Minted’s CFO: Half the Year Happens in One Month

Summary

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Run the Numbers — Episode Summary

Podcast: Run the Numbers

Host: CJ Gustafson
Guest: Matteo Bryant (CFO, Minted; formerly Uber, Amazon)
Episode: "Minted’s CFO: Half the Year Happens in One Month"
Date: February 23, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the unique business mechanics and financial strategies behind Minted, a design-driven marketplace specializing in cards for weddings, holidays, and major life events. Host CJ Gustafson dives deep with CFO Matteo Bryant, tracing his career from global marketplace “fixer” at Uber and Amazon to leading finance at Minted. Topics include viral flywheels, extreme seasonality, long-term customer value, international marketplace lessons, and the financial implications of neglecting local market realities.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Matteo's Global Experience & Perspective on Marketplaces

• Matteo's Background: Has worked and lived in the US, UK, Turkey, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina.
• Language Advantage: Speaks English, Spanish, and Portuguese; views language as a differentiator and a mark of respect in international deals.

  "What goes a long way is that you're trying...it really means a lot to the person on the other side." (Matteo, 04:57)

• Mexico City as Startup Hub: Modern, vibrant, and increasingly a tech epicenter, particularly for AI and startups.

  "It's really having a moment right now... This is like the best kept secret." (Matteo, 05:32)

• Rise of Local Competitors: Mercado Libre, Rappi, iFood — significant homegrown market disruptors.

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2. Minted’s Business Model & Viral Flywheel

• How Minted Works: Crowdsourced artist designs, with customization tech for physical cards celebrating major life events.
• Virality: "Minted" and the artist are credited on every card; physical cards spread branding organically.

  "If you're like me...You flip it over and you see 'Minted.'...next year you'll think about using us." (Matteo, 09:00)

• Stickiness: The address book and card design history increase user retention and repeat business.
• Customer Entry Points: Weddings, holidays, birth announcements, wholesale cards in retail (Target, Whole Foods, etc.).

  "Holiday cards is another big business of ours...And birth announcements is still yet another." (Matteo, 11:05)

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3. Financial Metrics: CAC, LTV & Cohort Analysis

• Importance of CAC & LTV: Long-term relationships mean higher amortization of CAC, especially with cohorts spanning nearly two decades.

  "Once someone...chooses to use us...it's just further and further amortization of that acquisition cost over time." (Matteo, 12:18)

• Flywheel of Life Events: Weddings can trigger future purchases—birth announcements, holiday cards, graduations—creating multiple monetization touchpoints.
• Repeat Purchase Predictability: Dynamic is highly seasonal, but long-term data makes forecasting more robust.

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4. Navigating Extreme Seasonality

• Holiday Seasonality: Approximately 90% of revenue happens in a five-week holiday window (Black Friday–Christmas).

  "Most folks do not really consider sending out their holiday cards until the day after Thanksgiving...All the holiday card business...happens between Black Friday and a couple days before Christmas." (Matteo, 19:49)

• Floating Retail Calendar: Minted uses a retail fiscal year aligned with purchase peaks, not the standard calendar.
• Forecasting Challenges: Variability in timing (Thanksgiving date changes), customer trends (later sending dates), and fiscal year-end impact cash flows and revenue recognition.

  "My holiday season can vary six to seven days...ask me on December 20th, I'll tell you." (Matteo, 19:49)

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5. Managing Cash Flow in a Seasonal E-Commerce Business

• Revenue and Outflows: Most cash comes in during holiday spike, but payouts to third-party printers occur 30–45 days later.

  "Imagine...your salary were $100 a year, but you got paid 50 in December...That's kind of the dynamic." (Matteo, 23:45)

• Unique Cash Planning: Different from typical consumables (toothpaste, peanut butter); requires robust scenario planning.

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6. Marketing Dynamics vs. SaaS Sales Models

• No CRO/Sales Force: CFO role is deeply tied to marketing and category management for optimizing conversion—not sales commissions.

  "I'm spending a lot of time with our marketing team...thinking about what we do to increase conversion." (Matteo, 25:04)

• Email Campaign Overload: Lessons from Amazon—internal competition for email campaigns; carefully controlled to avoid customer fatigue.

  "Everybody wanted to email the entire customer base about everything at all times...they had a lot of information about at what point people became numb to email communications." (Matteo, 26:06)

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7. Retail Distribution for Cards — Pros and Cons

• Physical Retail Expansion: Learned on Target, now selectively expanding; careful about retailer and geography focus due to CapEx and stocking fees.

  "It's just another way for us to get in front of our potential customers...focus, which are the right retailers." (Matteo, 32:29)

• Inventory & Payment Terms: Some retailers (Walmart, Kroger) sell on consignment—terms can be net-90 or longer, impacting cash cycles.

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8. Going Global: The Danger of US-Centric Thinking

• Consumer Brand Lessons: Legacy brands (like Coca-Cola, Diageo) insist on international operator experience—less common in tech.
• Payments as Core to Localization: Without local payment acceptance (especially in cash-heavy markets), companies leave growth untapped.

  "You might be leaving a lot of growth on the table if you don't have a product manager who understands that." (Matteo, 35:32)

• Mexico Example: Oxxo convenience stores as a literal and figurative local payment gateway, supporting a large unbanked population.

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9. Uber Case Study: Cash Payments and Market Share

• Why Cash at Uber in Latin America? Half the rides are paid in cash due to low credit card penetration; this change accelerated growth and reduced transaction fees.

  "As long as one out of four rides is done with a credit card...the driver has those $30...It cut our credit card fees by 75%." (Matteo, 40:47)

• Managing Cash Risks: Tools for driver compliance; defaulting to sending only credit fare rides to drivers with unpaid balances.
• Financial Win: Credit card fee reduction greatly outweighed cash leakage (“breakage” or “leakage” in retail terminology).

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10. True Cost of Pretending to Be Global

• Opportunity Cost: Companies that force-fit US-centric products miss profitable sales; must acquire local players—often at a premium.

  "You’re likely to have a very expensive acquisition down the line." (Matteo, 46:04)

• Peru’s Inca Kola: Example of Coca-Cola having to buy out a dominant local brand.

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11. Gigs and Socioeconomic Dynamics

• Gig Economy Models: Work best where the socioeconomic gap between buyers and sellers is large; broader “market clears” range.

  "When there is a bigger difference in...the upper echelons...and the base of the pyramid...the window where the market clears is way, way bigger." (Matteo, 47:43)

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12. Tariffs and International E-Commerce

• MacGyvering Imports: Amazon Mexico launched with half of goods shipped direct from US (customer as importer) which avoided high tariffs vs. traditional importers.

