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TRANSCRIPTION WITH SPEAKERS
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[00:00] SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Canada's podcast.
[00:05] SPEAKER_01: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Canada's podcast.
[00:08] SPEAKER_01: My name is Rivers Corbett.
[00:10] SPEAKER_01: I am honored and thrilled to be the Atlantic Canadian podcast over Canada's podcast,
[00:16] SPEAKER_01: which is Canada's number one podcast, podcast for entrepreneurs.
[00:22] SPEAKER_01: And of course, I'm always very, very leaning towards Atlanta, Canadian,
[00:26] Speaker UNKNOWN: Roxfarer stories.
[00:28] SPEAKER_01: And today's story is exactly one of those.
[00:31] SPEAKER_01: I'm really pleased to have from Ecuador, which originally started at the journey
[00:38] SPEAKER_01: and Brentswick Matthew Carpenter, our very old, welcome Matthew to Canada's podcast
[00:44] SPEAKER_01: Atlantic Canada version.
[00:45] SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Rivers.
[00:46] SPEAKER_00: It's a great pleasure to be here.
[00:48] SPEAKER_01: Yes, sir.
[00:48] SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, I know you're from New Brunswick.
[00:52] SPEAKER_01: I know you went to St. Thomas University.
[00:54] SPEAKER_01: And I know that you're, you're, you're an entrepreneur.
[00:58] SPEAKER_01: And I've done my background on you.
[01:00] SPEAKER_01: And before, so I'm not going to dive right into that.
[01:03] SPEAKER_01: What I want to dive right into is that you were referred.
[01:08] SPEAKER_01: You were referred by a previous guest on the Canada's podcast, David Olston,
[01:15] SPEAKER_01: who was very near and dear to New Brunswick, let alone on the Atlantic Canadian landscape.
[01:20] SPEAKER_01: The conversation was absolutely freaking brilliant with him.
[01:24] SPEAKER_01: And at the end of the conversation, I said to David, is there anybody that you would recommend
[01:31] SPEAKER_01: that I talk to to bring it into the podcast and do without any hesitation, he said you.
[01:38] SPEAKER_01: And he said a couple of more by the way, but he said you first.
[01:41] SPEAKER_01: And it was like, oh my gosh, you've got to talk to Matthew.
[01:45] SPEAKER_01: And of course, he was so kind David, as you know, an awesome man.
[01:48] SPEAKER_01: He made the introduction right away.
[01:49] SPEAKER_01: So tell us why you think he said that I needed to talk to you.
[01:55] SPEAKER_01: Obviously with your background in New Brunswick and Atlanta Canada, that's the natural connection.
[02:00] SPEAKER_01: But tell us as to why he said, yeah, get a hold of them.
[02:04] SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm, I'm glad that he recommended me.
[02:07] SPEAKER_00: And I'm grateful for the opportunity to be here as well.
[02:11] SPEAKER_00: I think that what he was probably referencing was the fact that he invited me to speak to his marketing cohort.
[02:17] SPEAKER_00: And I had shared with them some of my experiences developing my sort of approach and philosophy to marketing based on my experience living in Latin America.
[02:27] SPEAKER_00: And I think my journey is somewhat unconventional primarily because instead of, instead of building my life around my career, I've sort of built my career around my life.
[02:37] SPEAKER_00: And that has taken me to a number of different interesting places, including, you know, over 10 years here in Ecuador.
[02:44] SPEAKER_00: But I suspect that's probably what he was referring to.
[02:48] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, we're going to dive into that then because it's not right to just share only the nuggets with David Austin.
[02:53] SPEAKER_01: You need to share a bit. So we'll get into that in a bit.
[02:56] SPEAKER_01: But I want to, you know, I want to, I want to put context here for this conversation, Matthew.
[03:01] SPEAKER_01: And, and by the way, folks, you got to go on to his LinkedIn site. Matthew Carpenter are Vero, A R E B A L O.
[03:09] SPEAKER_01: And the first thing is I see our ex Google ex Twitter. What does that mean?
[03:17] SPEAKER_00: So it was a bit of a strange journey to get to both of those places.
[03:22] SPEAKER_00: But I graduated from St Thomas University, as you mentioned, I grew up in St John graduated from St Thomas.
[03:28] SPEAKER_00: And I got a scholarship to graduate school in the UK.
[03:32] SPEAKER_00: So I went to Oxford, I studied philosophy. And I'd always have this like one foot in the technology world and one foot in the philosophy world.
[03:39] SPEAKER_00: I'd started university as a computer science student and then switched to to literature and philosophy after the first week.
[03:48] SPEAKER_00: And when I was graduating from a lot from from Oxford, I got an offer to go and work at Google.
[03:54] SPEAKER_00: And I said, no, because I had made this commitment to my wife and my wife's family that after we finished graduate school, we would move back to Ecuador.
