Unlocking Startup Success: Gabriela Matic’s Insights on Scaling, Strategy, and Investment
Unlocking Startup Success
Gabriela Matic’s Insights on Scaling, Strategy, and Investment
interviewd by Claire Siegert, Co-FOunder @ BUsinettes
I'm delighted to welcome Gabriela Matic—an accomplished entrepreneur, innovation strategist, angel investor, and mentor. As co-founder and director at Metta, Gabi has dedicated her career to helping startups scale sustainably and efficiently, a particularly timely topic given current economic uncertainties affecting funding opportunities. Her impressive journey includes co-founding MindMate, a health-tech startup that successfully raised over $2 million, scaled internationally, and integrated into the NHS. Gabi has directly supported more than 150 startups, guiding founders on capital deployment, go-to-market strategies, and scaling. She's passionate about empowering underrepresented founders, regularly sharing her insights through mentorship programs and networks like Female Factor and the Female Founder Meetup Group in London. Today, she'll share her expertise on making the most of your funding and achieving scalable growth.
Claire: At Businettes, we greatly value the power of founder-to-founder inspiration. What inspired your entrepreneurial path—from co-founding MindMate to your current role at Metta—and your dedication to mentoring female founders?
Gabriela: I’ve always been inspired by solving big problems. I grew up with my dad being a nurse in an elderly home, so the challenges families affected by dementia faced were familiar to me. Throwing myself into building something that supported those families in my first startup really showed what I wanted to do with my life going forward. Since then, I’ve wanted to help entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world – using both my own startup experience and the passion I get from being around founders in general. Their energy is contagious! Female founders and founders in other underrepresented groups have a special place in my heart - I really want to see them succeed. Including different voices in the conversation is the only way we as a society will be able to solve some of the biggest challenges we face in the world.
Claire: Through organizing numerous events and workshops, I've observed funding as a consistent hurdle for female entrepreneurs. Based on your experiences, what unique challenges do women founders encounter, and how can they effectively overcome these?
Gabriela: From my own lived experience, these challenges can be gender- and sexuality-based, as well as socio-economic or racial. Statistics show that underrepresented founders only receive a fraction of investment and are often excluded from networks and wealthier communities that would allow them to develop these business relationships.
Often tokenised, underrepresented founders can be overwhelmed with support structures that ‘tick a diversity box’ – rather than ensuring real commercial outcomes. Here, investor bias can come into play. For example, investors are more risk averse because they can’t see an underrepresented founder in their prior investment success stories. This can then challenge underrepresented founders to be held to a different (or higher) standard than a founder that fits the model investors are more used to or comfortable with.
As well as facing these structural challenges on a daily basis, underrepresented founders also carry this as an extra mental burden during their entrepreneurial journey.
My advice is to prepare for a hard journey. Build networks that allow you to access as many different investors as possible – investors that are aligned with your vision and will understand what and why you are building. When you get to that pitch meeting, be aware of biases that will lead to investors asking risk-focused questions and reframe them by focusing on growth and opportunities. You also need to be data-first and to focus on fully understanding all your financials and metrics - often they are the only way to disarm bias.
Claire: From your experience supporting startups, could you highlight common pitfalls in deploying capital, and share practical advice for female founders to navigate these successfully?
Gabriela: I’ve seen a lot of different mistakes like overhiring or not being rigorous with tracking your cashflow. As a former marketer, one that particularly winds me up is when founders burn cash on marketing campaigns that aren’t tested and do not serve their business’s ultimate goals. Spend a lot of time experimenting with ways of getting users or clients on board – only double down on one when you have proven that it works and is repeatable or scalable. In addition, I’ve seen too many founders acquire users for apps through e.g. Facebook to be able to show their potential investors a pretty hockeystick graph when the users retention was non-existent. Marketing is like a magnifying glass - if your product has issues you haven’t dealt with or you’re still far from product market fit, marketing will make it more obvious and you will be wasting your money.
Claire: Having connected many founders with investors myself, I’ve learned strong relationships are critical. As an angel investor yourself, what practices do you recommend female founders adopt to nurture productive investor relationships?
Gabriela: Remember that investors are there to support you, not the other way around. The good ones understand this and the key to a productive relationship is transparency around what your business needs and how the investors can practically support you in achieving the business’s goals. You also want to maintain a regular basis of open communication (for when the times are both good and bad!). Please also don’t treat an investor like an ATM – don’t just go to them for money when you need it. If an investor has e.g. volunteered and then made a great introduction, make sure to thank them and follow up with what came of it. Doing so also keeps the investor engaged and encourages them to be proactive in supporting you.
Claire: Why do you believe mentorship is especially crucial for female entrepreneurs, and what qualities should founders prioritize when seeking mentors?
Gabriela: It’s all about the network. I think it’s crucial to get insights from experienced mentors and it can really help a founder take the right steps in the most efficient way possible. Nonetheless, those mentors that stand out are the ones that take the extra step: they offer introductions, share opportunities and advocate for the founder when they are not around.
Claire: How do you effectively manage your responsibilities as entrepreneur, mentor, investor, and board member, and what practical strategies can you recommend? How do you balance it all?
Gabriela: I don’t think it’s as much a balance as it is harmony between those roles, at least on a good day. On a practical level, I’m a fan of calendar blocks and have recently also started tracking what activities I spend most of my time on, to make sure I actually get to do what I enjoy.
I have always been someone who needed to have multiple things to do and wanted to get inspired by different activities and environments. I encourage anyone to follow their instincts and do things that make them curious and excite them while setting boundaries for rest, family and looking after one's health. It might get chaotic, but you can usually draw insights from one role, activity or even hobby that you can apply to the others. I’ve recently started an executive masters in behavioural science at LSE, and even though it’s been hectic, it has been the best decision for me. I’ve been able to use so much of my studies to make my work in the other roles I have more impactful!
Claire: In my role supporting female founders, staying ahead of trends is crucial. From your experience, what emerging trends should female entrepreneurs closely monitor to seize new growth opportunities?
Gabriela: With massive advancements in sustainability, autonomy and AI, there will be an exciting trend towards the creation of whole new job categories that didn’t exist before. Roles that e.g. cover the ethics of AI-driven solutions or specialise in creating circular products, supply chains and systems will emerge and will open up opportunities for innovation and redefining career paths. Whatever progress has been made in sustainability innovation so far is far from enough. Increasing environmental disasters and the impact of the climate change crisis really highlight the need for global climate action.
The political situation in the US will mean a deprioritisation of climate action on a federal level in the US, putting more pressure on states, cities and businesses individually. Even for all of us in Europe, it reflects the need of every single one of us to do their part to avoid irreversible damage in this critical time.
Personally and as an angel investor I’m also passionate about supporting innovation in FemTech because women’s health has been underserved for far too long, and empowering female founders to lead the charge will drive real, lasting change. It’s not just a growing market—it's a necessary revolution in healthcare that addresses long-overlooked needs, from reproductive health to menopause and beyond.
Thank you, Gabi, for sharing your valuable insights today. I'm looking forward to continuing this conversation at the Unstoppable Founders Summit. Attendees will have the fantastic opportunity to connect directly with you during your session on capital efficiency on February 28th from 10:30-10:55 am CET. I encourage everyone to engage further and deepen their understanding of these critical topics!
Don’t hesitate to connect with Gabriela on Linkedin!
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