At Hakkoda, we amplify our ability to deliver customer outcomes by forming close partnerships with technology leaders who share our vision, and whose products and capabilities complement the solutions we provide.
One such partner is Matillion, an industry leader in ETL and enterprise data integration technology. Hakkoda and Matillion have worked together on several initiatives, such as the FHIR Data Loader for Snowflake we built in 2022, and our 2023 collaboration around helping organizations unlock the benefits of AI.
As part of our continuing partnership, we had the pleasure of welcoming Matillion to Hakkoda’s offices in Costa Rica in October 2024 as a highlighted partner and sponsor for our quarterly Puki Yuki onboarding event.
There, we had the opportunity to interview Matillion Founder and CEO Matthew Scullion in front of an in-person and remote audience of Hakkoda team members. Our candid conversation touched on a variety of topics, including the foundation of Matillion as a cloud consulting firm, the unique insights that led to the development of Matillion ETL, the company’s decision to build the futuristic Data Productivity Cloud, and Matthew’s best advice for business leaders.
In this blog, we’re excited to share a selection of the best moments and most valuable insights from our interview with Matillion Founder and CEO Matthew Scullion.
Hakkōda and Matthew Scullion: Best Moments from Our Interview with Matillion Founder and CEO
1. Matthew’s First Taste of Entrepreneurship
Matthew’s first venture into software entrepreneurship came when he was just 17 years old. Matthew tells us: “I had a part time job at an end user IT site, and the CIO of that company said, hey, I’m going to do a startup. Like, do you want to come?”
The year was 1997, the company was Real Information Systems, and the product was Groupware development and implementation. Matthew helped grow the company to 30 or 40 employees before selling the business to a larger American firm.
Looking back on his experiences as a young founder, Matthew says: “We did everything wrong and still managed to just about get away with it.”
2. Matillion’s Foundation Story
Perhaps serendipitously, it was the sense of wanting to correct past mistakes that partially motivated Matthew to found Matillion in 2011. Reflecting on his decision to take a second shot at entrepreneurship, Matthew tells us: “I kind of wanted to go back and do it properly, if that makes sense. It felt like unfinished business.”
Even more motivation, Matthew says, came from feelings of not enjoying his 9-5 job and a strong inner desire to rekindle his passion for work: “I’m definitely a, uh, there’s only one gear and it’s top gear forward sort of guy. And if you don’t like what you’re doing, then it’s really hard to keep that up.”
The last little push came from Matthew’s wife Caroline, who recognized Matthew’s need for fulfillment in his professional life, encouraged him to start another business, and even came up with the name Matillion.
3. The Importance of Values in Business
Matthew Scullion and Ed Thompson co-founded Matillion on January 20th, 2011.
Looking back on his development as a leader, Matthew places significant importance on the actions he took to define Matillion’s values early on: “Matillion has a list of six company values. They’re one of the smartest things I think I ever did, because they were the first thing I wrote down on the first morning of the company. It was only me and Ed…we walked into the office, we set up our computers, we made a cup of tea, and then he started writing software and I wrote down the values.”
Matillion’s company values are confidence without arrogance, working with integrity, customer obsession, innovation and demanding quality, bias for action, and caring about people and communities.
4. Recognizing the Need for Matillion ETL
Matillion started out as an IT consulting/services firm specializing in cloud business intelligence (BI) solutions. Matthew explains: “We’d go into a customer and we’d build a data warehouse and we’d hook it up to a BI front end. There’d be an ETL layer. Most of the time it was Talend…we started off using an open source columnar database called Infobright for the data warehouse, then when Amazon launched Redshift in 2012, we started to use that…We would build that out for a customer, then charge them a monthly subscription to look after it.”
Along the way, Matthew and Ed realized that data engineering (building ETL pipelines) comprised up to 70% of the work on every project, and was eating up a lot of valuable time and resources. Matthew says: “It seemed to us obvious that the reason that we weren’t able to go faster is the data integration tooling we were using to build the data warehouse wasn’t designed for the cloud. It was designed for a pre-cloud world.”
When Matillion went to market in 2014 for an ETL platform with a cloud-first approach that could help accelerate data integration for Matillion’s customers, there were exactly zero options available. This led Matthew to develop Project Emerald, a cloud-native data integration tool that would lay the foundation for Matillion ETL.
5. Transitioning Matillion from Services Business to Software
When Matillion finally completed Project Emerald and deployed it on a customer’s data warehouse implementation project , the impact was obvious. Matthew tells us: “Years later, we try out Emerald on our first project, and sure enough, it slashed the amount of time it takes to build a data warehouse…It used to take us 35 days to do the service engagement for the customer…we got the whole project down to 1 to 15 days on the first go with this tool.”
Not only was Emerald proven effective, the timing was also looking good for Matillion to move away from its professional services business and shift its focus to software. Matthew tells us that “Amazon announced that they were the fastest growing B2B technology company in human history, and the fastest growing business line was Redshift. [We thought, okay,] we’ve just built this tool that makes us more than twice as productive, and…it’s on the fastest-growing business line of the most disruptive B2B technology company ever. Maybe we should launch the product.”
When it came time to launch the product for real and shift away from services, Matthew told us about two significant challenges faced by Matillion: “I think a lot of it comes down to…the instincts that we build in our companies. Once the business gets to a certain size, all the instincts are around one business model or another. So the bigger it gets, the harder it is to push back against those instincts. And the other thing is…the financial one. If this thing makes money, you want it to carry on making money and everyone starts to feel weird if the profitable bit is just paying for the unprofitable bit.”
