Being a Startup CEO as a Non-Founder
A conversation with Henrik Mattson, CEO, Lookback
From getting a Ph.D. in economic geography to becoming CEO of a startup as a non-founder, Henrik Mattsson has had a fascinating journey. We spoke about how his life changed in the span of an hour, handling change, shifting company culture after taking the role, and his philosophy of distributed leadership. His remarkable journey brings insights to leaders and those who aspire to be one.
Can you introduce yourself?
Sure. I'm Henrik Mattsson. I'm the CEO of Lookback.
Very concise. What does Lookback do?
We are a UX research platform used by UX researchers, product managers, and designers who want to do different types of usability studies, and user interviews, trying to figure out what's wrong with the experience they're building by talking to people. So, it's qualitative stuff, none of the heat maps and stuff like that. We try to help people collaborate across the team, because if you just do research and no one builds off it, then nothing improves. So, we're trying to get the whole product team in there. It's been fun.
How long has Lookback been around?
2013, I believe. I joined in 2016.
So about nine years. I understand you have a Ph.D.?
Yes, Economic Geography. Everyone knows what that is, right?
(we both laugh)
So what is economic geography?
It’s a subfield of economics, but it really concerns itself with things like globalization, local environments, agglomerations of industries, and all economic activity where space matters.
I've never heard that before. I love learning new things. So, you have a Ph.D., did you ever expect to become a CEO?
No, I mean, I think we'll get into that, but I was surprised when I was offered the CEO job. So I mean, all those years before, I wasn't even thinking about going into business. So, I would've been very surprised if you had told me back then that this was where I was going.
If you told Ph.D. candidate you, "You are going to be a CEO one day” would you have responded, "What?"
Yeah, absolutely. I just wanted to be a teacher and do research, and yeah.
So how did you get into the business world?
Yeah. So I mean, I really loved doing a PhD. I recommend anyone who has a chance to go do a Ph.D., that, that was great. I love teaching, I love supervising young people, I love that whole kind of learning journey, I love figuring things out, I love running experiments, all of that stuff. When you're early in your academic career, you get to do a lot of that stuff, and it's fun, but one thing that you don't have, is you don't have stakeholders. I mean, for me, I don't want to kind of disrespect all of academia, but for me personally, I couldn't really deal with this thing that no one really cared about. It's like, it's just other academics like, "Yeah, I'm going to cite your paper, if you cite my paper," and it's this kind of weird exercise.
So, I got thrown into business because people cared about the impact of the analysis. I started doing consulting on the side, and then I just jumped into that, and then one day I was helping Lookback in the early days. They didn't have any kind of business background people, and I knew one of the founders, so I helped them with pricing and stuff like that, and all of a sudden, I was there full-time.
That is such an interesting way into technology and business. How long were you consulting before you officially joined Lookback?
I founded a management consulting firm when I left academia. So, I was doing that, and then this was kind of pro bono work. Lookback was trying to raise money, and I got a call after an investor meeting and they were like, "We need to have a market sizing thing. We need to know the go-to-market strategy. Can you do that?" And I'm like, "Sure, I'll throw something together." So, I was doing that for probably the first year and a half, took a lot of lunches, and helped out with stuff like that, and then when they raised the Series A, they kind of hired a bunch of people, and I was one of them.
What role did you come into in the company?
Yes, I was the first kind of business background person to join. So, I was in some glorified admin role. I did everything from metrics, to investor reports, to budget, to signing off on expense reports and paying people. So, everything that wasn't design or engineering.
How big was the company at the time?
Around 10 or something.
So you were sort of doing a little bit of everything to start. How did you progress to CEO?
I was working a lot with metrics, "How is it going? What should we be tracking? Are we doing the right things?", that's very close to the business side of things. It's like, "We're running these experiments. Are they working? Should we run more experiments? Should we run fewer? Should we run others?" So, I kind of got into the leadership group doing that, and then in my management consulting work, I advised a bunch of CEOs and stuff like that, and the founding team is younger than I am, so, I was kind of in an advisory role to the CEO.
At one point, we got into a kind of bad situation, running out of cash. We had a good team, we had a loved product, and we had a few, but very, very good customers that really believed in us. We were doing okay, and we had kind of a bright future, but we were running out of cash, things weren't going fast enough, we were at that point where we really needed to do something, and we had kind of a crisis meeting, the three founders and I, and kind of brainstormed solutions, and strategies for a couple of days.
