Matt shares his experiences and insights on the challenges and misconceptions of building a startup. He discusses the importance of recognising and overcoming inflection points, adapting to constant changes, and the significance of building strong leadership teams. Matt also provides valuable advice on hiring, managing growth, and the decisions that helped Mews scale to success. Mews was founded in 2012 by Richard Valtr and Matt Welle (CEO) in Prague, Czechia.
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Key funding milestones:

• $1.6m Seed Round (2016) raised from various investors, including HenQ, and the local angel investment community.
• $7.1m Series A (2018) led by Notion Capital
• $33m Series B (2019) led by Battery Ventures
• $185m Series C (2022) led by Kinnevik and Goldman Sachs Asset Management
• $110m Series D (2024) led by Kinnevik

Year-on-year growth:

• 2016 $0.5m
• 2017 $3.5m (600% growth from 2016)
• 2018 $12m (243% growth from 2017)
• 2020 $20m (67% growth from 2018)
• $50m (150% growth from 2020)
• $100m (100% growth from 2021)
• $180m (80% growth from 2022)
• $240m (50% growth from 2023)
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Highlights: ‍

• Startup Leadership:
  Exhilarating and TerrifyingRunning a startup isn’t just another job; it requires constant decision making, adaptability, and resilience. The highs are thrilling, but the lows—like struggling to meet payroll—are far tougher than most imagine. Accepting this duality is essential to thriving as a founder.
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• Embracing Inflection Points:
  Founders face constant inflection points that require adaptation. Ignoring them means risking burnout or stagnation, while addressing them can propel growth. Recognising when to slow down and make strategic changes, such as hiring experienced leaders, is key to sustaining momentum.
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• The Importance of Strategic Focus:
  While early experimentation may slow initial revenue growth, it can accelerate long-term success.Multisegment and international expansion helped Mews build a scalable foundation, enabling them to target larger clients effectively after reaching $100M.
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• Trust Your Vision Over Investor Advice:
  Founders know their business better than anyone else. Early advice to “go for quick wins” led Mews to pivot away from their core problem temporarily, only to realise the hard but valuable path was the right one. Trust your instincts and stick to solving the big problems.
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• Letting Go of Under-Performers Quickly:
  Retaining under-performers for the sake of culture or loyalty can hurt your business and frustrate high performers. A strong culture thrives on high standards and decisive action. Addressing performance issues promptly ensures your team stays motivated and aligned.

What are some common misconceptions about building a startup (particularly regarding the perception that it is a linear process)?

I think there’s a misconception, especially for those coming from the corporate world, as I did, that running a startup is just another type of job where you go about your day and things will work out. It’s not like that at all! You need to actively engage with the different scenarios and challenges you face and make the hard decisions.Without you making those decisions, things will go south.

Something that’s hard to appreciate, until you live it, is that the entire business depends on you making the right decisions, all the time. That’s incredibly difficult, but it’s also what I enjoy the most. Especially in the early days, when I had complete control ,and owned the journey from end to end, which I loved.

Alongside all the ups, the downs are much bigger than you can possibly imagine because you don’t know what it’s like to not have money to pay developers for a month until you face that challenge. This is part of what it means to lead a startup. The good and the bad. Or perhaps, the exhilarating and the terrifying.

To what extent has overcoming inflection points been a critical challenge for you and the business?

‍Being a startup founder means constantly dealing within flection points. When Mews reached 1,000 employees, I hit yet another breaking point. I had never been a CEO before, and suddenly, I was leading a company of 1,000 people.

Fortunately, early on, I realised I couldn’t just work harder; things had to change. More importantly I had to adapt to cope with the next stage of growth. I remember having a persistent headache and visiting the doctor. He asked how much I worked, and when I told him70 to 80 hours a week, he said, “well, that’s the problem.” I now understand that I mustn’t work every single day, every single hour. Recognising these inflection points is crucial. If you don’t, you’ll burn out. But if you do, you can take action and adapt.

Despite the challenges, I enjoy these inflection points. I seek them out and see them as opportunities to adapt. Int he beginning, I didn’t recognise them quickly, if at all.

How have you, as a CEO, had to adapt to these changes?

As a CEO, you have to constantly adapt. Personally, I love the growth and the fact that I haven’t been bored for a single second in the last 12 years. However, this constant change isn’t for everyone.You must enjoy the continuous change happening around and to you, and revel in the fact that what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow. Sometimes, you need to bring in someone who knows what needs to be done. Fortunately, I love surrounding myself with people who are smarter than me and who lift me up. Having people around you who have scaled companies far beyond where you are today can be terrifying for some, but I love it. These individuals elevate me as a leader, allowing me to grow from the experience and constantly learn while looking forward to the next step.

What have been the biggest challenges you have faced building your leadership team and which have been the most important hires?

The biggest challenge is letting go of people who havebeen with you from day one. I have so much loyalty to them, but not everyone can keep up with the rapid development of the company. Richard (Richard Valtr, Founder of Mews) and I are very ambitious, and sometimes our goals are more beyond the capabilities of our team. You have to recognise this because if the people in your leadership team, or the next level down, can’t keep up with the company’s ambitions, you need to step in. The challenge is recognising when it’s time to make that change and then act on it. Too often, you wait, hoping someone will improve, but they won’t. We are now much more decisive than we were in the early years.

When you get this right, it’s fantastic. One of the most important hires has probably been our President, Mike Coscetta, who recently joined us (June 2024).We realised we needed someone with experience scaling companies through an IPO, who can recognise patterns and knows what needs to be done.