[04:02] SPEAKER_00: And when I was here, I was initially a high school teacher.
[04:07] SPEAKER_00: And I had this insight, which is that there throughout the so called developing world, there's a lot of people who are very, very talented, but their skills are often underappreciated and under compensated in their local markets for a variety of different reasons.
[04:24] SPEAKER_00: So my thought was, why couldn't you develop a website with this global team with people based on Latin America or in other places.
[04:31] SPEAKER_00: So I started developing my first company, which was doing web design for companies in the United States and Europe.
[04:38] SPEAKER_00: It went okay, but this was 2006. So the world wasn't quite ready for remote teams and near short teams.
[04:46] SPEAKER_00: But I was able to leverage that that work into a job at Google when my wife got a scholarship a few years later to study at UC Berkeley.
[04:56] SPEAKER_00: Because it's campus not far from Berkeley, which they're basically on two different sides of San Francisco.
[05:02] SPEAKER_00: So I wrote the people I had interviewed with the years before and said, hey, you know, I know I turned you down before, but I've been working in technology and I've been working as an entrepreneur.
[05:12] SPEAKER_00: Is there any chance I could apply again? And I got in under the before the price has happened in 20 2008.
[05:22] SPEAKER_00: And so I spent three years at Google and it was really a school for me.
[05:26] SPEAKER_00: I didn't have a lot of practical business experience before that.
[05:29] SPEAKER_00: Google, I think, aside from being a technology company, is really a company with a really core management philosophy.
[05:37] SPEAKER_00: And part of their idea is that middle managers either make a break your organization because bad middle managers will cost you a lot of great employees.
[05:47] SPEAKER_00: So I really feel like I got a master's degree there and how to manage people and how to build cultures.
[05:53] SPEAKER_00: And so I did that for three years. Then I stepped away from technology almost entirely. I was at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland for two years.
[06:02] SPEAKER_00: Then I came back to Ecuador and one of Silicon Valley is actually a pretty small place.
[06:09] SPEAKER_00: So a lot of my former colleagues had moved from Google to Facebook and Twitter.
[06:14] SPEAKER_00: And one of them wrote me and said, hey, we're trying to set up a Latin American sales operation.
[06:19] SPEAKER_00: Maybe it could help us. So I went and worked for Twitter for a while.
[06:22] SPEAKER_00: But ultimately I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I knew I had to take the leap at some point.
[06:26] SPEAKER_00: And so as soon as I finished up my time at Twitter, I started my company, which is built on the same notion as the first company only now in 2014, the world was starting to get ready for globalized services.
[06:40] SPEAKER_01: And let's talk on that in a quick sec. So a couple of observations come from that conversation.
[06:44] SPEAKER_01: The first one is that you initially said no to Google because you promised your wife's family, you would go back to Ecuador and then she proceeds to take you to UC Berkeley.
[06:55] SPEAKER_01: So that's right. So that was okay. When she decided to take you away, I love it.
[07:01] SPEAKER_01: And the second thing when I love and you know, I don't hear a lot of this conversation happening from from entrepreneurs about the job ahead of it.
[07:11] SPEAKER_01: And I know I had a job before I started my entrepreneurial community journey and I totally agree with you.
[07:17] SPEAKER_01: I get paid to be educated in the world of business. It was a telecommunications industry for me.
[07:24] SPEAKER_01: So as entrepreneurs, you know, don't be afraid of taking that job prior to beginning the journey because of what you can learn and get paid for it.
[07:32] SPEAKER_01: So I think that's absolutely amazing that you brought. I've never heard that in the mini podcast that I've done.
[07:39] SPEAKER_01: So thank you for reinforcing that. So talk about that company that was reborn in 2014.
[07:47] SPEAKER_01: What was the value proposition that you were that you were really focusing on on solving the problem of?
[07:55] SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So I would add to what you say to what you said is that I've been extremely fortunate to live with a great deal of privilege.
[08:03] SPEAKER_00: And we had great public schools in New Brunswick and I was able to leverage that into scholarships and get a great education.
[08:12] SPEAKER_00: And I've had very few barriers in my path. But and so the benefit of that is that a lot of people look at certain uncertainty as risk.
[08:20] SPEAKER_00: But I've always seen uncertainty as opportunity.
[08:23] SPEAKER_00: And so and this is also a big part of my wife's influence in my life is learning to kind of raise uncertainty.
[08:30] SPEAKER_00: And so when we started when I started the company in 2014, I had the same notion that eventually we will sell our services to companies in Canada and the United States.
[08:41] SPEAKER_00: And what I was looking at was there were a lot of providers in India that were doing.
[08:46] SPEAKER_00: For example, website design.
[08:51] SPEAKER_00: But the model wasn't really working all that well for a lot of people because either these companies had high turnover.
[08:56] SPEAKER_00: And so you weren't getting great quality or something would happen in the development at three in the morning.
