Beats, Bootstrapping and Life – Mat Clayton on The Product Experience

Mixcloud CTO and co-founder Mat Clayton helped bootstrap his company from humble beginnings in an empty warehouse with no internet connection to more than 15 million active users over a 10-year period, all before they took their first round of funding.  He joined us to talk about startup life, scaling, making hard decisions, and more.
Quote of the Episode
Engineers massively underestimate what they can achieve in 10 years by an order of magnitude – but massively overestimate what they can achieve in a month, or a week…. Some of the biggest companies in the world have been built in less than 10 years.
Listen if you’d like to learn more about

* Bootstrapping
* Building a roadmap backwards
* Iteration as an indicator of success
* Challenges of music in Tech

Links mentioned in this episode

* Follow Mat on Twitter and LinkedIn
* Mat’s Instagram
* Mixcloud
* Mixcloud jobs

Hosts
The Product Experience is hosted by Lily Smith and Randy Silver.
Lily enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. Lily has spent 13 years in the tech industry working mainly with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She has worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank in Bristol, the Product Managers’ meetup with regular events and talks on Product now with 800+ members and growing. Now the Product Director at Symec, Lily also runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.
A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy has been working as an interactive producer and product manager across the US and UK for nearly 20 years. After launching Amazon’s music stores in the US and UK, Randy has worked with museums and arts groups, online education, media and entertainment, retail and financial services. He’s held Head of Product roles at HSBC and Sainsbury’s, where he also directed their 100+-person product community. Now a trainer, Discovery and Leadership consultant, he’s spoken at Mind the Product Engage (Hamburg and Manchester), the Business of Software, Turing Festival, a number of ProductTanks (London, Zurich, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford, and Brighton… so far!) and at conferences across the US and Europe.

Music
Our theme music is from Hamburg-based Pau, featuring ProductTank Hamburg’s own Arne Kittler on bass. Listen to more on their Facebook page
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