During those meetings, I had some very strong opinions, I guess, about what would work, and more importantly, what wouldn't work. It was very clear to me that what we had been doing, wasn't working. So, I was like, "Look, this is serious. If we get this one wrong now, we're going to run out of cash in three months, and then it's over." At one point, my predecessor (the CEO at the time) said, "Oh, perhaps Henrik should be CEO," and then one of the other co-founders said, "Yeah, perhaps he should," and they kicked me out of the room to talk. I went for a walk. One hour later, they called me back in and yeah, gave me the mandate, so that was a bit of a shock.
Wow.
Yeah.
That’s incredible. In your role at the time, were you still doing this operational sort of stuff? Were you managing, were you running an area, were you sort of an individual contributor?
Both. It's a typical startup thing, you do everything. I was running Excel sheets, just making sure that the accountants did the right things, and just tracking all the cash, and writing expense reports, and all of that stuff, all the practical stuff, but I was also heavily involved in spending a lot of time with my predecessor, trying to figure out, what do we need to do to get where we need to be? So, a lot of strategy coaching, and things like that, and also, more and more trying to... I mean, that was my kind of transition, I guess as... An early startup, I think this is probably pretty common, an early startup has very centralized leadership.
It's like the founders have done everything, and as the team grows, and especially in our case, I think we were very privileged from the early days to have very, very strong non-founder team members, and when you have very centralized leadership around that, it doesn't really work. So, I kind of became the person who spent the morning talking to the CEO, then went out and talked to all the other people to try to get them on board with what we were doing. So, I was kind of this relay, which was a very inefficient way of doing it, but yeah, I got more and more into that.
You joined Lookback in 2016. When were you appointed CEO?
Just after the summer of '17.
Oh, so like a year and change into your tenure at the company.
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting times. Go work for a startup.
So the company was still relatively small then.
Oh yeah, we were burning a lot of cash, there wasn't a product-market fit yet, and the product was in its early days.
Were you shocked when you came back into the room and they gave you the role? Or was it something you had considered at that point since you had the business experience?
No, I was shocked. I think it was really… it's one of those things where sometimes when you're in a crisis situation like that, it could be anything, right? But you're in a team, there are some of these things, I had really fallen in love with the team, and the product, and everything we were doing, I really loved it, and this was kind of like a second career for me because I had founded another company before and I was like, "No, I'm just going to be in an advisory role."
And obviously, some things weren't working, but I was happy with the founding team we had. I didn't want to replace anyone. It wasn't at that level, but it also became clear when we were about to lose all of this stuff, that we need to up the game, and that this is not the time for learning. When you have a coaching mindset, you have to let people make mistakes because that's how you learn, but when you have three months left of cash, it's like, "Hey, we have to do this thing now, like school is over, or we won't be able to pay people."
So, I think it also made a lot of sense. I mean, I really believed in the plan that I laid out. I think it was the best plan, and I think the other alternative plans that were presented were not good, and they weren't going to work. So for me, it was like, "I have to do this thing. It makes a lot of sense. I'll do it," but it was also such a weird... It felt also at the same time kind of like a failure because I was coaching the founding team, and clearly, I didn't do a good enough job, because I had to kind of take over. So, that was a super weird conflict for a while.
I think a lot of people might say, "Oh CEO, yes, that's a success," but I love that you see, "Well maybe, but it's also I feel like maybe I failed because I was coaching the founding team and I want to make them successful." You weren’t angling for the job.
Exactly, and I think that's the hardest part of coaching in all situations. Sometimes it doesn't work, and then you have a choice to make, "What do I do about that?" And sometimes you just let people fail, because when I was in a more advisory role as a consultant, it's like, it's not my place to go and kind of take over something and make it work. But here, I had become such a big part of it, it's like it's only one and a half years or something that I'd been there, but that's intense in a startup. And I really loved the team, really loved the product, really loved what we were doing, and I was like, "We have to save this thing." And so, yeah, it was weird, but I don't regret it. I've had a lot of fun. I love it, but it was weird.
I bet. I love the nuance you provide there. So, you come back in and they say you're going to be CEO. I mean, did you say, "I have to think about it," or did you accept it right away?
No, I think I accepted it right away. I mean, my mind works like that. I think that might be one of my talents that helps me a lot in my job. I accept losses very quickly. I'm like, "This situation is gone, now this is the new situation, and this is what we need to do." So, I think I very quickly kind of changed into that, but then at the same time, and I think this was one of the big challenges for me, it felt kind of like an interim solution. So that took me a while to accept that it wasn't. I was like, "Okay, I'll take us to cash flow positive or something. I'll get us there so we don't die, but then we can go back to normal," or something like that. That was kind of the feeling, but then that very quickly, that wasn't realistic, that wouldn't have worked. So, and no one else thought it would've worked either, so it was like kind of, it just kept going.