Within a few months of Mike joining we could already see the impact he’s having with his thinking and in the different conversations he’s driving within the leadership team. However, this also makes you realise that other people in leadership might not work with the new speed we’ve set.

What do you wish someone had told you about your startup journey that would have helped you reach 100 million revenue faster?

People definitely told us we should be more focused in the early days and perhaps that may have led us to $100 million faster. However, while that may be true, the lack of focus allowed us to internationalise the business faster and to do so across different segments.

So, whilst it slowed us down to get to the $100 million, it accelerated us from there to the next step. Because now, we can target mid-market level customers and international chains that we couldn't otherwise have done.

I see some of our competitors that have focused on SMB, and now they're stuck because their system is set in stone. I always encourage people to listen to advice but do what they think is right.

My advice to founders is always to keep in mind that you want to build a global scaling business. And in order to do that, you need to do what's right for the business long term and not listen to advice too much.

‍When you hit approximately $30m what were the most important things you did to reach $100m?

The big change for us is we hired true SaaS and fintech leaders who understood the next stage of the journey.

One of the most important hires was Leah Anathan, our Chief Marketing Officer who joined us in 2020 and in hindsight, I kick myself that we did not do this before. She knew how to build a website, the brand, and a digital funnel serving multiple geographies and markets. And the traffic the marketing team has been driving is incredible.

In the early years, the only way we could get sales was through outbound sales efforts and going to trade shows. So Leah was transformative. Because suddenly marketing was driving half of our pipeline and we could really scale. So I'd strongly recommend levelling up your marketing at this stage, because it can actually help grow the business really really fast if you get it right. Someone who understands brand and digital and experience at the stage is hard to find, but it's worth the effort.

‍What advice did you receive early in your journey that you initially ignored but later realised was crucial?

As I mentioned, I don't really listen to advice. Or if I do, I make my own decisions and encourage my team to do the same.

However, we've occasionally been guilty of reinventing the wheel in our effort to transform the hospitality industry. Early on, we were advised, "Don’t mess with hotels accounting systems, don’t try to reinvent it." We didn’t listen and learned the hard way that there was no value in it. Hotels prefer to stick to accepted practices and do things as they always have.

We didn’t listen initially, but now I know better: don’t mess with accountants—just give them what they want and need.

What advice did you follow that you wish you hadn't?

In our initial conversations with VCs, even at the pre-seed stage, everyone was willing to meet with us. However, none of them understood why we were building something as challenging as an entire hotel property management system—an entirely new infrastructure layer for hotels. They said, "That's too hard. Just do the easy thing, the light thing, the online check-in system that can scale quickly."

At some point, we decided to follow their advice. We stopped everything, put our main project on hold, and focused on building the check-in system.

It didn’t work.

If you don’t address the core problem and instead opt for a quick fix, you need massive market coverage to achieve scale. Additionally, we had to build on top of outdated platforms that didn’t want to integrate with us. And our vision was to replace the legacy platforms that were holding the industry back, not integrate with them,, that was the problem we wanted to solve. Sure it took longer, over 4 years to achieve $1m in revenue, but it was totally worth it, from there we have accelerated revenue built on solving a problem that is hard, but incredibly valuable.

The takeaway is that investors never have the full context. You need to trust that you know what's best for your business and your customers.

As a founding CEO, what is one counterintuitive decision you made that went against your instincts but led to significant positive outcomes?

A few years ago, Richard, the founder of Mews, approached me with a vision to venture into fintech payments. "I think we can make lots of money there," he said. I was initially clueless about payments. How would we process all our hotel transactions? Why would they trust us? How would we make money?

Honestly, it scared me because I didn't understand it. But thankfully, Richard was persistent. Eventually, I decided to listen because it was clearly important to him, and I wanted to understand it too.

Once I listened and investigated, I realised it could be beneficial for us and our customers. We developed a minimum viable product, started onboarding customers as a merchant of record, and began processing payments. It was challenging at first, but as we persisted, it became our biggest growth driver.

Having a founder or team member you trust, who constantly looks beyond your scope, is incredibly important. I'm focused on the operational aspects of hospitality and SaaS, while Richard looks at the bigger picture. He reads widely and brings in different perspectives, which is invaluable. Finding a true partner who is different from you and brings diverse opinions can be very beneficial.

What are the biggest mistakes you made that you would encourage others to avoid?

The biggest mistake is waiting too long to let people go and not making the hard termination decisions. The weakest link will hold you back, and this is something I’m increasingly learning. It's difficult because we are nice and have a great culture, but you can't keep underperformers just to protect that culture or because you're too nice. Ultimately, it’s not good for them or for you or the culture!

A great culture is a high-performance culture where you set the standard. We can have fun, but you've got to work really hard. People who join a startup are on a mission and will appreciate being surrounded by high performers. If they see underperformers being tolerated, they'll get frustrated and leave, which is a lose-lose situation. We don't always deal with underperformers fast enough, but  that's something we're definitely working on.

What is the one thing founders should avoid or say no to in their role as CEO to accelerate business growth and reach $100 million in revenue?

The one thing I would avoid is downside protection for your investors. During negotiations, investors often try to include various downside protections, offering a higher valuation in return. However, it's simply not worth it if you have to work even harder to justify that valuation just to protect their downside.

Keep your term sheets clean and accept that a lower valuation might be better in the long run. Adding downside protections sets a precedent, making it worse in the next round as new investors will add more protections.

Be mindful of what you allow into your company's structure, as it only makes things harder. We've made conscious decisions to accept lower valuations because it's the right thing for the business and ensures fairness. These were hard decisions since the high valuations looked incredible, but the underlying conditions made them not worth it.

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