[09:03] SPEAKER_00: You wake up and turn on your computer at eight or nine and you've lost six or seven hours of work.
[09:08] SPEAKER_00: So my thought was first of all, we're not going to compete on cheap. We're going to compete on quality.
[09:13] SPEAKER_00: And second, we're obviously in the same time zone as much of the United States and Canada.
[09:19] SPEAKER_00: So that's a major benefit in terms of real time collaboration.
[09:21] SPEAKER_00: And then tools like Slack and other productivity tools were coming along Trello, making it easier to organize project management across different time zones and across different countries.
[09:35] SPEAKER_00: And so at first we focused entirely on clients in Latin America.
[09:39] SPEAKER_00: We thought we'll be sort of a high-scale provider in Latin America.
[09:44] SPEAKER_00: And we'll learn our chops that way.
[09:48] SPEAKER_00: And there was always a lot of downward pressure on our pricing in Latin America because there's a lot of people who would do the same thing but for cheaper.
[09:56] SPEAKER_00: And then in 2016, I had this notion that I wanted to start focusing on the US market.
[10:04] SPEAKER_00: And my wife and I had ordered a heater for our house because keto is at almost 3,000 meters.
[10:10] SPEAKER_00: So that's like 12,000 feet. It's really high in the mountains.
[10:13] SPEAKER_00: And it got called here.
[10:15] SPEAKER_00: We'll think that because we're on the equator that it's warm, but it can actually get quite cold.
[10:20] SPEAKER_00: And the heater, the company that processed the purchase made a mistake between my credit card address and the delivery address.
[10:29] SPEAKER_00: So they sent the heater to the wrong address.
[10:31] SPEAKER_00: So I reached out to the CEO and I said, look, this happened.
[10:35] SPEAKER_00: And we got to talking and he said, what do you do? And I said, well, I have this marketing company.
[10:38] SPEAKER_00: And he said, well, I've been praying to God to send me someone like you.
[10:45] SPEAKER_00: And so that was my first client in the United States.
[10:49] SPEAKER_01: You were so glad you were so God was on your sales table.
[10:52] SPEAKER_00: I guess so.
[10:53] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[10:54] SPEAKER_00: It was a violent invention.
[10:56] SPEAKER_00: And from there, we started building out our services for US companies and Canadian companies.
[11:03] SPEAKER_00: But with a very narrow focus.
[11:04] SPEAKER_00: I thought was, let's just focus on doing few things really, really well.
[11:08] SPEAKER_00: And let's make extremely picky about who we work with because in the services industry, there's always a temptation to work with anybody.
[11:15] SPEAKER_00: But if people haven't worked with your type of service before, then they might not necessarily understand the value that you add.
[11:22] SPEAKER_00: Right.
[11:22] SPEAKER_00: And so we did that.
[11:24] SPEAKER_00: And then when the pandemic hit, we had a slight readjustment as some clients in different spheres that were more disproportionately hurt, a left.
[11:35] SPEAKER_00: And then other clients came in.
[11:36] SPEAKER_00: But really, for us, the pandemic was a moment when the market kind of realized that this trend is here to stay remote work is here to stay.
[11:45] SPEAKER_00: And if you can work with somebody remotely in the United States, why can't you work with somebody remotely in Latin America.
[11:50] SPEAKER_00: And so our trajectory continued up until this day.
[11:54] SPEAKER_00: And we had two very good years, despite all of the turmoil and the personal cost of the pandemic.
[12:04] SPEAKER_00: But one of the other things that had happened was that in 2019, here in Ecuador, we had some protests that shut down the country for a week.
[12:12] SPEAKER_00: And it was during that week that we developed our kind of remote work infrastructure.
[12:15] SPEAKER_00: And then after that, we never really looked back.
[12:18] SPEAKER_00: So we were ready to work remotely when the world became aware that remote work was going to become a thing.
[12:24] SPEAKER_01: So let's kind of talk about let's kind of tie back into that marketing piece for the David.
[12:31] SPEAKER_01: David's group was had the opportunity to learn from you about so talk about that as an element for your kind of what's the name of the company?
[12:39] SPEAKER_00: The name of the company is centric of digital. We just announced yesterday that it was that has been purchased so we can talk about that later later.
[12:48] SPEAKER_00: But I think that the kind of key insight I had was when I lived in Ecuador in 2006, I would use the bus system to move around a lot in Keto where I live.
[12:58] SPEAKER_00: And I had this insight. So one of the things that happens on public buses and this happens in any country in Latin America here are public bus costs 25 cents.
[13:06] SPEAKER_00: So it's very accessible. And then you get on the bus. And oftentimes what will happen is that people will get on the bus to try to sell you things.
[13:14] SPEAKER_00: Okay. And some of these people can be scared very scary looking.
[13:19] SPEAKER_00: And oftentimes what will happen is, you know, maybe somebody gets on a bus and maybe they have a tattoo on their face.
