Matt Kilmartin, CEO and co-founder of data startup Habu, is embracing the walking meeting.
He goes for long strolls in the woods near his home in the suburbs about 20 miles outside of Boston, eschewing the video conference for good old-fashioned phone calls. Zoom fatigue is real.
Walking and talking is “a good way to stay fit and sane at the same time,” Matt says.
There was one day when he clocked 17 miles just taking his meetings on the go – and he’s still only in eighth place out of a group of 24 Habu employees participating in a month-long get fit challenge. Ten days into the challenge, the group had already logged enough miles to walk from Bar Harbor, Maine to Key West in Florida.
It’s been an interesting few months for Habu, which was incubated within Krux co-founder Tom Chavez’s venture studio, Super{set}. The company launched in mid-February – just under a month before the lockdowns started. So, what’s it like to be CEO of a startup during a global pandemic?
“There’s no playbook,” he says, but Habu is still in growth mode, despite the circumstances, although the economic situation has “forced us to be a lot more deliberate about when and how we spend money.”
Also in this episode: Why Habu refuses to be bucketed into the DMP category or the CDP category (“We aspire to create our own bucket,” Matt says), how Habu was able to raise around $50,000 for charity over the last couple of months, and the ongoing battle against “Zoom neck.”