  "When the importer record is the customer...there's actually an upper threshold where there's no tariffs at all." (Matteo, 50:37)

• Arbitrage Opportunities: Loophole allowed significant savings for Mexican Amazon customers until policy changes.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On International Business:
  "Sometimes what ends up being an offhanded comment—I wonder what would happen if—ends up becoming something that was a multi-month push, 100 people involved." (Matteo, 01:00, 53:17)

• On Minted’s Stickiness:
  "Once you've done that, there's a strong stickiness factor...It kind of becomes this new repository of information you have." (Matteo, 09:00)

• On the CFO’s Role in E-Comm:
  "I'm spending a lot of time with our marketing team...and during holiday season it's a 60 [minute] conversation every day, including on the weekends." (Matteo, 25:04)

• On Mistakes & Career Growth:
  "Not every hour of every day is worth the same thing to you as, as an employee, as an executive...there are people who you only see four times a year for maybe 90 minutes...it's really matters to get a hundred percent on those 12 hours a year." (Matteo, 55:34)

• On the Wildest Expense Attempt:
  "There was a seven day cruise...it was for my wife. I've been working really hard lately and that's more weight on her. So I just thought the right thing to do would be for my employer to invite her." (Matteo, 59:50)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Matteo’s Language and International Perspective — 03:41–06:15
• Mexico City’s Startup Rise / Latin American Market — 06:15–07:21
• Minted's Flywheel Explained — 08:09–10:53
• CAC & LTV Deep Dive — 12:12–13:42
• Seasonality, Forecasting, Retail Calendar — 19:35–24:58
• Marketing vs. Sales in E-Comm — 25:04–27:41
• Physical Retail Channel Strategy — 32:00–34:17
• Going Global: US vs. Local Market Fit — 35:26–39:29
• Uber Cash Payments Revolution — 40:42–43:19
• The Risk & Reward of ‘Pretending to Be Global’ — 46:04–47:26
• Tariffs & International Ecommerce Tactics — 50:37–53:11
• Demand Gen Launch Story at Amazon — 53:11–55:22
• Career Mistakes & Lessons Learned — 55:34–58:11
• Finance Software Stack at Minted — 59:03–59:45
• Craziest Expense Attempt — 59:50–60:51

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a treasure trove of lessons for ambitious finance professionals and startup operators—blending the strategic (market fit, international expansion), the operational (seasonality management, CAC/LTV), and the tactical (cash vs. credit, channel distribution). Matteo’s global experience challenges listeners to look beyond US-centric assumptions, while his stories from Uber, Amazon, and Minted provide actionable insights and a dose of humor.

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Standout Moment

On action-item alignment:

"Sometimes what ends up being an offhanded comment... ends up becoming something that was a multi-month push, 100 people involved." (Matteo, 01:00, 53:17)

A reminder for leaders: Always ensure action items are truly understood, especially in high-stakes organizations.

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Transcript

[CJ]

Can you tell the launch story with Demandgen?

[Matteo Bryant]

So you know, Google is a big company but it was growing and growing. Every year more and more people were discovering product via Google Search and it was something that Amazon was concerned about. In a meeting when we were planning the launch, a very senior Amazon executive said, I wonder what would happen if we launched Amazon in Mexico without Google at all. And we left the meeting with what we understood to be the marching order of launch. Without Google Search. There was no proxy. Everybody had launched with Google Search. We get into our quarterly business review three months after launching and we report on how things went not using Google. And that same executive says, why did you launch without Google Search? And what I learned from that was always make sure big action items are actually the same. Because sometimes what ends up being an offhanded I wonder what would happen if, you know, ends up becoming something that was a multi month push, 100 people involved and like how do we do it? And all because of I wonder if

[CJ]

is this thing on

[Matteo Bryant]

Yesterday's price is not today's price.

[CJ]

Welcome back to Run the Numbers, the show where we talk with the world's top CFOs and we're on YouTube. People think that I am AI, but no, I'm CJ, a tech CFO and my goal is to tease out the playbooks and tactics the best finance leaders rely upon to make you better at your job. On today's show, I'm speaking with Matteo Bryant. Matteo is the CFO of Minted, the design driven marketplace behind the holiday cards, wedding invitations and birth announcements that make the rest of us look far more organized than we actually are. Shout out to my wife who orders them. Before Minted, Matteo is effectively the fixer for some of the biggest global marketplaces on the planet, spending years on the ground across Latin America and Europe helping scale and localize complex businesses at companies like Uber. Heard of them and Amazon. Though it was a messy launch, a regulatory puzzle or operational fire drill tariffs, Mateo is probably on a plane he's lived and worked across oh my goodness. Uk, Turkey, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and the US in this episode we go deep on V minted Flywheel how weddings, holiday cards and life events create a decades long LTV engine. Long term CAC versus short term monetization forecasting extreme seasonality. Like 90% of this guy's business happens in one month. My goodness, the financial cost of pretending to be global. And why us centric tech companies, they don't really. They leave some money on the table thinking that everything is everything. That every. Anyways, making marketplaces work in emerging markets, from enabling cash payments at Uber in Brazil to how gig models scale differently depending on the socioeconomic gap. And if you like this show, please remember to like and subscribe. It helps us with the algorithmic overlords. And if you're looking to hire the best finance and accounting talent. Woo wee, I'd love to help you. Boy, would I love to help. I run a recruiting service that pairs you with thoughtful, qualified candidates from our warm community of finance leaders. People who voluntarily read about the nerdy stuff I write about CAC payback periods. You want to read that on weekends? Okay. We can get you a job. Email [e-mail] and we can talk onto today's episode with Mateo Bryant. Matteo, thanks for joining me on the podcast.

[Matteo Bryant]

My pleasure. Happy to be here.

[CJ]

So I feel like you're the world's most interesting man.

[Matteo Bryant]

You're.

[CJ]

You're now the CFO of an online design marketplace, an E Comm company, and you were previously the man on the ground throughout Latin America and Europe for marketplaces like Uber and Amazon. Have you ever seen Pulp Fiction? Because I kind of feel like you're the guy who's the wolf who. Who gets people out of a sticky situation.

[Matteo Bryant]

I kind of like the idea of me being Harvey Keitel. I have seen the movie. I'm a big fan of Quentin Tarantino generally. I guess to some extent, I. I fixed things. That is true.

[CJ]

Just to paint some context here. What languages do you speak?

[Matteo Bryant]

I speak English. I'm. I'm from the United States originally. I also speak Spanish and Portuguese, so all the, all the major languages of the. The Americas, I guess.

[CJ]

And so the Spanish and Portuguese, did. Did you know those pretty well? And that was kind of like your angle to work for some of these huge marketplaces and be on the ground locally.

[Matteo Bryant]

I learned Spanish just because when I was a kid, my parents said if you want to do anything besides go to school and. And be at home, then you need to pay for it. And I went and worked at a grocery store and it was as a bagger, and it's all me and immigrants, mainly from Mexico. So I started to learn Spanish for that reason, but I kept up with it and ended up studying in Argentina for a little bit. And it just became something that was a kind of like a professional differentiator, I guess you could say. I was comfortable with working in a different language. And in some ways when you do that, it's like being in an Anthropology class alongside doing work. And so I kind of like that, that dual challenge.