[13:25] SPEAKER_00: And they immediately end up having a bag of chocolates or a bag of candy. And they'll walk up and down the bus and they will put the chocolate in your hand.
[13:35] SPEAKER_00: Okay. And once they put the chocolate in the hand, there's not an expectation that you will buy it. It's just part of the sales process that they put the chocolate in your hand. And then they will normally tell a story.
[13:44] SPEAKER_00: And oftentimes that story will be something like I used to lead a life of prime and a life of sin. And then often there's a religious component. So I asked God to save me and God helped me.
[13:59] SPEAKER_00: And now I am trying to support my four or five brothers and sisters and anything that you can pay for this chocolate helps me and my journey.
[14:07] SPEAKER_00: And so the thing that I realized from this experience was, first of all, as soon as they put the candy on the chocolate in your hand, your resistance to purchasing drops immediately.
[14:18] SPEAKER_00: You are willing to purchase it once it's actually in your hand. And then the element of storytelling really changes that product from being a generic product into something that you have some sort of emotional or sentimental attachment to.
[14:32] SPEAKER_00: And the other thing that they say is pay whatever you want, which is a wonderful pricing strategy, because if you look at the economics, maybe it costs them 10 cents to purchase each chocolate.
[14:44] SPEAKER_00: And I'm probably going to pay him 50 cents, which is the most common coin that we have. So he's making a fairly good margin by saying pay whatever you want, because very few people are going to pay less than the cost.
[14:57] SPEAKER_00: So what I started seeing this and I developed it into kind of a marketing philosophy that we implemented in our team, which was that we have to find out how do we get the candy in the hand?
[15:09] SPEAKER_00: How do we get the candy in the hand of the people that we want to sell to? And then how do we tell a story that makes that service or that product?
[15:17] SPEAKER_00: Have an extra value that you have before.
[15:20] SPEAKER_00: So a lot of people in our space focus on inbound marketing. We are also practitioners of inbound marketing, but we wanted to do another layer so that we could compete not just as generic content producers, but also the really skilled at the technical side of sales and marketing, but also selling storytelling side of it.
[15:39] SPEAKER_01: Yes. So you become a master storyteller. So you went from Spanish and literature at St. Thomas in the technology and Google Twitter and now you're telling bedtime stories, which your father, so that's quite naturally your bedtime stories must be just freaking epic.
[16:01] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right now we're very dependent on Cookie Monster and Elmo for those stories. As my kids get older, I'll help to tell them stories that will make them curious about the world.
[16:11] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, that's so wonderful. Just back to our friend David. I've introduced David a few times. My journey used to be the entrepreneur residents for the province, and he runs away.
[16:22] SPEAKER_01: And I used to always say, I want my kids to grow up. I want everybody in the branch to grow up and their kids say, kids say to their parents, tell me that story of David Austin again.
[16:33] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, be a winner for sure. So, so you sold your company. Now, tell me if you could and I don't want to delve into areas that are not better aren't my business, but talk about the sales process of a business.
[16:52] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, a lot of people hear that. They hear a lot about raising money. What's the process of selling and any tips?
[17:00] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I had, you know, had this spell in Silicon Valley and I walked away from that experience, really turned off from the world of raising money and, you know, serious A, serious B, serious C.
[17:14] SPEAKER_00: And because I realized through conversations with a lot of friends who move from Google into the startup world that no matter what value system you have, once you accept outside money, you will compromise your values to do what your investors want you to do.
[17:33] SPEAKER_00: And it's basically because you're always on borrowed time. And then I was working for a company that is going towards an IPO and they said, and I asked them about it and he said for us and IPO is just another capital raise because you're always, you've always promised something and to get that money that money allows you to survive and then you have to go out to deliver.
[17:51] SPEAKER_00: So I said, I want to, I want to create a company that requires no capital to get started that is creative because I'm very fulfilled with doing creative work.
[18:04] SPEAKER_00: And that has this sort of social component to it. And one of the things we did was we decided that we would be sort of Robin Hood's of knowledge.
[18:11] SPEAKER_00: So we would take the best practices around sales and marketing that a lot of large companies have and we would share them with NGOs and purpose driven organizations because a lot of those organizations are filled with generalists and they often lack technical skills.
[18:26] SPEAKER_00: So we would step in and provide that technical knowledge.
[18:30] SPEAKER_00: And so we did this for eight years and then what I realized was that if you have a company and you're looking for an exit, then it's not just going to happen.
[18:41] SPEAKER_00: This is the first thing is that people think that that that you know people, people in label, come and somebody will find you, you actually have to go out and market your product.
[18:49] SPEAKER_00: And that means figuring out who buys companies in your space, who would be a good fit for you, and then how do you get close to those people, while seeing interested without seeing desperate because no one wants to do a deal with somebody who is not motivated to sell.