What a great quality to be able to accept losses very quickly. Having the ability to adapt and change is so important for startups, particularly startup CEO.
Yeah, it's funny, you're not aware of these things in yourself, right? It's something I've become aware of, but it has some weird cons... Like sometimes when people that I really like decide to leave the team or something, I'm sad about it. I'm like, "No, that's not what I wanted," but because I know I'm not going to convince them, they're done, and I don't want them to feel guilty about this thing, I immediately go, "Where's the opportunity in that?" And it's almost insulting to the people. I'm like, "Yes. Okay, great. You're leaving. Now we can do this, and this, and this," and I'm like, "I don't mean it like that." So, it's a weird thing, but yeah, definitely a benefit for me.
Change is hard for some people, and it's okay, but in a leadership role, if change is hard for you, you are now impacting lots of other people if you are struggling even mentally to wrap your brain around "This situation is done," or "We need to move on."
Oh, absolutely. Not being able to move on and embrace change is probably the main source of bad decision-making. It's like, "I don't want to do it. I don't feel good about it. I know it's what I need to do, but I don't want to."
Well, and the founders must've had some ability with change too, like, "Okay, this is not working. We're going to move forward." I mean, it was like an hour or something. I don't know how long that decision had been primed, but it sounds like they were able to recognize and move forward too.
Yeah. I mean, defacto that's what happened. Being a founder is an interesting thing too. You start this thing, you don't talk so much about different scenarios that are going to develop, and then you find yourself in these situations, and you have to kind of figure it out. And they're very different people from each other, they're all unique. And there was co-founder conflict. I think one of the reasons they accepted it so quickly was because they had been trying to figure it out between themselves, and perhaps I was like a neutral party or something like that, that could just come in and solve it.
Yeah, co-founder conflict is a reason why many startups struggle.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, and we definitely suffered from that, just the distraction. I mean, it sounds so bad, but it's just about people. It's impossible to see what something will become, and what kind of situations you're going to end up in, and then also, it's kind of hard to think about in the beginning, you're trying to be inspired, you're trying to have fun, you don't want to think about all the risks. I mean, if people who started companies thought about all the things that could go wrong, no one would start companies.
Then you find yourself in these situations that don't have kind of a playbook, and you have a non-cynical shareholders agreement where you can't solve these things, so it just becomes this endless kind of conflict, and even if it's not, everyone has the right to desire what they desire, right? I mean, some people want to build a huge company over here, some people want to do something else. That's fine. All of these are fine, but they can't coexist in one company, so what do you do about that? It's a super interesting topic, but sensitive to talk about, of course.
I feel like starting a company is almost like getting married. It's such an intense experience and you're navigating human behavior, and then along with the business landscape, and organizational dynamics, it's a lot to navigate for founders.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and you risk that relationship, I mean if something goes wrong.
So after you took the CEO role, what happened to the person who was in the role? How did that all then play out? How did the organizational pieces move in that?
Yeah, that's a good question. He's not with the company anymore and it started well, but then it kind of degenerated from there, so there's a complex story there. These things are hard to do.
Oh yeah. So he moved into another role. How long was he there?
He stayed on for probably two years or something like that. I think when you're in a meeting like that and I present a way forward, someone else presents a way forward, people tend to, the reason why they presented their way forward is that that's what they think needs to be done. I mean, I disagreed with my predecessor on a lot of things, but I mean, he has a valid point of view. It's like we disagreed on things, and it's not because one is 100% right and the other one is 100% wrong. That's not how it works, but you can't lead on someone else's style.
One of the things that we're very different, him and I, is he's very kind of central, all power on him. It's like it was important to him that it was done in a certain way. And for me, I'm the opposite, I'm like, "I don't care how it's done, as long as it works." I mean, I have some ethical guidelines and things like that, there are limits, but I think there was a big culture shift, and it's hard to back from that. I mean, what happened was, as I was imposing my leadership style, and as the culture shifted as a consequence of that, his leadership style and what he wanted to do, just became further and further away, it just disappeared, and I think that was hard for him.
Yeah for sure. These things are very tricky to pull off, especially when a non-founder leader steps into the CEO role from the founder. That's a really interesting, intricate sort of move. How did the announcement to the rest of the team go?
