Episode #5: Makenna Smutz - Employee to co-founder

In this episode we had the enormous pleasure of talking to Makenna Smutz. Makenna, is the co-founder at a brand new project called Wavr. Before this she was co-founder at Meeshkan a SaaS solution targeted at product teams aimed to ease UI testing. We talked to her about:

- her journey into co-foundership,
- challenges of refocusing a company on a new product,
- strategies to develop and market a SaaS product,

and much more. Hope you will enjoy this episode!

Transcript

Spela 0:00

Hello, and welcome back to startups. People in equity. To Tamas takes care of people, operations at LumiNova and it's also people partner and the people of collective. I am head of CX at logy. And equity management and ownership intelligence platform. This is a space where we discuss topics. Well related to startups, people, inequity. We hope that you will enjoy listening to today's episode, as much as we enjoyed recording it. Let's dive straight in So welcome Makenna. It's very nice to have you on the podcast with, and we're going to touch on two very interesting topics today. You've gone through quite a bit in the startup world, and I'm very excited to hear your side of the story. before we dive into any topics, I want to take a couple of seconds to introduce you. in the past few days, I have been served many Adam Grant and Simon Sinek quotes, and all of them have got to do with persistence and discipline and how the compound effect of it matters more than anything else. And that is basically who you are. You're one of those people that I read about online, how, when you focus on something, you will actually stick with it. And you will actually succeed in it. You're self-taught in design self-taught and coding. You're incredibly curious, you know, everything there is to know about coffee or graph, QL, any random thing. And on top of that, you're just extremely kind as a person. So in terms of humanness and ambition, but trying to do things that I value very highly, you're always an inspiration. And if I veer into a more professional one, which is also, where I really, really respect you is that you've worked for four startups. All of them sub 10 people, all of them had some type of funding and all of them are doing really well. Right now. One of them is a unicorn. One of them got a series C series seed series a and I think they were all very lucky to have, you.

Makenna 2:11

Well, thank you for that super kind introduction. Might be a bit biased, but thank you very much.

Tamas 2:17

It's great. I also loved it. I would. Second of course, most of that, it's very interesting how, like with almost every guest we have, like kindness is one of the, one of the attributes we mentioned. So yeah, I think we were very lucky to have such amazing guests. And when you were speaking about the four startups, it kind of made me think about this metric, that is used, in sports teams. So in basketball, for example, but we are also now using in water polo, which is kind of calculating if you're on the field or in the pool, when a goal or a point is scored, then you kind of get a little bit of attribution. So now I kind of think of it like this, you know, like you were there for four great startups, there must be something in common and it might be you amongst other people as well. So, so yeah, I think.

Spela 3:08

And I think one last kudos to you is you have great tastes and people, and that led you to marrying me,

Makenna 3:16

yeah, just to add on to your introduction. I am currently the co-founder with my partner, Mike at a startup called Weaver brand new. I'm sure we'll get into it at some point during this, but I don't necessarily have a standardized title. I do design code and a lot on kind of the managerial admin side of things. And yeah, I'm really thrilled to be here and excited to share some of my experience,

Tamas 3:45

I was just gonna say that that's a really wide scope, right? Like, is there any part of that resonates, would you more than the other,

Makenna 3:55

Maybe the underlying backend. For all three of those things, which is I'm really, really passionate and motivated about creating something out of nothing, like being able to add some tangibility to, to an idea. And that could be something being designed. It could be a product that someone can use. Now. It could be a dream team being pulled together. Right. It's a wide, it's definitely a wide range, but I think it provides a lot of context in building startups to have experience in lots of different spaces and be able to empathize with the people you're working with.

Spela 4:36

Yeah. I think it's a very good segue into. Well, we wanted to talk about today because you joined a startup, it was an existing startup. They have gone through a funding round to actually, and at the end of it, you've become a co-founder. How does that happen?