[19:05] SPEAKER_00: But also it's not in your favor to be entirely desperate to sell because then you're not really going to get the best price for what you're doing.
[19:13] SPEAKER_00: And I think another thing that happens to a lot of entrepreneurs, especially in the professional services space is that they enter the conversation with the completely flawed notion of what their companies work.
[19:25] SPEAKER_00: And I say that because most companies have debts and liabilities.
[19:29] SPEAKER_00: If you have friends that are in the sort of tech, SaaS space, then they won't understand how acquisitions happen in other spaces.
[19:38] SPEAKER_00: So in the agency space, for example, rather than multipliers of revenue, there's usually some sort of multiplier of a profit.
[19:45] SPEAKER_00: And there's a couple of different profit metrics that could be used, whether that's Evita or a sell a discretionary earnings.
[19:52] SPEAKER_00: And then, so you have to first understand what your company is worth, where there might be discount factors.
[20:01] SPEAKER_00: Are they buying you because you have attractive clients, are they buying you because you have a really good team, is it more like an aquihire?
[20:08] SPEAKER_00: And if there's no intellectual property, then your friends who are working in the SaaS space don't really have an understanding of what your company is worth.
[20:15] SPEAKER_00: And then, there are things like earnouts that don't exist in the SaaS space.
[20:29] SPEAKER_00: So it's really good to be educated on all of these topics before you get into those conversations.
[20:34] SPEAKER_00: And it just so happened that in my case, the acquisition plays over the course of eight or nine months.
[20:40] SPEAKER_00: And because I didn't have any imperative to sell, I mean, we had a really strong,
[20:45] SPEAKER_00: a bad night, you know, a best alternative to negotiate, negotiate agreement, which was the company was doing better than it ever had before.
[20:52] SPEAKER_00: And so, of course, was a very legitimate path for us to tell you.
[20:57] SPEAKER_00: So my first thought was if this doesn't work out, then I have learned so much about the acquisition process.
[21:04] SPEAKER_00: And I've spent a lot of time with somebody who is an OG in the agency space, which is who is Peter Lang, the head of whoever networked, who eventually purchased our company.
[21:14] SPEAKER_00: But the other benefit of a nine month engagement is that an acquisition is often an exchange of risk.
[21:21] SPEAKER_00: When somebody acquires a company, they're basically buying the risk that was inherent in the business beforehand.
[21:26] SPEAKER_00: But you purchase it with trust.
[21:29] SPEAKER_00: Right.
[21:30] SPEAKER_00: Because there's so much trust that has to be has to be exchanged in order for a deal to get done.
[21:35] SPEAKER_00: And then you have the sneaky factor called lawyers who will often step in.
[21:39] SPEAKER_00: And after you've decided what it is that you think you want for your deal, they will come in and put other ideas in your head.
[21:47] SPEAKER_00: And then you can easily get carried away thinking, oh, well, I'm not getting what I'm deserve.
[21:52] SPEAKER_00: But you never really one of those things or had those things in mind beforehand.
[21:55] SPEAKER_00: So there are a lot of mine fields.
[21:58] SPEAKER_00: I understand entirely how any deal can fall apart at the last second.
[22:02] SPEAKER_00: But the most important thing is that if there's a lot of trust between the buyer and the seller, then that's just the degrees that makes everything else work really, really well.
[22:13] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, beautiful.
[22:14] SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for taking us through that journey.
[22:16] SPEAKER_01: And I love the fact that you, you know, you really went in there not caring quote unquote if you made the sailor not.
[22:24] SPEAKER_01: And I'm sure that that made the entire process much better.
[22:28] SPEAKER_01: I also, you know, I love the fact about the way you entered into doing your businesses.
[22:34] SPEAKER_01: Personally, I get very, I don't know if the words distraught concern with how we glorify glamorized raising capital as a society versus getting a freaking customer.
[22:48] SPEAKER_01: You get enough customers in your backyard, then you're going to have lots of opportunity to sell to and raise capital.
[22:54] SPEAKER_01: And so I love again that you reinforce that that's important.
[22:59] SPEAKER_01: That's actually extremely important and it's not as glamorous a ride is what we think it is when it comes to raising capital.
[23:07] SPEAKER_01: So I appreciate that.
[23:09] SPEAKER_00: My wife says, my wife says often that it's you don't have to be a unicorn. It's okay to be a workhorse.
[23:15] SPEAKER_00: And yes, exactly.
[23:16] SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of good businesses out there that are work horses that are very valuable because they haven't raised capital or maybe they're not they don't have too much debt or too many obligations on their hands.
[23:26] SPEAKER_00: But they're great companies. They're fundamentals are good.
[23:30] SPEAKER_00: Their unit economics are good and they're attractive for other people.
[23:33] SPEAKER_00: So we can get carried away with the media attention that's placed on these big exits and whatnot.
