solving a real problem, and you have to do it in a way, that's easy for customers to access and that they're willing to pay for being solved. And that for me, we call that product market fit, and that for me, is at the heart of any high-growth business, really. In our case, we identified it through empathy really. We are and were data engineers.
Julia: Yeah.
Matthew: We make technology for data engineers. So we've always had a deep empathy for what our customers do. We had the problem ourselves. We developed some software to solve it for ourselves and thought, gosh, maybe the rest of the world's got this problem as well. But however you identify the problem, you create, in our case a piece of software to, to solve the problem. And from there on out, what you're really trying to do is at industrial scale, synthesise the voice of your customers to make sure that the way that you take the software, fulfils their needs. So that, for instance, and not the reason I'm particularly here today at the London Stock Exchange, but you guys are a customer of ours, a very large and sophisticated financial services company. And, you know, we listen to your team about what they need the platform to do next. And our mission is to unlock data's potential by making data engineering teams wildly more productive, able to, make more data business ready, faster. But what they choose to do, with that capability we give them, is up to them. Here at the London Stock Exchange, your use case will be very different to our customers all around the rest of the world. We've got sports franchises, using our technology to understand their fans better. We, we have banks. US based industrial's making earthmoving equipment. But the thing that all these customers have in common is trying to get business advantage by understanding their data better. And they could only do that once they've unlocked its latent potential using our platform.
Julia: And you talked about getting to 500 people, and you've got teams around the world now. That cultural fit of growing that engineering capability and the people who can understand that product market fit and really understand what clients need, it's a critical sort of symbiotic relationship, I think. What's your sense of how you build culture and that ambition and scale within your people, particularly for a fast-growing company like yours?
Matthew: Yeah. Culture is so important. There's that phrase isn't there, 'culture beats strategy'. And I think that's true. I occasionally get asked, what's something that you think about on your story so far that you've done wrong, and something that you think you've done right? Now on the done wrong category, Julia, it's normally too long a list.
Julia: It's a how long have you got.
Matthew: Yeah, exactly. If it's past 10 a.m. in the morning, I've already done something wrong that day. But on the doing right side, there's a few things I think Matillion has got materially right so far on its journey, which for me is only just starting. But one of them in particular that springs to mind is, on the very first day of the company, I wanted somewhere to write down the values of the company, and I wrote them down, as I say, the first morning of the first day. The first value, for instance, is confidence without arrogance at Matillion. And, and for me, those have always been the, one non-optional thing about working in Matillion. They're the lingua franca that all Matillioners trust and understand and communicate with. And because of that, they become an incredible scaling scaffolding. It's something that allows you with more confidence than you would perhaps otherwise have, to hire that team. And yeah the strategy is also important, but I think the culture is a lot more durable. And, I think it's the, the magic sauce of how you scale a business. I mean, that must be the same here I guess?
Julia: It is. Absolutely. And for me, the most important thing that any person who runs a business can do is set the strategy, set the vision, set the purpose for an organisation and the culture that you want people to follow to achieve that purpose. But they have to have a buy-in to the purpose. And the culture in the way you describe it has a massive role in influencing that. You're now making pretty healthy, steady revenues. But it takes a lot of investment to get to the sort of company you are now. And a lot of that's come from private capital.
Matthew: Yes.
Julia: Do you want to share a little bit about what your experience to date has been about raising capital to make Matillion go?
Matthew: Yeah, absolutely. So you're absolutely right. Matillion is a venture capital backed company. We've raised a little over 300 million US dollars. So we're a British company, but our accounting currency is US dollars. And our revenue is all US dollars. So a little over 300 million, in venture capital across five main venture rounds. It's all come from institutional investors. Apart from, we have three, in later rounds, three what we call strategic investors. So these are companies who we choose to sell shares in our company to, and they choose to invest dollars onto our balance sheet, not just for a financial return, but because of the strategic synergies between our companies. So the cloud data platform Snowflake, are a co-owner of Matillion, if you like. The cloud data platform Databricks. And then finally, the bank Citi, are investors in Matillion. But all the others are institutional investors. And yeah, we've learnt a lot. And I think we've also learned that it's perfectly possible to raise capital in the UK, if you've got the right sort of business.
Julia: Now CMIT, the Capital Markets Industry Task Force was created to try and look at how we can sort of enhance the reform of the UK capital markets, so that great, great companies can start here, they can grow here, they can scale here, and they can stay here. And so that our capital markets have the best possible assets for our policy holders, our pensioners and our savers to have enough money for life events and old age. But you're running an incredibly dynamic, fast-growing company, and yet you're devoting all this time that you have also to the CMIT agenda. Can you reflect on why you think the Capital Markets Industry Taskforce agenda is so important to you, and actually where Matillion sits in that as well?
Matthew: I'll tell you the reason why that, not only am I willing to, but I feel very lucky and grateful to be part of CMIT, and it's because, I think the UK, you know if you were to make a shopping list of ingredients that you need to build consequential businesses that just in a small way change the axis on which the world spins.
Matthew: If you look at the ingredients, there's a list of them.
Julia: Yeah.
Matthew: And some of them are really expensive and hard to get and take a generation or two to get. And then other ones I think, are easier to get. And the UK, in my opinion at least, has already the hard to get, expensive ones. We already have one of the best university systems in the world, producing world class software engineers in abundance, talking to my, industry. So we already have that piece. We already have trillions in capital. We have an enviable time zone position. We all speak English. We have a business-friendly set of laws and regulations that makes it easy and trusted and safe to set up a company here. We all speak English, which is pretty useful.
Julia: Yeah.
Matthew: You know, these are hard or impossible to buy advantages that the UK has. What we don't yet have, I think, is the playbook of how to assemble those component parts, and regularly and reliably build consequential businesses. Now, why am I personally so passionate about this? At Matillion we've started, I hope, to execute that playbook. Over 90% of our revenue is exports. The UK is a material market for us, but it's you know, it's less than 10%. Most of our revenue comes from the US. That's great for UK plc and the balance of payments, and the post-Brexit world that we all want to, to make a go of and, and make our economy vibrant. And then there's the value of the company that you're creating, the return to shareholders. And this is before you've even got on to why these companies exist, which is to in their small way, make a dent in the universe bigger than themselves and improve the world with their products and services. So that's why I feel passionate about it. And that's why I always feel excited to be here with you at the London Stock Exchange, talking about how we actually achieve this with CMIT.
Julia: I think you've just summed up CMIT and its purpose better than I ever could. This is value creation, that goes directly to individual people's lives, and it goes to actually making life that bit better by making things work better and work more straightforwardly. It is a virtuous circle.
Matthew: I mean, some of the, the team we have at Matillion, and I'm sure many companies are similar, but obvioulsy I'm proud of my own team, and we're essentially a manufacturing company, really. I know we often opine in this country about how we don't make anything anymore. We do, we just make it out of bits and bytes. But it's still manufacturing. Our Manchester office, I love the symmetry of this by the way, a very proud Mancunian, but our Manchester office is kind of a factory. We just make digital products and then sell them around the world. But, yeah, more of this in the UK is definitely a good thing. It's like, hard to argue, that valuable high-growth business creation isn't a good thing, but there's just a few things in the playbook we need to tweak.
Julia: I have to say this series is called Be Inspired, I think you've done a great job of not only inspiring me, but inspiring others with what you've done. But I also get the sense that you get a deep sense of inspiration from your own team and from the from the journey that you're on already. It's been great to have you here. And thank you so much for joining us.
Matthew: Julia. Thank you for having me. It's been awesome.
Julia: A pleasure.
