An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Give way more than you take and introduce people freely — I don’t know if there’s a specific story for this, it’s something that’s always come naturally for me and something I’ve seen from the best people I know. When great people get together great things happen and the pieces sort themselves out. It always balances in the end.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Matt Widdoes.

Matt Widdoes is the CEO of Mavan, an exclusive network of senior leaders from the fastest-growing companies in tech who validate and grow startups — from series A to C. Matt has more than 15 years of experience working in growth marketing, user acquisition, and business development in the technology and entertainment industries. He’s built and led teams at various start-ups across Silicon Valley as well as iconic brands RedBull, Zynga, Intuit, and King. Prior to Mavan, Matt oversaw marketing operations and user acquisition with video game developer King from 2016–2019 and managed user acquisition for Zynga from 2015–2016.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this career path?

I started my first company at 13, mowing yards in the neighborhood. I printed different fliers and posted them on different streets, each one listing different pricing and was unknowingly running my first A/B test. It was my introduction to understanding human behavior as it relates to business and just a few years later I chose advertising as my college major.

I graduated and got my first job at Red Bull in marketing. It was an awesome place to start, and I eventually left to pursue more lucrative role in technology sales. Despite excelling in sales, I soon realized I missed the testing and data gathering aspects of marketing that give you a clearer picture of the motivations behind people’s choices.

I ultimately got back into marketing by working at an early-stage gaming startup which kicked off a five-year stint in mobile acquisition at two of the largest gaming publishers in the world, King and Zynga. For many years, a close friend at Facebook had encouraged me to consider consulting given the amount of opportunity there was for people who had user acquisition experience at scale ($250M+/year). After many discussions spanning several years, I decided it was the time was right to start Mavan.

During these discussions, I came to realize a few fundamental truths that I believe about top talent. First, if you want to hire the best people in the world, you have to be willing to hire people all over the world. Second, truly world-class talent (top 0.5%) is capable of positively impacting more than one company at a time, 3–5 even. Third, attracting, acquiring, and retaining top talent is expensive and time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be if you could just build the best team once. That is how we ultimately arrived at our general approach to helping clients; by strategically tapping world-class talent with whom we have deep relationships with, and pairing that with a killer team of operators, we’re able to meaningfully accelerate our client’s growth trajectories

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

We’re disrupting in a number of ways: One is at the employee level. With Mavan Studio we’re pioneering a new funding model where we invest into our employee’s ideas with the safety net of a high-paying full-time role. For example, if they have an interesting business idea, we’ll put in the necessary funding and talent to get the idea through prototype and demand testing. Our employees are able to be entrepreneurs without having to give up their financial security as a trade-off.

Also, some people at Mavan.com are hired on a fractional basis and are able to continue working their full-time jobs. That flexibility allows them to impact different companies at the same time, which we’ve found leads to greater engagement. There’s also an element of “try before you buy” — every one of our full-time employees stared out as outside contractors and got a chance to learn what it’s like to work here before coming on full-time. This is very different from the traditional career gamble you’re forced to take every time you start a new role hoping that the team is as great as everyone said during the interview process.

We’re also disrupting how companies’ partner with agencies. For example, because of our depth of VP-level talent from the biggest companies in tech, with less than 10% of them being full time, we’re able to do many things well, across many verticals, whereas many traditional agencies focus on only a single element of growth. We’re able to help clients in a meaningful way across user acquisition, data and analytics, and predictive LTV methodologies. We also do UI/UX, engineering, brand, social media, and strategic finance. At the end of the day, meaningful growth comes as a result of many things across your business running in concert together, at different speeds and at different depths. We take a holistic approach to helping our clients because these elements are multiplicative and are required at most every stage of a business’s growth.

We’re also disrupting investment, which many startups struggle with. Founders often settle for only a million or so in initial funding, which is not enough to help cover basic salaries and attract world-class talent. Because we fund the seed round into our own ideas, we’re able to decide which concepts are worthy of more significant investment and that data paired up with our existing world-class team acts to derisk follow-on investment. Great people want to build and work on great things while being greatly compensated in cash and equity. With our model, Mavan is able to deliver on all those things at once.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

When we first got started, we ran the business a little too long without a bookkeeper. One of our key advisors, who previously led finance at a major venture studio, pushed us to get a bookkeeper immediately. The day we got a bookkeeper, the difference was night and day. Another thing was solely running on debit cards or cash when we could have accumulated cash bonuses from using a company credit card early on. If I remember correctly, we had nearly $10k in rewards within the first 90 days of opening the account.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

Honestly there’s too many to mention, I am here because of a lot of help from others. Bob Leppo and Craig Sherman are easily two of the most influential. Bob has taught me a ton about investment into entrepreneurs and the importance of giving them the room to make their own decisions and follow their intuition when they disagree with your advice. Picking a pony and watching the race. Craig Sherman has taught me a ton about the ability to make investments and other tough decisions without having to sacrifice things like compassion, kindness, or altruism. They’re both incredibly generous with their time and advice and continue to inspire and make me a better leader/investor/person.