[CJ]

I did take AP Spanish, but I think I got a 2 out of 5 on that test. So that, that didn't go too well. I can only imagine trying to do deals and negotiations in a different language.

[Matteo Bryant]

It can be challenging because now and then you, you can't find the right word. But what goes a long way is that you're trying, you get better and better and better. But it really means a lot to the person on the other side of the table that, that you made the effort to speak in their language. That was particularly true in Brazil. I've done a lot of work there. Not many people learn Portuguese, so when you show up and start speaking some Portuguese, you immediately command some attention. I'd like to say like a little bit of respect as well for, for having made the, the attempt.

[CJ]

I love it. It's a great tone to, to kick off the pod with. What's your favorite city in the world?

[Matteo Bryant]

I've got to say it's Mexico City. I'm biased. I lived there from a long time, my wife is from there. But it's, it's just a fantastic city and it's really having a moment right now. For a long time people thought I was nuts. I've lived there for quite a while, starting in 2008 and I was kind of thinking, keep thinking that because this is like the best kept secret on this side of the Atlantic right now, people figured out that it's a fantastic spot. If you go down there now, you will notice a lot of digital nomads move down there. And it's become a tourism hotspot as well. It's very different from Williamsburg Brooklyn. It reminds me of Williamsburg Brooklyn in like 2005 when there's all these great bands and artists and startups and all kinds of things coming out of this spot. There's a very particular and cool energy it's got right now.

[CJ]

So there are startups coming out of Mexico City?

[Matteo Bryant]

Yeah, there's quite a few. A lot of them are really pushing hard in AI. First, what's kind of interesting about Mexico, and I would say Brazil as well as far as startups, is that Latin America got attention pretty early on from some of the bigger startups in the world, mainly because people were using the hell out of things like Facebook and particularly WhatsApp. Then later on Uber and Amazon, as well as some homegrown companies like Mercado Libre, which has really given Amazon run for their money all over Latin America. So between some of the large global consumer companies showing up there, and that process started maybe 12 to 13 years ago, as well as some homegrown ones like Mercado Libre or Rappi, which is kind of akin to Doordash in many ways. There's. There's a. A lot of growing talent both in Brazil and Mexico. Ifood, which is a Brazilian food delivery company, they got bought by Prosus for $6 billion. Whoa. Yeah. And they only operate, really in Brazil.

[CJ]

I'm pumped to have you here because you're a great guy. And also, you just have a different view of business models. Right. And where value accrues and. And how to make them go faster. And I want to talk about some of the flywheels that you've seen in different business models. And when we met, we were. We were at the CFO dinner in San Francisco and I joked that, like, people who are like constantly online, they just think the entire world is B2B SaaS. And it's like, just not true. We all consume things every day. And you were telling me about Minted, where you work now. And at first it took me a second to realize you're the one who made me and my family look great on our Christmas card this year.

[Matteo Bryant]

I hope so. That's fantastic. Yes. We were looking pretty good too, my wife and I. So, yeah, we do our job well. What can I say?

[CJ]

Could you describe for the benefit of listeners what Minted does and just how it makes money?

[Matteo Bryant]

So Minted crowdsources design work from a community. It's all over the world of thousands of artists. And then on top of that, provides customization technology so people can create personalized stationery to celebrate, like, big life moments. One of our bigger businesses is going to be holiday cards. So I'm sure we all got a whole bunch of those in December and in January, there's other things like weddings, then there's birth announcements, bar mitzvahs, communions, things like that. We provide some very up to date crowdsource design work and combine that with the ability to customize it, put in your own picture, maybe change some of the text, move things around such that you can celebrate these moments in a, in. In a physical way and let everybody know about what's going on in your life.

[CJ]

Can you describe some of the flywheels in the business model?

[Matteo Bryant]

One is just the simple fact that on our cards it says Minted on there. And it also gives a shout out to the name of the artist who came up with it. So if you're to comb through all of your holiday cards. If you're like me, I have a desk drawer filled with them going back 10, 12, 15 years. You're just going to go through there and cemented a bunch of times. Now we all have these different social circles and in some ways, you know, you see a card that comes through that's has this thick quality, the printing is nice, design's kind of cool, et cetera, et cetera. You flip it over and you see minted. And perhaps next year you'll think about using us if you haven't already. That's one element of this kind of virality and flywheel. The other is just as simple as the address book and the group of people you're sending your cards out to. You want to send out holiday cards, for example? Well, you're going to add the names and addresses of all your friends, your loved one. StarSense system. Once you've done that, there's a strong stickiness factor there. The addresses are there. It kind of becomes this new repository of information you have what your past designs look like. You can see how your card was last year, how your kids have changed, how you have changed. And you're likely to come back each year and add a couple new names and addresses to that list and just continue to send out the minted name because you like the product and because it's, it's really easy for you once you've done that initial step. And over time, there are other things in life that you might choose to go to minted to do. Like I mentioned, the birth announcements or your wedding. A lot of times things will start with wedding and then you might later on decide it's time for us to do a holiday card. Might be the birth of a kid. The names and addresses of your loved ones are with us and we're the go to place when you want to really celebrate. And in a more meaningful way, I would say, than just a post on Instagram about something that's happened in your life.

[CJ]

Just reflecting back, it sounds like here's, here's my B2B SAS Martin thinking top of the funnel here. Sounds like it kind of starts with weddings. Is, is that kind of like the compelling event that, that kicks it all off?

[Matteo Bryant]

Wedding is one of them. Holiday cards is another. It's a big business of ours. And birth announcements is still yet another. And you might also come into the fold because we have a, we refer to as a wholesale business. We sell minted greeting cards in Target H E B which is a Texas grocer, Whole Foods, a number of Williams Sonoma formats. You pop into the store to get a gift and maybe a card or get, well, soon a happy birthday. And you might pick up a minted card. And that's yet another way that you might get into the fold.

[CJ]

Part of it reminds me of on an iPhone, if you don't change off the signature, it says sent with iPhone. Or when you originally had the Gmail, it said sent from my Gmail, but like having minted in the corner. And I've seen it before because my parents still hang up every single person's card that they get in the mail and, and you just see it when you receive it. For it was made by Mented.

[Matteo Bryant]

In some ways, perhaps obvious as it is, it's. It's something we've been doing for a really, really long time. Mented's been around since 2007. That kind of obvious but very effective virality is in some ways something we kind of pioneered. We came out at about the same time as the iPhone did, for example.

[CJ]

And I'm guessing you as a cfo, track customer acquisition costs and lifetime value big time.

[Matteo Bryant]

That's a big topic for us. And it's, it's an exciting one as well, because once someone has really come into the fold and chooses to use us to celebrate these moments, in some ways, I look at that as just further and further and further amortization of that acquisition cost over time, which is really, really exciting. And given that we're 18 years old at this point, we now have cohorts going back that long, and it makes our LTV and CAC estimates that much stronger, that we can really have faith that acquiring someone now means revenue in, in year 0, 0 plus 1, 0 plus 2, et cetera. We can really prove that that is going to happen over time.