Makenna 4:58

Yeah, it's definitely not a story here very often. I'll try to summarize it a bit, yeah, so I joined this company. Because one of my previous jobs, we hosted a conference. And at that conference, I had connected with one of the speakers and it turned out when I was searching for a job that they were in the market for someone design, web development skillset. And I started a conversation with their CEO and less than 24 hours later, I was in their slack and onboarded into the team. It was a, a super like fast non-traditional interview process. And I think that really set the tone for what this company was. It was very hands-off Self-directed and they basically wanted someone to help them come into the era of like web, basically all of their sales and stuff that they had done so far had all been offline. Their website, when I joined legitimately had all CSS taken off of the page, like even the defaults that are given when you code a website. So they needed someone of my skillset said kind of, we don't know what we want. Please take care of it. And then, yeah, that was kind of the, that was how I got into the product and it really set the tone for being self-directed. And the thing was though at that point, they were very much more of a. Research collective. They had a lot of tech built and some really, really incredible developers, especially in the machine learning and AI space. And I was trying to say, you know, if we want to be what proofread, we need a software of a product to headline this whole thing. And it just fit right. That I started kind of directing people into how to make the decisions on which product to go to. I had no say on like the actual tech that was being written in the back, but it was entirely up to me to get. Give everyone the security and peace of mind and organization in order to make that decision properly. And at that point essentially Mike and I were having daily conversations in regards to what was going on. And he basically just said, you're not our web designer developer. Do you officially want to become our COO? And I, I was super thrilled. This was like three weeks into the project and it really had kind of felt like that's the, the position that I had taken up. And I was super thrilled to say, say yes, of course. And we kind of became the yin and yang partnership in building that product. that product lasted for about. Three months or so I think they built it very much off of the tech that they had, and it was a really cool product testing, graph, QL, which definitely I knew something about, but we found that we were hitting some pretty significant walls in user acquisition. And in the dev space, user acquisition can be a bit tough because product people don't really like to talk to you, then they won't answer your phone calls or emails. They want to self onboard. But, but we really, really dug it. And found that there was just kind of an apathy towards the products. People are like, yeah, it's cool, but I don't have a need for it. Maybe someone else does, but I don't. And so we really stopped everyone. Coders all basically were told no, no lines of code should be written until we figure out what we're going to do next stopped everything and started doing user research. Basically we had these like mini week or two week hackathons where we were interviewing people, chasing different ideas and really figuring out in the dev and product space, like what is our know how able to like be applied. And again, this is the second time that we've tried to do a product with the same team. And my role was very much around giving people like this psychological safety and security to explore that it was incredibly uncomfortable for developer to take on kind of this SDR sales user research role, where they're requesting people in these random slack communities that they're a part of ticket on a zoom call with them to talk about how they use releases or different things like that. So that was, that was a really bumpy time in the company's past. And, and my entire job was just to try to keep people motivated to open their laptop every morning to get us through. It was, it was really hard, but we eventually settled on a really incredible idea. Which was essentially in software. You, especially when you start to build really big and, and data intense applications you need to test. And our hypothesis was that your users are your best testers. And we, with that same team that we started out with built this product out. And this one, Mike and I really took a. Unofficial co-founder role. We had daily conversations on our vision and really where we wanted to take the team, the product, everything from hiring to like the, the prioritization of how we were going to build. And when we were going to spend on ad words and things like that we deferred to each other, essentially, if there was ever these kind of things, it was like Mike and I are partners and we moved like together there wasn't a, he was my boss anymore. It was a very interesting, kind of natural progression in like the second product that we built together.

Tamas 10:53

I have so many questions to what you said, but maybe the first one I would like to ask is. How did you kind of carve out co-founders space for yourself with Mike and how has your relationship with my can, if you can shed a bit more light there? I think that would be very, very insightful.