Well, I have such a wonderful team. It's like, I remember my CTO, he's very direct. He was like, "Yeah, I don't think you're going to be able to do it. I don't like this." I was like, "What do you mean?" And he gave me some clear feedback, but it was mixed. I think we could've done a better job announcing it too, though. I mean, I felt, perhaps this is because I'm Swedish or whatever, but I don't want to embarrass anyone. So, for me, this was like, "Yeah, yeah. I'm just going to be CEO for a while now. Don't worry about it." It was weird for me to take over, and I think I could've done a better job. People want clarity, they want to know what's going on, right? And that's something I kind of quickly had to adjust to and just like, yeah, "Okay, this is it. Now, this is what we're doing, and this is happening," but I think, in the beginning, there was just confusion.
I think it was positively received though because I think one of the problems we had was that we had grown, and we had a lot of strong people, non-founder people on the team, but they weren't given the trust from my predecessor. He was very much, "I'll give you a mandate, and then as soon as you don't do exactly as I want you to do, I'll take that mandate away," and if you work with skilled people, they're just not going to do that, so they're going to leave. And my approach is more like, "You're CTO. There's a reason you're CTO, and I'm not CTO, you know what you need to do. Tell me what you need to do, and I'll help you do it."
So, I think that was very positive quickly for people. They realized, "This is better. This guy, I don't know what he's going to be like, as a CEO, but at least he's not getting in my way, and that's a positive change." So, I think that was one of the main kinds of reactions initially.
What do you wish you would've done differently about communicating the change?
You have to step up into the role. You can't kind of be the CEO. Once you are the CEO, you're the CEO, and it doesn't matter how you feel, you have to just step up. People will look to you to lead, and you have to, and you have to just get over that.
I mean, to be fair to myself and anyone who's going through this right now, I mean, the learning curve is crazy. I mean, I've done some difficult things in my life, but the CEO job is the hardest I've ever had, by orders of magnitude.
I mean, I would never do it. People have said when I was a COO, "Would you be CEO?" And I'm like, "Nope, not the job I want." I think it's the hardest job. The learning curve, like you said, is enormous.
Yeah. That was hard. I don't know if I could've done it faster. It's easy to look back at something and say, "Oh, I could've "just done that faster, but it's part of the process. I mean, anyway, it doesn't matter now, but as a learning, I think you have to lead, and in that, you have to accept that it's not about you anymore.
When you become CEO you can't optimize for things like your career. You have to take risks knowing that if you mess up, you'll be fired. That's the job.
I was talking to my coach at the time and he was like, "Well, what's the worst thing that can happen?" And I'm like, "I guess I let everyone down and whatever," and yeah, he's like, "Okay, well, you should worry about that. Don't worry about failing, like what it looks like. Don't worry about what people think about you. Just worry about why you did this." "Well, I want to save this company and I want it to be great, and I want all the people that have worked super hard for this to be rewarded. That's what I want." He's like, "Yeah, well, worry about that. Don't worry about anything else," and I'm like, "Okay, sure. Let's do that. Good plan."
Sure, easy. Check it right off. (laughs)
That's it, exactly. No, just don't feel anything. Yeah. Yeah.
I think that's the trick in any leadership role, but especially when you step into such a high-profile role, like the CEO role. There's more scrutiny. You have to listen, but if you care too much about what other people think, you're going to have a hard time.
Oh, and you're alone with the decision. You can't say six months down the line when the thing doesn't work, you're like, "Yeah, but because I listen to you guys." You have to make your own decision. Of course, you should listen, but you have to make the decision, and when that decision works, you have to step back and give the credit to everyone else, and when it doesn't work, you're alone with it. So, that's just the job, and if you can't take that, then you should have another job, you have to accept that when you feel sorry for yourself and you're like, "This should be fun.”
"I'm having so much fun," with gritted teeth. (laughs)
(laughs) It is fun too, but there are those elements of it that are just always… they're never going to be fun. It's never going to be fun to have to let someone go, or have to do something that you don't want to do, but you know it's the best for the company. So, if you're there (in the CEO role) for the glory and for just having a good time every day, wrong career choice.
Mm-hmm. That's why I say it's the most difficult job. How long do you feel like it took you to make that transition? To mentally accept some of those things that your coach was talking about?
I think, I mean, that's the good thing about a learning curve, it's like you're being thrown into the deep end. I think it went pretty quick, but I remember I lost a person there that I wanted to keep. I got him back, so that's great. I got him back after.
