Ajay Agarwal: How did you originally get in touch with BCV? What were your early conversations like?

Matt Martin: A mutual friend at Greylock, Saam Motamedi, introduced you and me after I had heard from a customer that BCV was asking about their Clockwise use. This led to some great early conversations in the spring of 2020, right as the pandemic was forming. In fact, the last in-person meeting I had was with you at a very empty San Francisco BCV office the day after Clockwise closed our offices! It was a wild ride and, in fact, we wrote an article about it.

AA: How would you describe the nature of your relationship with BCV today?

MM: Collaborative, supportive, and engaged. You are a fantastic investor who, as a former operator himself, has deep empathy for what it takes to build an iconic company. You can pattern match against a wide variety of top-tier companies, you know where to press, and how to add leverage to the business.

AA: That’s so nice to hear! What do you appreciate most about working with Bain Capital Ventures?

MM: The team. When we partnered up with BCV, I had conviction we were bringing on an amazing operator like yourself who could add an incredible amount of go-to-market experience to our board meetings. That’s turned out to be true, but I’ve been equally impressed by the broader BCV team–everyone from Kevin Zhang to Leslie Crowe has been willing and able to pitch in.

AA: What inspired you to become a founder?

MM: As clichéd as it may be to reference Steve Jobs, I still remember sitting in my office as a corporate litigator (yes, I was a lawyer) hearing that Jobs had died and watching his Stanford commencement address. The startup I had founded in college was dying on the vine, and I had a lot of sunk costs in the form of law school loans. Hearing the now deceased legend remind us to have “the courage to follow your heart and intuition” made me realize that no amount of sunk cost should drown out my dreams. So, I packed up to move to San Francisco later that month and took whatever job someone in tech would give me.

AA: We’re certainly glad you did! What’s the best advice you’ve received about being a founder?

MM: Be yourself. There’s no playbook here, no template, no paint by numbers–building a company is just plain hard. It takes resilience, it takes grit, it takes tenacity. In short, it takes a lot from you. And if you lose sight of who you are, it can take everything.

As founders, part of our job is to look for any point of leverage and crank on it for all it’s worth. Any incremental advantage can alter the course of our business. That’s why advice, especially from those who have been in our shoes and learned the hard way, can be so incredibly precious. Every path to the top is unique and you have to find a way to make it work for you.

AA: What would you want other entrepreneurs / founders to know about working with BCV?

MM: Again, it comes down, first and foremost, to the team. The team at BCV has always been excited to pitch in with anything under the sun. Additionally, I’ve found that BCV’s network adds reach beyond the normal Silicon Valley focus that many of us have–being part of the larger Bain Capital ecosystem opens doors that other firms don’t have access to.