The Learnings at Matrix are not Time-Bound

I spent two years as an Analyst at Matrix Partners India - two exciting years, personally and professionally. I headed to business school in the US post Matrix and currently work as a Product Manager at Walmart in the SF Bay Area. My role as a PM requires me to build intuitive user experiences for our digital products by understanding key customer needs and pain points and collaborating with engineers and designers.

Hopefully, my reflections here give a perspective on my time at Matrix, and how my learnings continue to be a core part of my current professional life.

From founder-focused to customer-focused

Customer-focused is probably one of the more misused terms in the tech world today. It is only when you actually work at a truly customer-focused organization do you realize the eons of space between customer-focused, customer-friendly, and we-can-think-about-customers-later firms. This remains one of my key learnings at Matrix - if you constantly and obsessively serve the stakeholders who matter the most, it can paradoxically be the most selfless move in your self-interest. Matrix was the epitome of founder-obsession - not just portfolio founders but the founder community at large. Every team member was wired to deprioritize everything else if a founder came knocking. Once in the middle of a deal diligence that we needed to close quickly, a founder we had backed needed help to create a go-to-market strategy and was crunched on time and resources. Tarun asked me to immediately re-prioritize the work we were doing on the live deal to ensure I was able to focus on the founder’s ask - even if it meant juggling between the founder's request and the potential investment opportunity. This obsession very easily translates and cascades every single day as a PM - making sure the voice of the customer is represented in every discussion, in every decision.

Beauty is in the details

Working at Matrix demonstrated to me that the beauty of a business lies in its details. Two companies may often look similar on the surface - identical target markets, similar business models, or even comparable customer experiences. But as an investor, spending time with founders to get into the details is where you learn to set apart good businesses from the great ones. Working with Rajinder was a masterclass in the pursuit of detail - I just never knew where I would be the next day. When exploring the agri-tech space, I would find myself speaking to a farmer on the outskirts of Chennai just to understand his pain-points and how a company could create value for him. Another day, I would be in the Bangalore warehouse of a re-commerce startup at 5 am just to see in real-time, the efficiency of operations in turning around incoming inventory. No great product is built without attention to detail and this is a skill that I can safely say was nurtured at Matrix.

Learn by doing

You will never walk into a role knowing everything you need to perform well. If that were the case, it’s probably the most boring job you’d ever do. While Matrix strives to provide you all the resources you may need, the core belief remains that there is no better way to learn than by actually doing it. I walked into Matrix with the financial IQ of a five-year-old. Vikram’s reaction to this, “Arpit, why don’t you build a financial model for the company we just met and let’s discuss it tomorrow”. The discussion on the following day remains etched in my memory to date. Vikram spent two hours dissecting every single element of my rudimentary model walking through the thought process and approach to analyze a company’s finances using first principles. Even today, when I find myself involved in technical areas very alien to me, I can jump into it assured that there will be a Vikram to teach as long as there is an Arpit curious enough to learn.

Strong opinions held loosely

Both as an investor as well as a founder, you are constantly in situations to make decisions with incomplete information. If you waited to get as much information needed to make a decision with complete conviction, you probably would have close to 0 companies in your portfolio. This is where Matrix teaches you the art of making decisions in uncertainty as long as you are open to being proven wrong later and willing to make the change. Avnish, to me, remains the personification of this idea of “strong opinions held loosely” (which he has probably said to me no less than 34 times). Through his experience, understanding, and research, Avnish always had a framework to look at founders (and hence companies) that he’d want to work with. However, he always sought out data that could refute his stand and referred to it as the constant cycle of learning and unlearning.

This has directly translated into a very strong hypothesis-driven approach to solving customer problems. As a Product Manager, you constantly evolve your product based on a hypothesis around consumer behaviors and problems. But, you should be able to quickly iterate or abandon your hypotheses as more data or customer research comes into light.

Long story short - The time spent at Matrix were two of the most fun, cherished, and educative years in my professional life and continue to strongly recommend Matrix as a partner be it as a founder looking for a partner for life or an investor looking to build a career.

The author of this blog, Arpit Agrawal, is currently the Senior Product Manager for Walmart eCommerce.