Matan Bar, Melio CEO - Always Remember to Keep The Main Thing, The Main Thing

🎥 Nov 02, 2022 📺 Miguel Armaza ⏱ 1m 👁 81 views

As a company grows and adds more people and processes, how do you ensure your team keeps their eye on the ball and stays ...

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About Matan Bar

Matan Bar, co-founder and CEO of Melio, has discussed the company's approach to B2B payments and its growth in several recent podcast appearances. In a January 2025 episode of the Invested podcast, Bar recounted an interaction with former President George W. Bush, during which he described Melio's mission as "we keep small business in business." He also discussed the company's early days, noting that before building a product, Melio hired a person in Manhattan to manually perform bookkeeping and vendor payments for ten small businesses via WhatsApp, an approach he said helped the team understand customer workflows. Bar has emphasized the importance of focus, stating that the company uses the phrase "the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing" in product roadmap meetings. He has also advised that "always do something" is the best career advice for young people, and has said that the worst thing for a team is "a bad player that thinks he's good." Bar has described Melio's growth, stating that the company processed about $20 million a month in early 2020 and around $1.7 billion a month by the end of 2021. He has characterized Melio as a B2B payments platform that acts "like Stripe but focused on B2B," and has noted that the company's objective includes creating "a workplace we all feel proud of." Bar has also discussed the role of banks in the payments ecosystem, stating that "banks are here to stay" and that they will continue to act as the routers for moving money, with fintechs providing infrastructure and applications on top.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Matan Bar's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (1 segments)

Matan Bar0:00

We have this saying when we start product roadmap meetings: we start with a slide that says 'the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing,' because focus is very hard to maintain. How do you make sure that the team is focused on the main thing as the company grows? As we have more people, you start having more obstruction layers above what the customer needs. There are more presentations, more documents, and more people involved. But I think the secret ingredient is maintaining a product-first culture, which is critical, and maintaining a customer-centric culture, which is critical. Now, everybody says they are customer-centric; it's very easy to say it. But you need to ask yourself a very simple question: when was the last time you talked with a customer? Then you answer yourself if you are a product-centric company or not. Ask yourself, ask your leadership, ask product managers, ask engineers. I think the combination of not getting confused by the different obstruction layers that are being added as time goes by, and making sure that again you start with the customer and work backwards, and maintaining focus because hyper-growth companies have many opportunities, but you need to make sure that you keep the main thing the main thing.