In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?

It largely depends on your perspective; sometimes you’re the bug, sometimes you’re the windshield. For the professional horseshoer at the turn of the century, the rise of the automobile would have likely been considered a pretty negative disruption. Ultimately there are secondary effects of all disruption and there are people that benefit and people that suffer as a result.

I also think that disruption is a natural state of things. Like many things in life there’s a risk of being too results oriented. Even if the net result isn’t positive, there is a positive in knowing that the net result wasn’t positive at that point in time under those specific conditions. This is all a very long-winded way of saying “it depends on where you sit.”

Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

  1. “As a CEO, say ‘no’ more often than you think you should.” — I was on a company trip and asked our CEO, Justin Kitch, what advice he would give to someone who might be a CEO one day, and he said “You have to say ‘no’ way more than you think. Everyone’s going to want your time, your money, your energy, and if you don’t say ‘no’ constantly, you’ll never get anything important done.”
  2. “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” — This is a famous quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. I received this advice in college, and it’s stuck with me ever since. Every five years or so I take the time to consciously sit down and map out what’s most important to me and where I’d like to be in the next handful of years. Doing that has highlighted so many paths that have led me to amazing things that I otherwise wouldn’t have even noticed. By having a clear understanding of what I’m looking for it’s made those things easier to spot.
  3. “Play every show like you’re at Madison Square Garden” — This is basically getting at giving things your all even when it’s seemingly unimportant. Slow night at the restaurant you work at, the only table of the night wants to split an appetizer and two waters? Give them the best service you possibly can. You never know when you’re working on something that can be career changing until you’re looking back.
  4. “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” — It’s a famous quote from Søren Kierkegaard but I remember hearing this from my father-in-law when I was torn between a few job opportunities. He told me that at many points in his career he thought he was potentially making a mistake but that it all made sense looking back. It was great advice for having faith that things would all work out.
  5. Give way more than you take and introduce people freely — I don’t know if there’s a specific story for this, it’s something that’s always come naturally for me and something I’ve seen from the best people I know. When great people get together great things happen and the pieces sort themselves out. It always balances in the end.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

We’re growing quickly. We want to continue to expand Mavan as a consultancy and anticipate growing Mavan Studios in a more meaningful way in 2023. I think it’s entirely plausible that by 2025 we’ve announced a more traditional large venture fund. This would give us a stake in a highly operational team of top talent, a home-grown seed investment vehicle, and fund meant for later stage investments.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

One particular episode of the Naval podcast, “Play Long Term Games with Long Term People,” perfectly summarizes our approach to building relationships in business. In terms of books, three that always come to mind are: (1) Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras, which is a great resource for those who are leading their business through tough times; (2) Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh; and (3) Measure What Matters by John Doerr, which is excellent for those who are looking to quickly scale their startups.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Call your shots” — It’s very easy to tell people after the fact that you knew something was going to happen. I see it all the time with stock advice, but people rarely tell you about how they just lost 30% in some stock they bought less than a month ago (ignoring r/wallstreetbets).

When you call your shots publicly or even with just a small group of friends it forces a few things.

1) Conviction. It takes some conviction to say what you’re going to do or to try and predict the future publicly. Elon Musk famously wrote “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan” in 2006, literally outlining what he’s been doing since, with a high degree of accuracy.

2) Accountability. When you email a group of friends to tell them that you’re going to be putting 10% of your investable net-worth into a company that you believe in, you become accountable to yourself and others. It’s easy to hide the loses and talk about the wins, not a lot of people call their shots.

This doesn’t mean to go around constantly trying to predict every single thing that’s going to happen, I’m not sure there’d be many people left to tell after long if you did. This means for those rare, all-in, “I think this thing is huge” or “I’m 100% going to do this thing that most people probably don’t even think is possible” — that it’s worth putting that out into the public.

I might even put together “The Secret Mavan Master Plan,” stay tuned.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

Reducing unnecessary meetings. Companies of all sizes are riddled with unnecessary meetings. Meetings that could have been an email, or key decision makers don’t show up, that there’s no agenda for; the list goes on. It often results in employees having to work during meetings, because if they didn’t, they’d have to work all night at home just to get through their inbox. We’re testing a product right now that aims to solve this and we’re expecting to release more details later this year.

How can our readers follow you online?

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!


Meet The Disruptors: Matt Widdoes of Mavan On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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