Makenna 11:13

Absolutely. So interestingly enough, Mike and I had this conversation and less than 24 hours was hired, and then we didn't meet in person for, I want to say eight months. It was a pretty significant amount of time. I was hired and promoted to COO and then started acting as a co-founder long before we ever met in person. And I think that that meant our conversations were. Very very important to like trust each other of course, when you interview at a company that doesn't have a product yet, it was really Mike, that inspired me to, to join this adventure. And in terms of carving out a space for COO, I think it was really the first couple of days that I joined. I was trying to just assess, like, where are we at and what do we need in order to make these decisions? We're kind of showing up every day and saying like, these are our tasks and you'd say, well, why like, what are we working towards? They just. It's something to do. Not really sure. And so it was, to me, a pretty obvious like glaring space and the experience that I've had in startups, it's like without a goal or an end goal to like what you're working on. You're, you're just like creating this artificial productivity, like sphere. Right. And so it was pretty natural. It wasn't intended I didn't, I didn't join. Mishkan thinking like, oh, I'd love to be the COO of that one day nor had I ever thought about that in terms of like my career progression, it was just the natural thing that having worked at productivity software and coached people on how to like set up their organization and their spheres as well as manage a marketing team in another company. It was just kind of a natural progression. Yeah, unfortunately it wasn't a master plan.

Spela 13:20

I think you kind of, touched on why you switched to the products. Even within this one company you went from researching to then testing something and then the third product. What did you do differently in this last approach in comparison to the first two?

Makenna 13:42

This latest product, the music, and do eye testing. We essentially set a requirement for ourselves that before we write another line of code, we needed what we called at the time, a customer advisory board. We needed some form, of indistinguishable proof that this is something we should be working on. And the standards that we set for that were essentially to have five champions in companies that were willing to have weekly conversations with us in regards to what we were building to solve a pain that we found they had during these interviews. In this case, we found it was, it was in regards to releasing software and. We these conversations though, we're with these cab numbers were so boundable and at the same time, so hard, maybe you have to kind of on a weekly basis, go back to someone and say, this is the progress that I've made on this product that you wish was here already. The standards are super high for what you have to do. Asking someone to do that really was our threshold. And it also to us gave us a very distinct idea that there was a market for this product. That was what we, we focused on. We said we don't really care if we liked the idea of the products, we don't really care if the idea is really, really hard to solve. We just care if there's a market, because everything before they'd built on things, they liked tech, they liked, but there was no market behind it. And so we kind of swung to the opposite end to compensate and be like, no, we really need to make sure there's people who would use this and have this problem.

Spela 15:36

So you went to customer first this time.

Makenna 15:38

Exactly.

Tamas 15:41

How did your investors behave through that journey? How did you pay employees? How was the whole team financed?

Makenna 15:49

Yeah. Before I joined there Mike did raise 2 million one through a winning slush in Finland and another an actual financing round. And I really, really quickly to joining Michigan was speaking with investors and introducing myself and, and just getting to know them. And they were thrilled about there being kind of a more user centric person coming in. And I would say at this point when we started building Mishkan UI testing is when I officially started attending board meetings. As the counterbalance to Mike, Mike is this incredibly talented developer. And he's got some really lofty and motivational like visions of where we want to be in things like that. And I balance out on the, on the. Execution side of things. And so to come to them with this brand new idea and saying like, we've completely pivoted, it was you could see kind of the board of investors taking a deep breath and very content. Despite it being like we're starting from scratch. We have eight people on payroll. They were like, okay, we're moving in the right direction. And we're paying attention to what customers want. We see traction. And not only that our board meeting notes and things like that, we started actually shipping out the alleging, which was another part of like my organizational aspect at Michigan. So yeah, I would say we did not receive any pushback at all from investors, quite the contrary, only encouragement and. I think, a lot of those conversations though, with the board at that point did, especially right before we had kind of decided on the idea and started writing code again, was on, how do we keep people motivated? How do we how do we ask a developer to show up day in, day out for almost two months interviewing users, interviewing people and, and with no end in sight, they, you know, several times we'd have these conversations of, well, when do we stop? And just say, I don't know, I'm sorry, but I don't know. And kind of feeling responsible to have that answer, but to give that answer and to give like direction on. You know, the people that would hit walls and they just couldn't get people to talk to them. Like they just couldn't have the interviews because they didn't have the kind of that, that training. It wasn't what they were hired for. It it's not their skillset. It was, it was really hard actually,

Tamas 18:36

this period of a startup's life is so interesting that I, and especially Michigan's life that I have one more question, because we talked about the customer first approach and here I'm wondering how much you worried about competition. Was that part of the analysis or did you completely disregarded.

Makenna 18:55

It's a, it's a hard one.

Spela 18:56

Can I jump in really quickly? Sure. Because I remember a specific moment when you found a competitor and we were celebrating.