[CJ]

That's awesome because, like, if you get the wedding right or say it's the Christmas or the Hanukkah, then you continue to think about it, well, what events can I stack on top of that?

[Matteo Bryant]

Exactly, Exactly. How do I be there? How do I make sure that they remember we're out there? But the nice thing about the holiday cards is that that's, that's an annual thing. You know, New Year's happens every year, Christmas happens every year, Hanukkah, et cetera. These are annualized events. And it's, it's a yearly reminder that we have an opportunity we have with people to let them know, you know, when other things are happening. We might be able to help you as well. Like your kids are graduating medical school, you want to send out some cards or high school or college or you have another child. These are all things we can assist with.

[CJ]

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[Matteo Bryant]

You know, I'm keen to make money on every transaction. It's something I enjoy. It's not to say that I'm not interested in investing in the long haul for customers. But a good example of kind of the shorter term way of looking at that would be like with the wedding, which, you know, I never really thought about weddings so much since I myself got married. Now I think about it all the time. But there's kind of four big moments when someone might purchase some kind of personalized stationery. There's the save the date. Then there's the invitation itself that has all the details and all, you know, a lot of filigree and detail. Then there is day of stuff like signage and menus that might be on the table. And then for all those polite couples out there, there's thank you notes which is kind of after the fact. Ideally I get them for all four of those. I amortize the CAC across all of those and have a really high conversion from one moment to the other. You know, this wedding event is just the gift that keeps on giving in A lot of ways as such, we have a wedding websites product, for example, which is an excellent way for people to start to get into the fold. And ideally they might be able to stretch the same design or kind of motif across from the wedding website all the way through to the very end with the thank you notes.

[CJ]

This is awesome. Now this is the inside baseball that people come to the podcast for. So you've taken just this event that we take for granted in our lives. Well, I, if my wife is listening, I did not take our wedding for granted. But you're hoping you can get that quadruple stack of monetization events.

[Matteo Bryant]

Perhaps the couple already has a child, or perhaps they have one afterwards. You know, I'd love to help them announce that birth to the world. And then, you know, usually a lot of times the birth of a child is the trigger to start to do the holiday card. So perhaps the child might be born in May and then come November, December, it's time to do a holiday card. And now we've gone from perhaps a four stage relationship in their wedding to a fifth stage being the birth of the child, and then a sixth and seventh and eighth and so on with the holiday cards and throw in a graduation event here and there and perhaps the birth of subsequent children and. And now there's multiple touch points per year.

[CJ]

You mentioned seasonality there. I think when we met it was September, October, and I was making small talk, I was like, oh, how's the end of the year looking to you? And you kind of like threw up your hands and gave me this hilarious example like how, how do you forecast your business around the holidays?

[Matteo Bryant]

In some ways there's something that's really great, which is that the repeat dynamics among our existing customer base is, is pretty darn predictable. There's a bit of volatility, but it's pretty minor in that sense. It's easy to predict. But then it all happens in a very short timeframe. Most folks do not really consider sending out their holiday cards until the day after Thanksgiving. So Black Friday is a big, big, big, huge day for us, as is Cyber Monday. A lot of times, you think about it, that big family photo with the autumnal scene in the back, that, that oftentimes might happen. The week of Thanksgiving, for example. Essentially almost all the holiday card business, which is our biggest, it all happens between Black Friday and a couple days before Christmas. Usually. Now there is kind of a secular in all forms of the board trend towards people doing it a little bit later, including starting sending the cards out in January. So there's a little bit of spillover every year. But it's challenging because if you think about it, Thanksgiving is a floating holiday. It's the fourth Thursday of the month of November and that could be on November 22nd and it could be much later. That could be November 28th. And then traditionally people kind of use the goal like the end zone is kind of Christmas depending, but a lot of people, and that's a fixed day, that's December 25th. There's a heady mix of people there and the way people like to do things and that changes over time. But if you look at it from that sense, my holiday season can vary six to seven days. That changes things. And then also there's just a fiscal year cut off which we use a retail calendar that seeks to align those major purchase days like particularly Black Friday. So my end of year is always the Sunday after Christmas and that floats around. A, it all happens very quickly. B, it sounds odd, but one day more or less can make a big difference. C, there is this growing secular trend to maybe send your cards a little bit later, later in the season. And D, because it's just so much happens so quick, quick, small variations can move things quite a bit. So, you know, my, the eternal question you get from the board of directors is are you going to hit your numbers this year? And I'm usually saying, well ask me on December 20th, I'll tell you.

[CJ]

Okay. So I just had a realization as we're doing this podcast that there's such thing as a retail calendar. I didn't know that. So Matteo, your end of year was December 28th this year, but next year

[Matteo Bryant]

it'll be December 29th, which sounds like a big deal, right? But people out there who actually work with physical product will understand is there's particularly in E commerce businesses, one thing is the day that you sell it, another thing is the day that you ship it. The day you ship it is, is the trigger for revenue recognition. So one day more, one day less might make the difference between a package getting out according to your retail calendar or not getting out according to that calendar. Now it bleeds into the following year and the end for the customer. They're, they're not thinking about our retail calendar. They just want thing on time and that's our main focus. It's a delicate balance to strike, particularly with the calendar the way it is.

[CJ]

Let's just say half of your business, 50% is within a 10 day period. One or two more days on either side of that like that makes a huge difference.

[Matteo Bryant]

That selling season for holiday is effectively five weeks long. But it varies. It squeezes in, it squeezes out. So yeah, it does make a difference. What's kind of interesting is like, it makes a difference for me in my head. The customer isn't thinking about that. They're just thinking like, oh man, I gotta get this done. So they're not thinking about like, oh, there's, there's fewer days between Thanksgiving and this, you know, December 23rd, or whatever their kind of mental cutoff date is.

[CJ]

I bet you're also thinking about the cash flows.

[Matteo Bryant]

The cash is an interesting thing because we do do a big chunk of our business in that time. And you know, that means that we have a bit of a roller coaster action because a lot of the year's revenue is going to happen in that four to five week period. We don't manufacture the cards, we use third parties for that. So we'll have a lot of cash come in. You know, we're going to get paid two to three days after the transaction goes through online, and then we'll pay those printers, you know, a month or a month and a half later. So a lot of cash will come in, but then a lot of cash will go back out. I sometimes kind of, when I'm attempting to kind of talk about like cash flow dynamics with a, like a more general audience, I like to put it as. Imagine if your salary were $100 a year, but you got paid 50 in December and then, you know, 450 the rest every other month, the rest of the year. That's kind of the dynamic in some ways that we're dealing with. It's a good to have. I don't have a problem with it at all. It's just the nature of a, of a business that's seasonal. But it's a different cash flow planning dynamic than we would have if we sold toothpaste or, you know, peanut butter or something that's not particularly seasonal, as far as I know.