[23:38] SPEAKER_00: But I don't necessarily think that we should all fetishize it as as the goal because I don't know that people when they start down that path are really aware of what they're in for.
[23:50] SPEAKER_01: So you mentioned your wife a few times during this conversation. What's her name?
[23:54] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so her name is Michelle.
[23:56] SPEAKER_00: I'm married up and she is from Ecuador, also studying at St Thomas.
[24:00] SPEAKER_00: And when we moved back to Ecuador in 2013, she we had this question of what will help change the Ecuadorian economy for the good.
[24:09] SPEAKER_00: I had this idea around globalized services and she built a business that has five co working spaces. It has an incubator.
[24:16] SPEAKER_00: It has a services company and it also has an investment fund.
[24:21] SPEAKER_00: So she is what we call an in an ecosystem builder and she's helping primarily social businesses, purpose driven businesses that are looking to have some sort of positive impact either on the environment or on society.
[24:36] SPEAKER_00: And she has all of these different tools in her toolkit to help them grow.
[24:41] SPEAKER_01: So you're right, you did marry.
[24:44] Speaker UNKNOWN: Absolutely. Yeah.
[24:45] SPEAKER_01: And I think it's a good for you, man. I five.
[24:48] SPEAKER_01: So, and by the way, I don't think she married Dow.
[24:51] SPEAKER_00: I just think you married up.
[24:54] SPEAKER_00: There's a, you know, I met when I was at Oxford, I met with a well known Canadian businessman and I asked him for advice and he said, you should always try to be a big fish in a small pond.
[25:04] SPEAKER_00: And I think that I know this wasn't necessarily a big fish in Prederton, but it helped that the being in a small town, I had a strong value proposition when I started introducing myself to her.
[25:19] SPEAKER_00: And so maybe if we were in Toronto, she would have, you know, married somebody else, but the lack of the draw.
[25:24] SPEAKER_00: I was able to leverage my position in as probably the only Spanish speaking, Gringo, in our university to start a relationship with her.
[25:36] SPEAKER_01: Well, it sounds like again, you had gone on your side and sailed.
[25:43] SPEAKER_01: So, why ask that question? And thank you for diving deeper into her.
[25:48] SPEAKER_01: I love that.
[25:51] SPEAKER_01: I've become my partner and I believe big fans of the Netflix series or prime series that Yellowstone.
[26:01] SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you've seen it yet, but it's quite spectacular.
[26:05] SPEAKER_01: Anyway, rules thumb in Yellowstone is that you do not talk business at the table.
[26:12] SPEAKER_01: So, if you have any rules of you and Michelle at home that you say, okay, this is how we integrate it, is it full force?
[26:22] SPEAKER_01: Is there rules? And why I say that is because a lot of partners are in business together.
[26:28] SPEAKER_01: And so any rules and hacks that you think might work well for that would be appreciated.
[26:32] SPEAKER_00: No, I only rule this is sort of probably after nine or 10 at night, we don't talk about problems.
[26:39] SPEAKER_00: Because we're trying to I will I'm the type of person who will lie awake staring at the ceiling, thinking about a problem, even if it's not my own problem.
[26:47] SPEAKER_00: So we try to.
[26:49] SPEAKER_00: But actually it's more of the opposite. And the reason I say that is because when I got to Oxford, I felt a great deal of imposter syndrome.
[26:58] SPEAKER_00: A lot of the other people who were there at my scholarship were from Central Canada.
[27:04] SPEAKER_00: Their parents were all professionals. My parents were working working class.
[27:08] SPEAKER_00: And they just had this baseline knowledge of the world and business and arts that I just didn't feel like I had.
[27:17] SPEAKER_00: And so when our children were born, we thought no, actually we're going to expose them to these conversations.
[27:22] SPEAKER_00: We're going to expose our children to learn through inertia. They hear us talking about PNLs and building companies and things like that.
[27:32] SPEAKER_00: So that it's there for them. It's part of their education, but it's not something we're forcing on them. It's just something that they're picking up on.
[27:39] SPEAKER_00: So so we don't I think when we first met, we were more sort of dreamers and were our interests were more around social movements.
[27:50] SPEAKER_00: So we spent a lot of time be about that. Then we went through graduate school together. So it was more about big ideas.
[27:57] SPEAKER_00: Then when we entered the workforce and either it was ever expected to end up in business.
[28:02] SPEAKER_00: But just by just the fate we ended up in business. So at this stage of our relationship and we've been married for 18 years, it's one of these things that we're able to do together because we have companies that are similar size.
[28:14] SPEAKER_00: We have similar problems, though she has a lot of problems that I don't have to deal with.
[28:19] SPEAKER_00: And so we're able to be each other's partner, but we're also careful not really to work together.
[28:25] SPEAKER_00: And this is something that I think bothers her a little bit is that people will either assume that people often assume that I'm running her marketing, which I am not.