Makenna 19:04

Yeah. I think yeah, I personally think that competition in the space is, is the best sign you can have. It means that there's enough problem that users are pulling it out from lots of different directions. If there's one software in the space, you hope that they're super duper early and they're like they're leading the pack. I think it's super important to find competitors in the space and yeah, we definitely found some competition, but I think one thing we got a little hung up on was trying to find our unique selling proposition USP too quickly. We thought that in order to enter the market, we had to be unique and provide something on paper extraordinarily better immediately. And that led to the product that we were building to be massively scoped, honestly to us hold yourself to this standard of launching incredibly better is, is really, really hard. And I think, but yeah, to answer your question competition is, is was definitely in the picture.

Tamas 20:17

One last question. Would you do this differently now? would you set the bar lower?

Makenna 20:24

Yes, most definitely. So there's a few things that I will do and have done differently now that now that I'm getting kind of a second or a third chance and building a product one, we talked to the board of investors, which were very much advisors for us about this time and period in our company's life. And they were very adamant that we were going to need firepower and we're going to need it quickly. And we should keep people on payroll, despite it being a very strange time to have eight people on board. I personally would not do that, given the choice again, I think it created a lot of pressure to settle on an idea quickly to keep people motivated as well as to, to use our time and our money and our, our time, our runway wisely. That's one thing I think the user center perspective definitely I think that the products that came out of the user interviews, it's probably one of the coolest products I've ever been a part of creating. I definitely think that that was a good point and I would go that direction again. I don't think it's the only way to do it, but it definitely created something great. Yeah. So I would say settling down too quickly and. Creating a scope too big because wanting, because of wanting to be unique and me going out of the gate w we're definitely definitely failures on my directional part that I wouldn't repeat again.

Tamas 22:03

We talked about competition and we talked about like setting the bar on uniqueness high. So I'm wondering if you don't do that. And if you do come out with a seminar product, compare that to one of your competitors, then can you sell it?

Makenna 22:18

It's a great question. I am of the opinion that. Customers users don't always make a logical decisions on the products that they use, that you being better for them could be as minute as green as their favorite color. And that's your brand color, even if you're the exact same product as someone else. I think that it's good to have a vision of how you want to be unique and why you're building in the space rather than just repeating something that exists already. But I definitely think you can sell and you can start to speak with users and start to get traction and users before you're unique.

Spela 23:06

I think you, you hinted that Product in two spots right now we introduced you or you introduced yourself as co-founder of waiver which is different than Michigan. So what happened? Where are you at now? How would you describe what's going on?

Makenna 23:20

Yeah, this is the, you know, X number of times that we've tried to build the product, from scratch now, but things have shifted. Yeah, I would say for about a month and a half now Mike and I have slimmed down to just the two of us. We realized let's say early fall this year that we had hit a wall where, where We saw that people were enjoying the product, but it wasn't maybe growing as fast as we wanted. And we had kind of determined that a large part of that was because neither of our hearts were really in the product that we had built a product that people responded really, really well to being pitched to. But we both had side projects and different things on our minds because we weren't feeling very fulfilled by what we were building. And so we started digging into something, both Mike and I are pretty creative people at, with design and him. He was a professional musician for several years before before he started this tech startup and we decided that we didn't want to make the same mistake of too many times. And that we really valued each other and wanted to use the rest of our runway to really, really figure out where's our know-how like, what's our background and passion overlapped with the most and how can him this highly technical and, and creative person paired with me, highly user oriented and design oriented person. How can we create something together that, that has some sort of business viability, because at the end we do have institutional investors and it is a goal of ours, to build a product that can stand on its own two feet, rather than just something kind of cool that adds to the noise. So yeah, as to what we're doing right now. I can't quite tell you yet. It's I can tell you a little bit about the space. We definitely think that the way that we consume music right now is incredibly static. We are still constricted by the time of vinyl, cassette tapes CDs, et cetera, with the time limits, you know, other than Taylor, Swift's new, all 12, 10 minutes. Every song is two to five minutes long. There's only, you know, let's say 10 to 16 songs on an album. We're constricted by the static format. And we've been developing a dynamic music platform and really figuring out how, how can people consume music in a way that more. Correctly fits into, their listening patterns in life. Yeah, it's a really, really interesting space to be in. And I'm really loving working with Mike and figuring things out. And we're looking forward to being able to grow a team again around this. I do like working with other people.

