Matt Grimm
speaker
244 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Matt Grimm’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Can we take a different kind of approach than a traditional
type of company that ultimately will get to a like a stronger kind of cost margin profile if we can kind of condense that gna segment of the spend that was just a decision why um i mean it seems highly logical it seems logical and it sounds on paper uh it sounds like a kind of thing that a um a mckinsey consultant would tell you on paper to the condensed spend
In particular, on two areas, it really kind of hampered our growth and was a long-term strategic mistake. Looking back, I wish we hadn't done this. First is on the business systems side. And this kind of gets to one of my favorite quotes. I literally have this printed on my wall in my office. It's the Elon quote about production. I want to get the quote right. I have it written. It's the...
Extreme difficulty of scaling production of new technology is not well understood. It's 1000% to 10,000% harder than making a few prototypes. And the machine that makes the machine is really the genius and is really the hard part of getting full systems into production. What that means is...
There's a lot of guts to running a company, a big hardware company like us that are completely unappreciated by the average, certainly venture capitalist or investor, let alone the public, that goes into supply chain management, procurement management, the sales and operations planning, which gets into literally the guts of how many fasteners should I buy? How many brackets should I buy?
How many sensors should I buy? Into the Kind of pipeline planning. This is sort of the whole CRM side of things into the backend financial engine that kind of makes all of that work that ultimately your auditors have to interact with to stamp an audit at the end of the year. Was it obvious that this was a mistake? It's obvious now. It wasn't obvious at the time. Not at the time it wasn't, no.
So like what we should have done at the time is take a big swing and say, we're going to make massive investments in ultimately headcount and then platform spend, kind of the tools that those folks build, to build a unified kind of operating system here. We're doing that now. We announced this publicly. It's called Arsenal OS.
Like we've hired a whole bunch of heads, but in retrospect, like I should have done that two years ago and we'd be in a much stronger position now. How do you think about your relationship to Rugrat? Oh, man. I think that anybody who tells you they have no regrets is lying and they're trying to put on a face. They're trying to pretend.
I think there's a difference between sorrowful regret and introspective, reflective regret. I'm incredibly introspective. I'm incredibly self-critical. I like to joke around and roll that I'm our harshest critic. And I actually view it as part of my job to be continually pushing to do better, to go faster, to be more perfectionist.
Yeah, sure. You can do both. It is very possible to have a customer demo go very well and have the customer walk away and be like, man, that was great. I'm really excited. Like, look forward to meeting next week, talking about pricing and next steps. Ah, this is really great. Thanks for taking the time. And they walk out and they close the door, get in the car and drive away.
And to turn around and be like, whew. all right, great job team. Let's talk about the three things we can do better next time. Like that's absolutely totally doable. You can both celebrate your achievements and your successes and aim higher and better next time. Those things aren't mutually exclusive.
And I think if anything, and this tends to happen a lot in the Valley and certainly amongst VC world is like a navel gazing at like how amazing you are and a self puffery of like, ah, we're the best. Like, first of all, like hubris kills everybody in the long run. So you can't have that. And second of all is just objectively false.
Like in any individual circumstance, you are always misplaying things. To wit, like I guarantee at the end of this, I'm going to listen to this interview no less than four times making notes of different tacks I could have take or different points I should have made or different arguments I could have gone down and less because I'm neurotic more because the next time I want to do better.
And I think that like you can take that mindset, you can take that approach. And bring that to everything from our facilities to our IT stack to our recruiting process. Literally everything as a company, we should be in a position where we say like, okay, great, we achieved that milestone. What can we do better next time? What's the learning? What should we change?
yes however i think that point is is kind of hyperbolic if the decision is truly genuinely tomorrow and there's new information that is coming today yeah waiting for tomorrow is better that's in practice it's not actually the point that the question is trying to get at the point that the question to get at is like over analyzing over data collecting driving to consensus amongst large committees
over many, many, many, many months, getting to a groupthink decision at the end, yeah, is always net worse than making a quick decision, seeing the impact of it, learning from it, and then maybe changing course, maybe changing tact completely. Yeah, almost always, delaying's worse. How much money have you raised to this point, give or take? give or take.
Short of debt, it would be about $4 billion. With debt, it'd be about $5 billion. Who runs the fundraise process? It's changed over the years. So in the early days, and this is because our investor profile has changed over the years too, and surely you have... the notes of who's led each round and who's participated in each round.
In the early days, it was exclusively Trey who would run our fundraising processes, and he would put Palmer or me or Brian or some of our key engineers in front of investors at the right time to get to whatever questions they had or whatever their concerns were. But really, it was orchestrated by Trey. In the later years, the more recent years, that shifted to our CFO, Bobak, entirely done
I mean, I think there are certainly individual R&D efforts. I don't think I would say, oh, we could have done this on half as much money. No, not at all. I mean, if anything, I think we should raise more and go faster.
Yeah. How many of them are lying?
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