Episode #272 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Matt Schulman - CEO & Founder of Pave.
You might have heard the oxygen versus aspirin analogy for finding product market fit for a company. For Matt, he likes to use the burnt pizza analogy. Most people don’t like burnt pizza, but if you are solving a problem that has a very high degree of importance, they will eat the burnt pizza when the product is at an early stage no matter how bad it tastes.
Obviously, as the product evolves it will hopefully end up being a delicious slice of pizza, but you need to eat to survive and it all goes back to what has been discuss several times on this podcast. Don’t build your product in a vacuum where you have cool technology in search of a problem. Instead, talk to your customers or potential customers, figure out the critical challenges they are dealing with, and determine if you can build the product to solve it.
Pave is on a mission to build the world's best compensation tools and easily accessible market data so companies can plan, communicate, and benchmark in real-time. The company recently announced its $100M Series C round of funding at a $1.6B valuation.
In this episode of our podcast, we cover:
- A deep dive into the state of the tech industry and how current market factors are affecting compensation.
- Matt’s experiences while at Penn and how he caught the entrepreneurial bug, plus his experience traveling the world.
- The background story of Pave and how he figured out the burnt pizza problem that needed to be solved and how their initiative approach won over customers.
- All the latest on Pave in terms of its platform, recent round of funding, and goals for the future.
- How he came up with the name for the rebrand and was able to obtain a single word .com domain.
- And so much more.