[CJ]

That's amazing. Well, I'm guessing you don't have a traditional field salesforce in this E comm model, right?

[Matteo Bryant]

No, no, we don't. One of the things I notice when I meet up with, with CFO colleagues elsewhere, particularly those who are more of the SaaS variety, they're spending a lot of their time talking with the CRO, which makes sense about sales plans and bonuses and what kind of discount you might get for locking someone up for a three year plan as opposed to a one year. Those kinds of things. I don't have a CRO per se. I'm spending a lot of time with our marketing team and with some of our category management folks thinking about what we do to increase conversion, what kind of marketing campaigns we're going to do, what's the most effective channel these days? Do we need to reallocate cash? And that's a 60 to 90 minute conversation every week. And during holiday season it's a 60 conversation every day, including on the weekends.

[CJ]

Well, you're talking to a guy who runs a business newsletter for a living. So I finally have a guest. You can appreciate that you can't just send one more email and just hope for new business. That can actually be a friction.

[Matteo Bryant]

This is very true. We had that matter at Amazon, for example. It was actually really fascinating there. Everybody wanted to email the entire customer base about everything at all times. You are a the head of the hardware category. You want to tell everybody like, hey, you should be buying your hammers and your screwdrivers and your drills from us. And you want to encourage cross, cross category purchasing. And that was always a big deal, still is, always will be at Amazon. And they had the neatest thing there where they had a lot of accumulated information about different kinds of email campaigns. They also had a lot of information about at what point people became numb to email communications. So you would register the email campaign you wanted to do with the population that you thought was appropriate. It would compete with others and you would see if you would get a few of those names. All of those names, none of them sometimes be like, nope, historically these aren't very effective. There's three other campaigns that are more likely to work. We can't send more than X emails in a given amount of time. No campaign for you or there's a lot of overlap with your list and others. You're getting 10% of the the names on there. There were other campaigns that are way, way better, but they, you know where they didn't overlap. You did win for those people for this period of time and it was fairly automated and it was always very interesting to see people not always being pleased with the outcome of the decision. Although it really did make sense for the overall company. Exactly. For what you're saying, it does create friction. It can be kind of obnoxious.

[CJ]

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[Matteo Bryant]

Well, well, well.

[CJ]

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[Matteo Bryant]

Exactly. And that's an unfortunate thing because let's call it inexpensive to free depending on how you want to look at it. And it's an exciting tool to let people know we have this new product, we have this new variation. There's a special promotion going on but if you use it too much then you're starting to dull its impact and maybe even just render it useless. So it's a tough one. That's why Amazon had such a strict and very data driven approach because everybody wants to do it because it doesn't require very much budget. And I have the list of people. I have a reason that I believe that these are the ones we should be speaking to. But everybody can't be talking to everyone at the same time. Particularly at a company like Amazon that sells anything and everything under the sun.

[CJ]

How do you think about the retail channels for distribution? Because my wife goes to Trader Joe's grocery store locally near us and the cards there only cost like a dollar, so. So she'll grab like five that she thinks are funny and she'll keep them for whenever like a holiday pops up because inevitably like you end up being like, oh crap, I need a car. Let me go to CVS and and pick one up. So we have them just right there in the drawer. How do you think about having like these physical brick and mortar locations that you can use to sell cards?

[Matteo Bryant]

I find it really exciting. It's just another way for us to get in front of our potential customers. Our work in that regard has kind of had two prongs. One is that we needed to get good at it. Physical distribution, retail. It's very, very different than online. You know, among those things you actually have to get this, the product physically on the shelf. Something that most of these huge retailers like Walmart or Kroger or Target, they require you to pay pay for that. They do not pay for the stocking you do as one of the providers. So we spent a good while working primarily with Target and getting good at that. And since then we've expanded more into other retailers. And that's where the part becomes important which is focus, which are the right retailers for you because it is a lift to enter into each one. There's Capex involved with the shelving and things like that. So you want to make sure you're at the right retailer and maybe even the right stores for that retailer. And perhaps your brand doesn't need to be in every single Kroger. Perhaps a subset that might be geographic. It might have to do with demographics at a zip code level. Maybe that's the right way for you to approach it.

[CJ]

And I think depending on who you're negotiating with, the terms can be different. Right. Like I hear anecdotally that Walmart, a lot of times you'll see something on the shelf. It's not like Walmart paid for that inventory. They're basically selling it on consignment and then they'll pay you like 90 days later.

[Matteo Bryant]

Sometimes it's referred to as scam based trading. It depends, it's different from category to category. But there are cases where that inventory does not belong to them, it belongs to the vendor and they only get paid. Or the trigger for getting paid is when it crosses that scanner and then X days after that. Walmart has a lot of power. They're a very large firm and that's demonstrated oftentimes in the terms and the ways of working with them.

[CJ]

I won't say the company name but there's a very large auto distributor out there. Because I was in vertical SaaS for automotive, we ran marketplace and so we would hear about different terms and conditions from the different part manufacturers. One of these big companies, it's net365.

[Matteo Bryant]

You know, I heard something similar about a large beer manufacturer that they paid for their hops like 180 days later. During that time they would brew and sell it and brew and sell it. So they would, they would spin off that the, the cash off that initial load of hops would get spun through like 12 times before they paid the first for the first lot. I always thought, man, must be hard to make ops.

[CJ]

Let's dig into your period as the guy on the ground abroad. Maybe you could rattle off what countries you've lived in or served extended periods of time. And for business purposes, I have been

[Matteo Bryant]

in a whole bunch of places. That includes the United Kingdom, the United States. I lived in Luxembourg for spell, Spain, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico. There's all. Those are all places where I've lived and or worked for extended amounts of time.

[CJ]

Do you think we are overly US centric when we think about applying what works here to what works outside the

[Matteo Bryant]

US that does happen in my experience a lot in tech. There weren't that many huge, large, particularly consumer tech brands 30 years ago. You know, if you were thinking about large consumer brands now, you would mention Google and Facebook. You'd also mention Coca Cola or Budweiser or others in the same breath. Possibly that wasn't true before. So what I've kind of noticed because I did work in consumer products and involved in chewing gum and chocolate, I've been involved in popcorn and canned vegetables at different points in my career. A lot of those large consumer companies that are now ubiquitous, you know, if you go to Ghana, you're going to find Budweiser or Anheuser busch or AB InBev products, you're going to find Diageo products, you're going to find Coca Cola, Pepsi, etc. Those companies realized that they were leaving a lot of opportunity on the table and they really did have like a cultural transformation. And now if you look at the people who are in the C suite at a company like Diageo, they've all worked on the ground in multiple like major geographies. You're not making it to the top unless you have that experience. I've not found that to always be the case in tech and sometimes that makes sense. There's perhaps not a strong reason why Google Search should work dramatically different in Botswana or Brazil or the United States. But on other occasions there's things that might make sense to have a lot of local flavor built into the product. I think payments is a great example of that. Credit card penetration is still pretty low in a lot of places in the world and you might be leaving a lot of growth on the table if you don't have a product manager who understands that and who's building different ways in order to be able to take things like this is a common thing in Mexico. There's a ubiquitous convenience store called Oxo, kind of similar to 7 11. And you can go in there, you can book a flight online for a lot of airlines and then go and pay for it in cash at the oxo. That's the kind of thing that you might miss out on if you have a US centric perspective. Or frankly, Uber. In Latin America, about half the rides come from cash payments, which is. Sounds really odd to the American ear. But that's where a lot of the growth came from. Because at the time, the penetration of credit cards and debit cards was in the mid teens in most of Latin America. That other 85% or so, they were taking taxis, they were getting on the subway. They could be customers. We just had to make it a way for them to do it.