Ultimately, it was early traction and quick wins on the software side that propelled Matillion on its transformation from services to software. Matthew says: “As soon as we started, we launched the software products and saw traction. You could splash out the graph and see that in about four months, the software business was going to be bigger than the services business. So that really helped.”
6. Differences Between Selling to Data Engineers vs. C-Suite
In our interview with Matthew, we talked quite a bit about Matillion’s approach to sales and marketing over the years. Here’s what Matthew shared with us about the difference between selling his products to data engineers vs. C-suite executives (Director or above):
“In our experience, some data engineers, if they’ve come from a background of using Informatica, Powercenter or Sis, they’ll love it because it’s a visual, low code, no code platform. If they’ve come from a more contemporary background, they might be more inclined to want to stitch solutions together, use open source, do a lot of coding and Python, DBT, PySpark, ETL.
However, the story is different in a top down sale. If we’re selling to a Director or above where that person cares about delivering business outcomes and value, then it’s a much easier and more compelling sale. We actually find our conversion rates are 12 times higher if we’re selling to director level or above in an organization, because what we’re [saying is] “Hey, you’ve got ten data engineers, we can make them do the work of 30 people.””
7. Deciding to Build the Data Productivity Cloud
Between 2015 and 2021, the release and growth of Matillion ETL transformed the company from a small IT services firm to a unicorn software start-up with a valuation of $1.5 billion.
But in the midst of that success, Matthew was already thinking about the future prospects of the business. He tells us: “In about 2019, we started to talk to our customers, our partners, and just kind of predict the market a little bit ourselves. And what we came to conclude was that [Matillion ETL] had an amazing market resonance with customers…but the technical architecture that we built the software with, we thought was going to take our customers and to be honest, our own business so far. But it wasn’t going to take it as far as the market opportunity we thought was there.”
Matthew went on to explain the architectural disadvantages of Matillion ETL: “Matillion ETL is a so-called pass architecture. You run it by setting up virtual machines inside a public cloud account. That has some advantages, but a big disadvantage is it puts work on the customer to set it up and to manage it. And as it gets bigger and bigger, that work logarithmically increases.”
The disadvantages of Matillion ETL’s architecture lead Matthew to the difficult decision that maximizing Matillion’s market opportunity would mean rebuilding the company’s flagship Matillion ETL product to avoid those limitations while incorporating new improvements in a modern cloud-native architecture.
Matillion put together an engineering team for the project in 2020, started work in 2021, and in November 2024 released Data Productivity Cloud, a unified codeless platform that combines data integration, transformation, orchestration, and synchronization in a single cloud-native framework.
Reflecting on that journey and the impact for Matillion’s customers, Matthew says: “The really important thing is that because we were able to design an architecture that wasn’t from 2014, it was from 2022, 23, 24. It sets us up. We feel incredibly strongly to delight our customers and our value to their lives over the next ten years.”
8. Hakkoda x Matillion Partnership
As part of our ongoing partnership, Hakkoda and Matillion have developed a bundled product/service offering that combines the AI and data science capabilities of Data Productivity Cloud with the AI consulting and cloud expertise of Hakkoda. Here’s how Matthew broke it down: “Basically it’s a bundle. It’s $100,000. It’s on co-branded materials. And what you get is Data Productivity Cloud, all the AI features of Data Productivity Cloud [and] a bundle of services, which will be provided by Hakkoda.”
From there, Matthew explained how Hakkoda is uniquely positioned to help Matillion customers realize the benefits of AI using Data Productivity Cloud and the strategic approach to earning success in the highly competitive market for AI-focused consulting services: “What it certainly does bring from the Hakkoda side, of course, is domain experience about what to actually do with [AI capabilities on Data Productivity Cloud]. And as you’ll notice here, it’s 20 hours of service. That implies we want quick action. We want to do something meaningful that lands for them. Every consulting firm out there has tons of people [focusing] on AI. The reason we’re being successful in that market is they get lost along the way. If we focus on driving a quick outcome and a win and we increment to innovation, we’re going to beat them.”
9. Matthew Shares His Best Business Advice
Towards the end of our interview, we asked Matthew to share with us the greatest piece of wisdom he’s garnered over 25+ years in business and entrepreneurship. Here’s what he had to say: “The one currency that you can’t resave up once you’ve spent it, or it’s incredibly difficult to is integrity. If you break people’s trust or spend your integrity, it’s incredibly difficult to get it back, or impossible.”
Matthew also emphasized the direct connection between effort and results, and the importance of simply doing the work: “Outcomes are correlated to effort. I know me, and therefore I can categorically tell you anything that I’ve done is not down to individual brilliance. I am, uh, fundamentally and at heart, lazy and stupid. But if you put the effort into things, you can get the outcomes.”
Accelerate Your AI Journey with Hakkōda and Matillion
We’re incredibly grateful to Matillion Founder and CEO Matthew Scullion for participating in this interview, sharing with us his rich experience in business and software entrepreneurship, and for Matillion’s ongoing partnership with Hakkoda.
The Hakkoda and Matillion partnership exemplifies how combining innovative technology with proven domain expertise can drive impactful results for customers. Through our collaborative offering around Data Productivity Cloud, we’re helping organizations streamline data engineering tasks, unlock the massive potential of AI, and generate quick AI-powered wins with low risk.
Ready to see how Hakkoda can help your organization harness the power of Matillion’s Data Productivity Cloud? Talk to our experts today.