[28:33] SPEAKER_00: And so they will come to her and compliment me on her marketing issues.
[28:37] SPEAKER_00: Yes, say no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Matthew just in the background. I always say like I'm like the vice president of her company because if like like the vice president of the United States, you have a cool title, but no real responsibilities.
[28:49] SPEAKER_00: And so we are each other's conciliates and we help each other think through things, but having that distance from the operational side of the business, I think allows us to provide each other a perspective where we know that the nature of each other's business intimately, but we're not involved emotionally.
[29:08] SPEAKER_00: So we can try to give each other a good advice without without getting wrapped up in what's going on on the ground.
[29:14] SPEAKER_01: I love it. I love it for all kinds of reasons, but one in particular, there's a strategy behind it that you both agree upon and also obviously you both execute and I love the fact your children get to learn a new language as part of that.
[29:29] SPEAKER_01: I mean, I speak a bit of French, definitely English, but I say I'm bilingual. I speak I speak entrepreneurship and that's what you're teaching them. So that's very good to speak.
[29:38] SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's very well, you can pretty well take it into any country as long as you speak the language of the country.
[29:47] SPEAKER_01: Matthew, you talked, you know, you talked about the gentleman that bought your company and you know the relationship you have in one of the ways in which he's minimized risk on his purchase is you're hanging on for a bit.
[30:00] SPEAKER_01: So talk about the next stage of your life, what's your plans and include in that, my friend, you're touching base back to Atlantic Canada.
[30:11] SPEAKER_01: So let's wrap that back to points and why back in Atlantic Canada because you're in Atlantic, Canadian entrepreneur, trans pointer in an Ecuador and now you're coming back to hang out a bit.
[30:24] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I mentioned that at the very start that I try to like live life and then build my career around my life. And one of the things I dreamed of I've been away from New Brunswick almost 20 years.
[30:37] SPEAKER_00: And so I go back frequently the longest period I have was through the pandemic, where it was almost over two years that I couldn't travel back.
[30:45] SPEAKER_00: But my heart has always been in New Brunswick. I don't long to live there, but I do long to spend a lot of time there.
[30:53] SPEAKER_00: And so if I were to design my life from scratch, I would say, well, I would like to live part of the year, especially the warm part of the year, because if you leave Canada, you eventually lose your resistance to the cold.
[31:04] SPEAKER_00: I don't know if a lot of Canadians know that, but your ability to sustain a Canadian winter is not permanent. You can lose that.
[31:12] SPEAKER_00: You can lose that in a week going down.
[31:16] SPEAKER_00: Exactly. So I would like to spend, you know, three or four months a year in New Brunswick and then the rest of the year in Ecuador.
[31:25] SPEAKER_00: It's obviously complicated with schools and things like that, but slowly we're finding solutions in the world is finding solutions.
[31:31] SPEAKER_00: But I had this vision a long time ago that I wanted to start creating work in the Maritimes. And so in 2019 I set out to create jobs in New Brunswick, then the pandemic struck.
[31:47] SPEAKER_00: And my children were born. So it got set back a little bit, but last week our first employee arrived through an intercom to Munkton and now he's based in Munkton and he'll be working with the new company as will I.
[32:03] SPEAKER_00: But I think one of the things that I've always thought is that when you're when you work at a company, there's two things that can happen either the company can outgrow you or you can outgrow the company.
[32:13] SPEAKER_00: When that happens, it's time to move on. And I had built this business that was doing well, but I couldn't shake this feeling of personal stagnation that I had kind of learned the things that I was meant to learn from an eight year entrepreneurial venture.
[32:27] SPEAKER_00: And so when the opportunity came came up to join a company that operates at another scale and that is doing programmatic acquisitions and really operating a lot more on the financial side of the business.
[32:42] SPEAKER_00: I thought this is a great opportunity to both employ the things that I've learned about culture and employees and management and growth and also learn from these individuals who have really mastered the financial side of the business and who have a completely different perspective.
[32:57] SPEAKER_00: And one of the benefits is in one of the reasons why I was so fond of the people who bought our company is that they were already a 100% removed company. So there was no pressure to my team, 100% of my team moved from our company to the new company.
[33:13] SPEAKER_00: And so there were new growth opportunities and as an entrepreneur, I've always cared deeply about the people that work for me. And one of the things that was really hard for me to admit sometimes is when some of our employees had outgrown the company and then needed to be able to do that.
[33:28] SPEAKER_00: And so now I feel like all of us myself included have this runway that we didn't have before of opportunity of learning of growth.
[33:37] SPEAKER_00: And so when you start to calculate the cost of any deal, most people just focus on what was what was the final number, what was, you know, how much money to do.
[33:47] SPEAKER_00: You're right. Right. There's all of these intangibles that have to be taken into account. And I feel like I won the lottery on the things that I really care about in terms of being able to give the 27 people who are part of my company, a new growth opportunity.