[CJ]

We're going to get to the Uber story in a second here. But what you bring up about meeting the customer, where they are with the things they want to buy at that time, like it's, it's such a great point because you go to different countries, there are all sorts of wild things you may be able to buy in a convenience store that in the US you're like, what? You can, you can do that. There's.

[Matteo Bryant]

Oxxo is a really interesting example in Mexico, but you can pay all of your bills there. You can buy airline tickets there, you can pay for Amazon or Mercado Libre merchandise there. There's a lot of things that go on, and it's because there's still a lot of people who operate in cash. They might still be distrustful of banks in some cases. One of the things that's driven the success of nubank all over Latin America and possibly in other places in the future is mainly that banks there are a little behind the times when it comes to payment acceptance. So I remember moving to Mexico City, trying to buy things with my debit card online, and it seemed like their safety or their risk algorithm just kind of assumed all online transactions must be fraudulent. Because sometimes I just couldn't do it. I had no option but to go to the airport and buy this ticket on like in cash, which is just kind of nuts. So sometimes this need to have alternative payment mechanisms is driven by kind of some of these banks being behind the times.

[CJ]

So on a prior episode, we spoke with Peter Oye, the CFO of Grab, which is kind of a super app within Southeast Asia and all the islands there. And they have basically the equivalent of Uber, but also on motorbikes, but Then they have lending and they have like, 17 other different things that you can do do there. He explained that it was a similar experience where not everybody even had a credit card. You had to think about how is the consumer going to pay for this? And also how is the person who's providing the service, whether that's somebody on. On a motorcycle, who's delivering, you know, a watermelon or giving somebody a ride, how are they going to get paid at the end of the day if they don't have a bank account?

[Matteo Bryant]

Yeah, there has to be some other kind of mechanism. A lot of times really needs to work flawlessly because you need to build trust for some of these people. If, if you're creating some kind of wallet and this person's never even really stepped into a bank, like the kind of the notion of having this wallet where your money exists and that you can't see it and you can't touch it, like, exactly this moment, you better get it right, or else you might lose the confidence of this person who's, you know, who's willing to drive around in a motorcycle with a stranger grabbing onto them, you know, which is. Which is a way people move. Move around in a lot of different countries around the world.

[CJ]

Can you talk about your experience at Uber and how you went through the different options for payment?

[Matteo Bryant]

Yeah, you know, it was really interesting time to be at Uber. I started there around 2016, so during the Travis Kalanick era. And when I started Uber, I was operating in 16 cities in Latin America, and it was growing like wildfire, and we wanted to keep on growing. So one way to do that was to launch in more cities. And now I think Uber operates in 400 cities in Latin America. But another way was to get more people onto the platform. And something we heard consistently was, I can't use Uber because I don't have a credit card, or I don't like using credit cards a lot. So we needed to find a way to make cash payments work. And what was kind of beautiful about it, really, was that it was in some ways way easier than you would think. There were some problems around the edges. Because you think about it, it's like, well, how do you get the money? But then you just start to think about the actual unit economics. If you take a $10 ride, Uber's cut, it changes, spend different over different moments in time. But at that point in time, it was around 25%. So you take a ride for $10, and Uber is owed $2.50 for that ride. If you Think about it. As long as one out of four rides is done with a credit card, then Uber is going to get the full $10, right? The other three rides were handled with cash, so the driver has those $30. Well, on those four rides, $10 would have been Uber's cut anyways. So now you can just kind of say, hey, you keep the cash, I keep the credit card receipts. And then the added benefit of that is that you didn't pay transaction fees on those other $30. In this mathematical example, you just cut your credit card fees by 75%. Now, it didn't end up being that it was 3/4 cash, 1/4 credit card. It was more 50, 50. And it varied from market to market. Almost always we owed the driver a little bit of money, but we were able to keep all the credit card receipts, figure out how much above and beyond the cash they collected we owed them, transmit that, and it cut down our credit card fees dramatically. But then it also made growth go through the roof. So then essentially it doubled the size of the business and cut our credit card fees in half. And that just became a very, very profitable business by virtue of that growth, by virtue of lower transaction fees, and really by virtue of the fact that people just loved Uber in Latin America and we didn't have to spend really heavily on driver acquisition or customer acquisition.

[CJ]

What is a CFO podcast? So I guess I can say it's the equivalent of like a cashless exercise. You just net it out.

[Matteo Bryant]

Yeah, it was fantastic. And, you know, it also gave me a bragging point, you know, when I would talk, you know, I had a colleague who ran the US and another one who ran Europe, et cetera, et cetera. And like, how are you paying? Only like 1.5%, you know, in, in. In credit card fees. And it's like, because I just don't pay them that often. It's just I pay a similar amount as to everybody else when I pay

[CJ]

them, because people forget that as the middleman, one of your largest costs are the payment rails.

[Matteo Bryant]

If the credit card guys take 3%, it can be two and a half. It kind of depends. But they take 3% of the total value of the transactions, $10. They're going to take 30 cents. But my cut at that time was 250. So that 30 cents is more than 10%. It's a huge amount. So if I cut that 30 cents down to 15 cents on average, so much value to the bottom line. But simultaneously, I've made my product better for our users. It's more apt for the people in this area. So cash became really, really big in Latin America and. And was also, you know, became fairly commonplace in places like Africa and India and a few other spots around the world as well.

[CJ]

Do people overly emphasize, oh, well, what'll happen if somebody just steals the cash? Do you say, well, that's how they make a livelihood. And if they're committed to having an ongoing business, it. It kind of, I don't know, it balances itself out.

[Matteo Bryant]

It wasn't a lot of people, but some people did do that. But we figured out ways to get around that. One was just only route them credit card orders until we got back. And another one was, you know, there were certain markets where there was just not a lot of credit card users. And we created ways for them to go and kind of pay up. Actually, one way was to go to an OXO, this 7 11, like, store, and they could pay up what, you know, what they owed us and then kind of not being arrears anymore, and we could start to send them rides again.

