Why entrepreneurs love our program.

Shared by Nadya Lev, CEO of Aconite, part of Matter Six.

Going through Matter was one of the most intense, rewarding experiences of my life.

With Matter’s guidance, my co-founder and I were able to take a deeper dive than ever before, both into our own personal aspirations, and into the unmet needs of communities we care about, to uncover a product that we both feel passionately about. Thanks to Matter, I wake up excited every morning to apply the lessons that we’ve learned in this incredibly rewarding program.

The greatest gift Matter has given us is a rigorous adherence to design thinking. We were familiar with its principles before, but Matter’s specific way of teaching this practice really helped us to approach design thinking in a disciplined, effective way. Matter helped us to strip our biases out of the process to the best of our abilities, helping us to design better user research tests and ask better questions as we iterated on our product.

One of the most emboldening things about Matter is their belief in founders over products. With Matter’s generous encouragement, our idea mutated significantly over the course of the program. What we had at the end was a much more original and exciting idea than what we had at the beginning. Matter’s confidence in us as founders enabled us to move quickly, and have the freedom to explore questions that enabled us to hit on more original solutions.

Matter taught us to embrace failures as learning opportunities. Rather than treating every mistake as a setback, we began to view mistakes as vital parts of the process. This attitude enabled us to move faster and recover from setbacks quicker.

Matter taught us that having a great product is not about being struck with a great vision (which does happen, but is ephemeral and can’t be relied-upon), but about adhering to a process. Sometimes, even if you don’t know what’s on the other side, if you stick to an effective process and put one foot in front of the other, wonderful things can happen. A lot of wonderful things have happened to us thanks to Matter.

Finally, Matter gave us the most incredible gift: community. Every day, I am awe-struck by the passion, dedication and resilience of my fellow founders. Being surrounded by so many inspirational people helped us on our journey, and I’ve made lifelong friendships.