[34:02] SPEAKER_00: And then eventually the idea of integrated global teams will just be so natural that you'll start a job and somebody will be in Argentina and somebody else will be in Bangladesh. And this is just how we work.
[34:16] SPEAKER_00: So I'm happy to partake in the building of that reality. And I'm also excited to see it come to fruition.
[34:28] SPEAKER_01: Well, a lot of things go through my head. One of them is the focus in on your people.
[34:36] SPEAKER_01: And the your desire to continue to learn more. I mean, I remember I was talking to a woman at the government one day.
[34:45] SPEAKER_01: And I said, well, she says, well, where do you work? And she says the government says what department and she said such a thing.
[34:52] SPEAKER_01: And I then asked her, I said, oh, you must you must absolutely love it. She says, no, I hate it.
[34:58] SPEAKER_01: What do you do it? She said, because of the benefits.
[35:03] SPEAKER_01: So when I hear your focus on that and you're genuine this behind it, that's just a great leadership, my friend.
[35:13] SPEAKER_01: And congratulations on that. I think it's really spectacular.
[35:18] SPEAKER_00: Thank you. And I would just add to that just quickly because.
[35:21] SPEAKER_00: Sure.
[35:23] SPEAKER_00: Last year I published a piece in TechCrunch about the kind of Atlantic Canada Tech Boom.
[35:28] SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that I've always believed was that eventually we would move to remote work and Atlantic Canada would be really well positioned to take advantage of that because we have such a high quality of life in Atlantic Canada.
[35:39] SPEAKER_00: And I think we've seen that come to fruition. There's been number of articles in the New York Times and other publications about people moving to Atlantic Canada.
[35:46] SPEAKER_00: There's always an initial two bumps where property values change and things like that.
[35:52] SPEAKER_00: But the truth is that you have these tech companies that have proven that you can build from New Brunswick.
[35:58] SPEAKER_00: They were successful before things like the Great Resignation happened and before the pandemic happened.
[36:04] SPEAKER_00: And now we just have this proof of concept, which means that we can build a very different economy for Atlantic Canada than the one we had before.
[36:10] SPEAKER_00: And so in many ways, the things I'm doing and trying to do in Ecuador and Latin America are the same things I would like to see happen in Atlantic Canada, which is migration from economies that pull things out of the ground to economies where we use our heads in our skills and can therefore offer different opportunities because I don't know what my opportunities would have been if I stayed in New Brunswick.
[36:31] SPEAKER_00: I kind of had to go out into the world to find my place. But my hope is that, you know, the next generation, the next few generations of New Brunswickers in Atlantic Canadians can build really fulfilling careers without having to move.
[36:47] SPEAKER_01: Well, there's a couple of things that come up. I told you from the beginning, this would be an ad lib conversation.
[36:53] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but what you're teaching people here is yes, the importance of understanding the value of, and the opportunity to work directly from New Brunswick, you don't have to leave.
[37:03] SPEAKER_01: But also, you got to look beyond New Brunswick in order to really look for some magnificent opportunities. And I find that that's sometimes a challenge for a lot of New Brunswickers, not necessarily New Brunswick entrepreneurs to appreciate that the bigger world is really the bigger opportunity, which you can do when you're on back.
[37:24] SPEAKER_01: So Matthew, how do people hang out with you, my friend, because they're going to be leaning. And by the way, I know I mentioned about getting the bio. If you can send me that link for that tech crunch article, that would be so helpful.
[37:36] SPEAKER_01: Because we'll put that in the bio when we send out the promotion and so on. But yeah, man, how do people hang out with you? Either they find you have things obvious.
[37:46] SPEAKER_00: This place to find me is on LinkedIn because I'm on Twitter, and but I tweet mostly in Spanish. My community is mostly in Spanish. So it might not be as interesting to follow me there.
[37:56] SPEAKER_00: But definitely LinkedIn is the number one place to go to find me. And I'm a big fan of that network.
[38:03] SPEAKER_00: I publish there frequently, different ideas about management, entrepreneurship and whatnot. So, and I'm the only Matthew Carpenter at Avalot there. So it's easy to find me.
[38:13] SPEAKER_01: I love it. Well, we started this conversation with David Austin recommending you to me. Now I know why.
[38:21] SPEAKER_01: I think it's been a spectacular, spectacular conversation at the speed that I like to go to.
[38:29] SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much for the opportunity to chat with you, Matthew. Congratulations on your journey. Keep doing your magic.
[38:38] SPEAKER_01: And you know, keep raising that Atlantic Canadian flag like you do. We sure appreciate it because you're showing us where opportunities lie and that we can do it.
[38:46] SPEAKER_01: So keep on being a rock star, man. Thank you so much for how much appreciate this opportunity. And yes, thank you so much for for the invitation.
[38:56] SPEAKER_00: You're welcome, sir. Okay, take care.