[CJ]

Because I've spoken to people before who work in the retail industry, and they talk about when something is stolen as leakage or breakage or something along those lines. But I mean, even what you were saving on credit card fees, Mateo more than made up for that. Like, in multiples.

[Matteo Bryant]

There were a hundred million dollars in rides. I could essentially say I saved like 1.5%, like a million and a half dollars on the credit card fees. And then a couple guys made away with like 25 grand, you know, and be like, well, I'm not thrilled when somebody finds a way to game the system. But it was really, really hard to do. And doing so usually meant that you wouldn't be able to drive for Uber after a certain point.

[CJ]

Well, if we were to zoom back out, what do you think is the true financial cost of companies who are pretending to be global, but they act otherwise?

[Matteo Bryant]

One thing is just leaving profitable sales on the table, and that can happen quite a bit. And the other one is having to go out and buy someone who did build something that works, you know, a similar product, but is tailored for that geography. If you are that person who has the perfect solution for a big market like Indonesia or Brazil, that's tailored, that's similar to what one of these global players has. And particularly if you're cash flow positive, you're in no hurry to sell it, you know that they are unlikely to build it at this point. And on the other hand, I've got something I don't necessarily need them. So if you want to have this superior product in your portfolio, you've got to pay up. So there's likely to be a very expensive acquisition down the line. That happened a lot in CPG companies. Like, one thing that comes to mind is if you ever go to Peru, you'll see this product called Inca Cola all over the place. It's very, very sweet. Peruvians love it, Coca Cola owns it. But there's a point in time when whomever is behind Inca Cola was just killing Coke and they ended up having to pay up in order to grab that part of the market. And, and those are the kinds of things that might not happen if you're willing to adapt to the conditions on the ground and you can become the right product for the. For the right geography.

[CJ]

Well, while we're on the topic of gig economy models, you've said to me before in passing that gig economy models work best when the socioeconomic gap between the buyer and the sell is largest. How do you think that shaped Uber's success in Mexico? If you, if you try to compare that to the US what ends up

[Matteo Bryant]

happening is that you might have a person who's in the car who is willing to pay $10 to go to the airport. They're also willing to pay $30 to go to the airport. And the person in the car is willing to take 750, which would be their share of that. And certainly they're willing to take more on the $30 trip. That's a transaction that can happen. It can happen all across the spectrum between 10 and there's plenty of people willing to pay that. And obviously there's people willing to earn on throughout that whole thing. Now, if you take that to San Francisco, no one's going to take you to the airport for $10. Absolutely not. Right. So that's a transaction that's just not going to happen. Just kind of using my San Francisco experience. But I. I don't think I've ever gone to the airport for my home for less than $35. So it's just kind of as simple as that. When there is a bigger difference in the socioeconomic period, which pyramid, which there certainly is in places like Mexico, Brazil and India, the. The relative distance between the upper echelons and that pyramid and the base of the pyramid that tends to be providing them, that distance is just way, way greater. They're a little bit more inelastic on both sides about what they're willing to earn and what they're willing to pay. Which just means that the window where the market clears is way, way bigger. And whereas in the United States, I think we've all had the experience now and then when we say, you know what, I am going to take the AirTran to JFK. Right. I don't know if I'm going to pay 180 bucks to go from Wall street to JFK in an hour and 45 minutes when I could jump on the AirTran for seven bucks.

[CJ]

Well, to that point, I had a similar experience last week where I took the Metro north train in from my town to New York city. It was $14.50. It was technically actually $29 because I dropped the first ticket on the rails and was debating climbing in to get it and said my life is actually worth enough that I'll. I have to pay again. That sucks. But it's 14.50 if you don't have fat fingers like me. I missed the train on the way home and the next one was like an hour and a half later. And I'm like, I'm tired. I want to go home. It was $250 Uber to get back.

[Matteo Bryant]

It's a trade off. But not everybody is going to make that one. Whereas I would venture to stay in a similar situation. If you were in Sao Paulo or Mexico City, it just wouldn't have been that dramatically more expensive.

[CJ]

Yeah. And I think you also have to think about in a gig economy, what's like the. I'll call it the net present value of somebody's time. What's the value of someone's time? Someone may be sitting there and they don't have another job to do. So the difference between getting paid nothing to sit there, and getting paid $5 to drive to the airport, that's a lot.

[Matteo Bryant]

Absolutely.

[CJ]

I want to touch on tariffs for a second here, something I am not smart on because I've never sold anything you can touch. But you've worked in models with extensive supply chains which are impacted by tariffs from. From Amazon to now Minted. What are some of the creative workarounds to tariffs you've seen in your time?

[Matteo Bryant]

You know, for a long time, for example, I was on the team that launched Amazon in Mexico, and I had to learn a bit about tariffs then because they did something interesting. That launch was very unique in that it was the first time that Amazon had launched with both, like a catalog of products that was sitting in warehouses in Mexico, but they'd also done all the work upfront to be able to import stuff directly from the Warehouses in the United States into Mexico to the, to the consumer. So they launched with that and about. It was about 50, 50 the catalog was. Half the stuff on there was in the United States and half of it was in Mexico. If you spend some time in Mexico City or Mexico at all and gone to let's say like expensive, manufactured, good, like a washing machine, you're going to notice that a washing machine in Mexico, if it's not made there, it costs way, way more than it would in the United States. The tariff situation is quite different. That's because Liverpool, for example, which is a large department store chain in Mexico, well, they're importing en masse a whole bunch of dishwashers or washing machines or DVD players or whatever it was at the time. So they're the importer of the record and they're bringing in two giant containers full. When the importer record is the customer. There's actually an upper threshold where there's no tariffs at all. And also if, even if the product is more expensive than that threshold, the tariffs are lower than what they would be if you were a person importing containers and containers, all these from one day to the other. Maybe like a Bluetooth speaker that might be imported by some department store in Mexico and have lots and lots of tariffs on it. It and cost the customer like 100 bucks at the, at the store. You could buy that same one out of an Amazon warehouse sent to you. You are the importer and it's going to cost you like $55. And so for the customers it's just like a revelation. Like if, you know, some people go from Mexico to the United States specifically for shopping trips, particularly to buy electronics and textiles and things like that. And now we could just bring all that stuff to them. And that was one of the, one of the creative solutions that was used for quite a while. My understand is that I believe it was t was doing the same thing, but the other way around. They were operating some warehouse facilities in like Tijuana and other places along the border and sorting the people in the southern half of the United States from there because it was more inexpensive to run those, those warehouses. But since then those, those loopholes have been shut to a large extent. I understand.

[CJ]

So I love some good arbitrage. Hey, while we're on the topic of Amazon, can you tell the launch story with Demand Gen?