Spela 26:41

Quickly wanted to share my observation because I think you said it really nicely. If I go back to the beginning of the podcast, you mentioned that what Michigan was working on was purely out of passion and. And then you did the polar opposite by choosing the new UI tests by going strictly away from passion and just super into what the market is there for. And it seems that now you're coming out and like rising like a Phoenix saying, oh, this is my, my balance is actually, and you are now very well aware of both of them need to be here.

Makenna 27:18

Let's try to do it that way. Definitely.

Tamas 27:21

Somewhat technical question, if you can share how long was your runway when you hit the pause the last time early for

Makenna 27:28

so when we decided to slim down to just the two of us, we would have had to raise early next year=and we extended our runway to approximately two and a half years. By slimming down and doing this, we did however slimmed down our runway a bit because we felt like the people that we were working with were incredibly intelligent and kind people, and that stopping a product. So suddenly like this was, was jarring. We actually gave a two and a half month of severance pay and then wrote reference letters, recommendation letters to, and, and all of the employees that we had at that point are hired at this point. And really seemed to be thriving in their new spaces. Super happy about that.

Spela 28:18

And how did you approach telling the employees

Makenna 28:21

That was a really, that was a really hard time. I guess it's also hard for me specifically to balance the need to like move forward and constantly try to, to, to progress with like slowing down and realizing like, this is a rift in someone else's life. And, we just told people exactly what the conversation was in the board that we weren't going to work on this product anymore.

Tamas 28:51

Did you have individual conversations or was there like a team weekly where rather than the KPIs of the last week you spoke about this?

Makenna 29:00

We did have individual conversations and we we canceled basically all the other calls. It was supposed to be on one of those days where you had a retro and things like that. And so people kind of knew what was coming, which was unfortunate. I know that in the past when, you know, like one of these hard conversations is coming in in a company, like you kind of dread it all day long, but yeah, it was pretty sudden, but they knew the day off. And then the other thing was we, we scheduled people back to back to back Trying to like, not have one person be the bearer of bad news, but really trying to like absorb that ourselves. We went in very explicitly with, here's what to expect. Does what severance to expect when your account will be shut down? Like, I think that when you're getting fired, it's a really sucky situation and the least you can do as the one who has to let them go is to, provide all expectations. Like very clearly, like you know, without emotion in between it, then you can like talk as a human about like the things that are humans.

Spela 30:03

How, how were the reactions of the people

Makenna 30:06

super kind, honestly to be honest, I think the severance pay helps. But there were only well-wishes and We also, of course, I think that it's quite hard to stay once, you know, like you're going to leave at some point. And so we asked in that call, we also asked for anything that needed to be finalized, for example, any notes about their specific domain and said like, as soon as this is done, which we don't expect to take more than let's say X hours then you're released immediately to do whatever you want. Even though they'd still be getting paid for the rest of the month, it doesn't make sense to try to keep someone physically there when their mind is not going to be there any longer.

Tamas 30:51

Moving away from, from this like technical people subject. I'm very curious about your relationship with music and audio in general before you started this company. So I understand how, it's a passion project for Mike, an ex professional musician. What is your relationship?

Makenna 31:09

it's really interesting. I tend to find myself able to jump into virtually any product. I think it's one of my superpowers. If I read humble brag, just a little bit, with how intense of a product person I am, I really, really enjoy learning how people can. Be absorbed into a product and use a product as if it's an extension of themselves. And I think musicians are like, have that in common with any other type of products person, but I've used or worked with before. So I've really, really tried to dive deeply into the process of creating music, which I didn't know before, but I'm also balancing Mike out with the consumption of music. I think I used Spotify probably eight hours a day minimum. Like I, I consume a lot of music and it has a lot of utility in my life in terms of like soundtracks to work, to, to work out to maybe sometimes even maybe to fall asleep or like there's a lot of utility to me. And so. My relationship to music and music creation with building this product has become much deeper. Mike has introduced me to these music creation software, such as logic. I've downloaded arcade buyout, but these are all probably like highly technical software like that real musicians use, but I've learned different things about music that I never imagined to be possible. And I've started trying to create music and having an incredibly Morrissey. Perspective of musicians than I had before, which makes it really, really exciting. And I would say like positively intimidating, to create a software for these types of users. And I think it's also, very encouraging to not be a user to not be the person that you'd write down in your user matrix when you're building a product because. Instead of saying, this is how I would do it, or this is what I want. You have to talk to people and you have to ask people is this natural to expect this? You have to study the, the logic and dif you know, softwares that they expect to use. Rather than having an opinion, it like removes your bias.