A boomerang.
A boomerang, but he had had a lot of conflicts with my predecessor. He was leaving, and I was telling him, "Well, things are different now. I'm in charge, this guy is not in charge, the guy that you have a conflict with and you don't like. So, we work well together, right? And you like this company, you should stay," and he was like, "I love you, man, but it's not going to be different, because that guy's still here." And perhaps that was partly because he had already made up his mind, but looking back at it, it's also because I wasn't clear. That's what I mean, you have to step up and take charge. Otherwise, you can't ask people to trust you, right? People need to be able to trust that you are who you say you are and that you can deliver on the things that you promise. So, that made me really accelerate this kind of like, "Okay, if I'm going to do this now, I need to just do this. I need to just jump in and do it."
When you said, "I wasn't clear," what weren't you clear about maybe with yourself, or with him, or the company?
I wasn't clear enough about how much I believed in what I wanted to do, because I didn't want to make the other guy look bad. I don't know, perhaps this is just me, but when you work closely together with someone, I mean, obviously, that's a big prestige loss for my predecessor to lose this job, and someone else gets it, and he's still there.
Mmm-hmm. It’s a big loss.
And I really like this guy, and we worked closely together, and I've seen why it's not easy to have this job. It's not like he was just like… he's a smart guy, he has some good ideas, he tried his best, he had all the good intentions, but he also got a lot of things wrong. I should've been clear with that, I'm like, "This way of doing it is absolutely wrong, and it's not going to be the way that we do things under my leadership, and this is how I want to do it, and that's what you can expect if you work for me," but because I didn't want to throw that guy under the bus, I was unclear on that. So, from their point of view, they're like, "What are we going to get here? Are we going to get something new, or are we just going to get something old? Because Henrik seems to really not be so clear about how bad things were under this regime." So, I should've been much clearer there and worried about the team, more than I worried about my predecessor's feelings.
What a tricky situation to navigate, but also wonderful to look back and reflect on. To realize at the time you may not have realized that you were prioritizing your predecessor's feelings, reputation, and all of that stuff, over the team. I guess you can only look back and see it in hindsight.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one thing that I've also learned is that as CEO, you have just such an information advantage. You sit right in the information flow, you know so many things that people don't know, and it's hard to explain nuance and complexity. I had good reasons to forgive, or whatever, my predecessor for his mistakes, and I knew how hard the job was. So, it was kind of, "If I can't forgive my predecessor, can I forgive my future self?" It's like, I know it's hard, but for someone who's been suffering the consequences… I often think about that.
It doesn't matter what my intentions are, real people suffer the consequences of my insufficiently good leadership. When I fail as a leader, they suffer real consequences, and that's what they see, and they need to know that this is not what's going to happen tomorrow.
I can’t say, "This happened because of this, and this, and this." I need to say, "I messed up. It's not going to happen again. If it happens again, you really have to call me out on it." Just, I say it here in public in front of everyone, "This is not the leader I am. I made a mistake. This is what you can expect in the future."
You have to be clear and you have to be simple from the perspective of the people who will suffer the consequences of you not doing your job, and I failed at that in the beginning, for sure. I mean, I still probably sometimes fail at that, but I'm better at it now.
Leadership is complex, and the CEO role is the most complex. There aren’t always right answers, and there's tons of nuance and tons of moving parts. As leaders, we're grappling with that. How do we explain that to other people, the minefield that we're navigating, and particularly as a CEO? Can we really?
Right. I mean, I think the answer is we need to just take that on, like where does that need to explain that thing come from? It's almost like a parent role like I cannot explain my... I'm not saying that employees are children, obviously, but we have a responsibility to lead. Leadership is to, I don't know, to instill hope and confidence, and feeling good about yourself, and celebrating wins, and you can't go and shoot down things with complexity. It's not good, and you have to just own that. I mean, I talk to my wife about how hard my job is and how sorry I feel about myself, but I can't do it to my employees. It's not my place to do that.
Well, yeah, you're right, and we have to figure out what level of information we need to give and what parts we need to clarify and take on ourselves. How do we help them navigate the complexity in a way that they feel confident, but that we're not putting the burden on them?
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly the challenge.
You mentioned culture earlier. It sounds like when you took over, you created a much different culture than your predecessor. Was that something you consciously wanted to do or knew you needed to do, with the direction the company was going?