[Matteo Bryant]

That was pretty crazy. It was a big learning for me. Google's just this massive company and they've been a massive company for a while. But if you were to go back 10 or 15 years, they were a fraction of the size they are now in revenue. So you know, Google is a big company, but it was growing and growing every year their search product. More and more people were discovering product via Google search and it was something that Amazon was concerned about. They were wondering, you know, is there a future where I might need to pay Google for every one of these transactions and how do I, you know, become a direct source where people go to discover products? In a meeting when we were planning the launch, a very senior Amazon executive, a person who reported to Bezos, said, I wonder what would happen if we launched in Amazon in Mexico without Google at all. Like we didn't buy any keywords, none at all. Wouldn't that be fascinating? And we left the meeting with what we understood to be the marching order of launched without Google search, like don't buy any keywords. And you know, I was trying to forecast like how what's going to happen. There is no, there was no proxy. Everybody had launched with Google search. My numbers were all sorts of right and all sorts of wrong. We get into our quarterly business review three months after launching. We're sitting in the room, we're talking about demand generation and marketing channels and we report on how things went not using Google. And that same executive says, why did you launch without Google search? And what I learned from that was one always make sure if you're in some kind of senior meeting that what you think are the takeaways, the big action items are actually the same. And also if you are that person who is giving those action items out, you do the same thing. Because sometimes what ends up being an offhanded comment and you're just, I wonder what would happen if ends up becoming something. There was a multi month push, dozens if not, you know, maybe a hundred people involved and like, how do we do it and how do we juice out these other acquisition channels? All because of just I wonder if kind of.

[CJ]

All right, Matteo, I'm going to take you into what we call our long ass lightning round. So you're a successful man, successful cfo, a fixer in multiple languages. But you got to give me one thing. You've messed up on the job before.

[Matteo Bryant]

Quarterly business reviews that you have at Amazon is it's an opportunity to shine in front of a whole bunch of senior people. It's a really intense moment. Those meetings are usually 90 minutes and the first 45 minutes is just people reading it is true what they say about it. Reading a memo that you've written and six months post launch, I still hadn't hired anyone. I was running the entire show myself for Amazon Finance in Mexico. The recruiters are jammed. They were hiring vendor managers, they were hiring people to, you know, make sure our inventories are correct, all kinds of other things. I didn't have any FP people. So as I'm preparing for this qbr, you know, I'm filling in the blanks about, you know, this much growth, this much margin, et cetera, et cetera. And I looked at the wrong column and put in all the wrong numbers. Oh, man, it was just so humiliating because, you know, it was something like, you know, we thought we were going to finish at 1, we finished at 1.2, and that means that we grew 12%. It's like, no, that's 20%. I went with my boss, you know, say like, I'm really sorry, like the results are there, but I just messed up this key moment. And he told me something that's very true, is that not every hour of every day is worth the same thing to you as, as an employee, as an executive, as in terms of your career. There are people who you only see four times a year for maybe 90 minutes, and this is a time when I was in such a meeting and they're going to form their entire opinion over you about you based on three to six hours in a year. And there's other people that you're in a room with for three hours a day. It really matters more to get a hundred percent on those 12 hours a year than a hundred percent on those 500 hours a year that you're going to have with this other person, because you have an opportunity to recover if you make a mistake. And I've really taken that hard since then. So I very much will over index my time on things like board of directors presentations or things like that. And sometimes I feel like maybe I'm going overboard. But in the end it's very true. And it's something I sometimes tell, you know, different colleagues are kind of informal mentees is those 12 hours count a lot. And if you want to get an A plus on something, you might want to get an A plus on those 12 because it'll carry you really far.

[CJ]

It's so true. Not every hour is created equal. I feel like that was a big unlock as well from me in my career where I would study for this 15 minute spot in a presentation because I knew the CEO and CFO would be listening. I would stay up really late the night before because I wanted to nail it. Because I think if you get that right, then it can turn into 30 minutes of exposure than 45 minutes. But you got to nail whatever stage time you're given.

[Matteo Bryant]

There's different work relationships that do have a more sausage making aspect. And you know, in there, not to say you should be sloppy, but there's, there's more latitude for making mistakes or figuring something out or having, you know, coming to a conclusion that's 70% true, but 30% of very strong caveats. And those other moments, you're building trust with this group of people and to have everything ticked and tied and every answer and being able to go three to four to five levels deep on, on any kind of line of questioning, it makes a huge difference for you. It makes a huge difference in gaining trust from whomever those individuals are. And it'll probably give you a bunch of leeway to operate in the between time between those board of directors or QBR or investor pitches, whatever it might be.

[CJ]

Matteo, can you walk me through your finance software stack? What tools does your team use to get the job done?

[Matteo Bryant]

We use NetSuite. We implemented it about three years ago. We were on QuickBooks for quite a while. We use Avalara for tax. For fpa, we use good old fashioned Google sheets. I love Google sheets. I know it's not perfect, but I also know that I'm a little bit behind at this point and there's a lot of really exciting AI products out there that I need to start to look at. Like the finance tech stack that uses AI. Now they're starting to come in their own and I'm going to need to request a little bit of roadmap time. Some of them are getting pretty exciting.

[CJ]

Well, the blessing of this podcast, Matteo, is you're about to get hit up by 50 hungry BDRs.

[Matteo Bryant]

They're in my inbox every day as it is. But this is the year where I'm going to start to think about what's the right software for us started using.

[CJ]

Last one I got for you, a fun one. What's the craziest thing you've ever had someone try to expense?

[Matteo Bryant]

There was a fellow at one of my prior employers, you know, we kind of did a, a cursory sweep to see if there's anything odd in, in some of the, the credit card transactions and the expense accounts. And there was a seven day cruise. We thought that we look peculiar. Like, you know, I just asked around. Did any team do some kind of bonding, team morale event that involved a cruise? Yeah. So we, we ended up confronting this fellow and asking, you know, what's going on with the seven day cruise? And he's like, well, it wasn't for me. He's like, well, this is a consumer company, so it's not like, you know, you didn't buy it for like a large enterprise contract or, you know, who is it for? He's like, well, it's for my wife. I've been working really hard lately and that's more weight on her. So I just thought the right thing to do would be for my employer to invite her.

[CJ]

Selfless act. What happened to that person?

[Matteo Bryant]

You know, they were not with the company very much longer after that. That was kind of the tip of the iceberg and we found a lot of other things.

[CJ]

Yeah, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Matteo, this has been an absolute blast. Thank you so much for carving out time for us.

[Matteo Bryant]

My pleasure. Really exciting stuff.

[CJ]

Run the Numbers is a mostly media production. Yelling an intro by Fat Joe. Artwork by Meg d'. Alessandro. Show is executive produced by Ben Hillman. Nothing said on this podcast is intended to be business or investment advice. It's the sole opinion of me. A guy who feeds his dog way too much ice cream and has a history of net operating losses. Lol. If you like this podcast, hit subscribe and give us five stars. It will take like two seconds and our algorithm overlords love it. Drink water, call your mom and have a great day.

[Matteo Bryant]

Peace.