Spela 33:35

I actually had a question because I did, you know, I was on the other end of the table watching you go through all of this for the past couple of years.

Makenna 33:46

And I remember

Spela 33:48

a moment when you had to decide to tell employees and investors and you and Mike discussed the moving on to another product, but you also had to tell it to the customers. How did that go?

Makenna 34:02

That was maybe even tougher because with employees, you just say this is how it is, and you've got a somewhat clear path on how to move forward. And I expected that with users. Basically with the cab, the people were really, really close with. We had individual conversations with, and then to anyone else who had found us via the internet, signed up themselves. They sent a mass email out. We're shutting down. This is what you can expect. And we actually got a lot of pushback. Like people really upset that we were shutting down and like, I can help you. I'm a developer. Can, can are you open sourcing this please. Don't you just add this? It was almost like a really radical way of asking, like, how would you feel if you didn't have this product anymore? But it was it was quite tough to like for someone to be like, you have a viable business, I will pay you for this. Please do this. And just say like, no other things are more important to us. And also the, the process of figuring out kind of, does it make sense to try to do like a micro acquisition of this product? Or do we just move on and let cobwebs gather on this product. Ultimately, we decided that the time that it would take us to try to sell this product, despite knowing that there was a lot of value in, it was going to take away too much of the runway we had took to create something new and thought that that would undermine essentially any ability to be productive with the runway we had.

Tamas 35:48

As a founder, why are you in Europe? How do you see the dynamics in the U S and how do you see the dynamics between the U S and Europe?

Makenna 35:59

Yeah. I would say the differences are bridging at the moment, I mean, us companies are definitely still raising pretty significant amount, more, however, I would say so, yes, I've worked for both. I've worked in the U S for what's now a unicorn. And they were really, really fast paced, constantly pushing software and had an extreme user centric approach. I think I very much relate to that. Intensely, like that's, that's kind of ingrained in me from every subsequent startup that I've worked in, all of which being European. One thing that your startups do better and to some extent out of necessity, But I think should be by choice as well. Is they leap as in like, I think a lot of times your board of investors or, or like just advisors in general are constantly pushing you to grow as fast and big as you possibly can because that kind of momentum begets success. It means you have more chances of someone coming up with a good idea, things like that. But I think European startups probably due to investment tend to keep the team smaller, like an only hire who they need and probably later than they need. I personally think, that sets up for more sustainable products or more sustainable company. Whereas the us is very much like a you know, fast and furious spend a ton of money and like gamble really hope that like it pays off in the end and European startups are much more sustainable and trying to build a company that will stick around whether the IPO can I, can I have a, the follow

Spela 37:50

on question about you were talking heavily on the product side. What about the culture? How would you compare the two?

Makenna 38:00

Maybe I can speak in terms of like the hiring process and like what I see that company's not.'cause I think that's when you get like the first taste of culture is like what they hire for. Right. I tend to find that American startups hire for ambition and people who can stand on their own, who are self motivated. They hire like the founder type is like their ideal hire and European startups hire someone who listens well as a general rule of thumb. That being said, I definitely think there's companies that flip-flop in separately, but those, that pen that's tended to be my experience so far.

Tamas 38:45

Super interesting.

Makenna 38:46

Is that, is that been your experience,

Tamas 38:52

I guess hiring is shaped by the founders, right? You hire out founder vision. I mean, I guess both are quite important, right? It's like you do want someone that listens well so that they, when they do do something it's super entrepreneurial, but it's to the point and executed really well and you don't have to be involved in that process. I think that's great. I have one question with regards to waver. So did I pronounce it correctly? Yeah. Waiver. Labor. Okay. How far are you from playing employee number one?