Yes and no. I mean, things are always clear in retrospect, right? We tell these stories to ourselves, but, but I did, remember thinking about something someone smart once said. (I don't know who it was and I don't know when they said it, but it wasn't me, so I'm not taking credit.) But it was very smart, and they said, "Culture is the collective memory in a group of how that group handled challenges, celebrated wins, and went through tough times together."
That’s something that I think about.
My job is to shape and be of service to the collective memory of the future. We were in this challenge, we were running out of cash, the company was dying, and we needed to get out of that. I also knew that if we got out of that, that wasn't the last challenge we were going to face as a team. People don't sign up to startups to just survive, we want to do something meaningful.
As CEO, I have to make sure that people can create great collective memories together, feel good about what they do, and feel good about the group.
Right, because if you're just surviving, you're treading water, you're not having impact. That's why people want to go to startups, right?
Exactly. So my challenge was, yes, we need to get through this thing, otherwise, we all have to go find something else to do, but I wanted us to get through it with a great collective memory of how we did it, that became an asset for us. And to me, that was the guiding light, if we call it that. That's where the distributed leadership philosophy that I have comes from. It's like, I want everyone on my team to get confidence, and just take credit for the parts they did. I mean, this is a team exercise. I'm not doing this as a CEO. I'm like, I'm allowing, this sounds like a cliché, but that's really what it is. So, that's where kind of my culture meddling comes from.
When you say "distributed leadership," can you just tell us a little bit about what you mean by that?
Yeah, so, I don't know if that's even the right term. Sometimes I think I know English because I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid.
I love when people come up with their own terms.
So, what it means for me is that you give strong mandates to people, and you don't take them back. It's like there are a lot of people who are part of the decisions. Now, sometimes you need a tiebreaker. My job is very much to make sure that people play nice together because people sit in their perspectives and their experiences, and they bring something to the table, and my best engineer will not always understand the perspective of my best designer, and vice versa. Right?
So I need to make sure that they're still friends and that they're playing nicely together, but that they're also kind of bringing what they can to the table, and feel like they're part of this, and that their concerns, the things that matter to them, matter to the group.
Distributed leadership means the team is part of leading this thing. It's not me who's saying, "We're going this way, or we're going that way." We're all part of it. So, I try to have as many independent leaders as possible.
It sounds like creating a culture of empowerment and building people up, rather than centralizing power in yourself as CEO.
Yeah, yeah, and I think that's the challenge when you move from... It was easy for me because I didn't start as the founder, right? I think this is a trap. This changes over time, and very quickly, right? When you start the founding team, you're just the founders, and you have to do everything. So, you just get used to that. That's the reflex, "I will decide. I will decide. I will decide," and to transition out of that, because that's such a fast way of making decisions, but it's not sustainable because it doesn't inspire people. People don't want to feel like outsiders.
If you're good at something, and you want good people, you want people that are really good at stuff, that are better than you at this thing, and if then you make the decisions and they're not part of that, they're not going to stay, and we're way past the kind of Renaissance person who could be good at everything. I mean, we live in such a complex world. So yeah, that's what you need. Anyway, I could go on and on about that, but that's the right way to do it, kids.
How big is Lookback today?
We're still pretty small. We're 22 now. So, it's just a doubled. We want to be like Notion — small team, huge business. That's the dream, but now we're cash flow positive, we're growing. We're not the biggest player in this space, but we're definitely one of the established players and we're having a lot of fun, and we're not done building the stuff we're trying to build.
Did Lookback get cash positive by taking a round of funding, or through selling?
No, through selling, mostly selling. I mean, there was just a lot of focus. I mean, that's another podcast though.
From that situation you were in, that's pretty incredible what you and the team have done to be able to get there. Are the other founders still with the company?
Only one founder remains active with the company.
What does the leadership team look like today?
We have a management team that is kind of doing all the boring stuff, like calculating inflation compensation raises for the team, stuff like that, buying insurance, making formal hiring decisions, and things like that. So, that's me and my CFO, and the remaining co-founder. So, we're just running that stuff, but then I have what I call the strategic leadership team, which is, that's six people, so that's from all of the different parts of the organization. So, six people out of 22 are running the company, so that's pretty good, I think.
That's great. Is there any other advice you might give yourself if you look back? (laughs) Ha. Lookback.
Very good, very good. I love the puns. Very good.
I didn't mean to do that. I often do puns accidentally. People think I'm clever, I'm like, "Oh no, it’s accidental." (laughs)
Anything you might look back and tell yourself, or anything we didn't sort of cover that you think is important to your journey?
Be kind. This is hard. Be kind to yourself, and be kind to others.
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