Makenna 39:23

Oh, good question. Right now we are intentionally staying in the abstract brainstorming conversations perspective, but we really want to have traction before we hire more people. It's really hard specifically, neither Mike, nor I likes to be on kind of the, the more methodical marketing and sales side, because we're both very products like creative type people. However, I think that, I think that to kick a company off in the right way, like to have the right momentum in order to hire, you need to have that traction for bringing people in. Otherwise, if you're bringing people in before you've got any kind of user base at all, and you might as well give that person co-founder ship because they're going to have to work their ass off to go from zero to one.

Spela 40:22

When would you meet that person in person? Oh,

Makenna 40:26

that's a good question. I would say, like most people I see value in being in person, but it's, it's not a requirement. I would say I'd love to meet this person, sooner rather than later, but never if it's a have to, I think that in-person versus online work is like promotes two different things. Both are valuable in a company's life cycle in person is really good for spontaneous brainstorming. Like when you're grabbing a cup of coffee and you're like, I've got it. This is what we should be. Right. And, and you don't have to set the coffee down to pull your phone out and text the person like, you know, it's, it's it it's, it allows you to be much more creative without like sitting yourself down and saying, all right, I'm going to be creative now. However, remote, in my opinion, lends itself more to getting stuff done. The actual execution of that, that being said, I think you can do, you can do both. You can be creative online and you can get things done together. Right. And especially. One thing. I didn't clarify. I was hired at Michigan in March of 2020, which is why I didn't meet Mike for the longest time. And we, we couldn't go in person there. Wasn't a possibility. And so I think when you're faced with this you don't have a choice. You have to find a way to make it work. You find a way to make it work. And so my perspective has changed. I definitely was of the impression that within the first month you should be flying out to see these people you're going to work with in person. I would definitely still say it's preferable, but I don't think it's a requirement. I wouldn't tell someone like I can't hire you if I can't be you in person. Okay.

Spela 42:32

That makes a lot of sense We were talking in our personal time a couple of times, what is remote work, even because you've worked remote before the pandemic, during the pandemic. And now, and you said, ah, it's completely different.

Makenna 42:49

Oh yeah. Certainly I I've worked for moat more than I've worked in person for my career. And I choose it over and over again. I would talk, go back into office if given the choice, even despite it being different. Now, I would say before the pandemic, it definitely had a different freedom to it. In the sense of I was flying to another place, I would say once or twice a day. To work with different people to attend conferences, to work from, you know, Spain because it was warmer in the winter and, it was really very free to, to not have to take exorbitant amounts of vacation to have that kind of freedom. It was really nice that being said with the pandemic, I think not being able to, you know, leave the country sometimes the county or the house is that freedom of operated in terms of like location-based, I do still think you have the freedom of like not having to spend 10 hours a day where two of them are commuting. I think it's, it's different, but there's still more freedom to remote than in-person.

Spela 44:12

It ties a little bit to the history because you let it go through an accelerator. And we learned a lot there. You know, exposure to investors already hard to get, but through an accelerator it's so much easier for one example. But now that you've gone through many actual startup companies with many actual investors and employees, is there anything that you would teach if you had your own accelerator?

Makenna 44:42

I think I would teach something super biased and definitely not across the board. That design matters more than you think. I mean, I've seen product after product, after product succeed purely because they looked better and they felt better. And I think I've also seen product after product, after product. It's like if we build it and it works well, people will come and that's not quite the truth. Yeah it's a pretty biased one being the designer I am, but that would probably be if I had to summarize,

Spela 45:20

absolutely love that you came on. Thank you for sharing your brief history as an amazing human.

Tamas 45:29

Yeah. Thanks for going to I appreciated learning about your journey within one company and across multiple for other companies. I think it's going to be, really insightful for the listeners as well. So thank you for your time.

Spela 45:41

We appreciate your time listening to this episode. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have any feedback for us or ideas on what you want to hear discussed in this space please do shoot us a message on the social media of your choice until next time take care