Matt Alexander

Matt is the CEO & Co-Founder at Neighborhood Goods, a new type of department store featuring an ever-changing landscape of the world’s most exciting brands, products, and concepts. As of today, Matt’s raised more than $27 million in funding from Forerunner Ventures, Maveron, and Global Founders Capital.

On the first hour of his day.

I typically get up around 5:45 or 6 every day.

Once I wake up, I won't go on email until I’ve eaten something. I’ll relax, make breakfast and coffee, and try to have some time where I can slowly wake up, rather than aggressively do something right away.

After coffee, I’ll hop on email quickly and try to answer any requests that might have come in overnight then hop on my Peloton.

I need a rigid and reliable schedule. I don’t get it right every single time, but I definitely strive for a consistent routine.

There’s a lot going on right now at Neighborhood Goods, particularly with travel. If I wake up at the same time, regardless of time zone, and have the same morning schedule — that really helps.

When everything else is crazy, a certain amount of reliability in your day to day has a really meaningful impact on your general sense of wellbeing.

Similarly, if things are relatively inconsistent in your life, routine gives you that sense of balance. It’s vital in managing your stress.

I’ve not struggled with it too much of late, but of course that always has the potential to change over time.

On cultural currency.

Neighborhood Goods is in so many respects the culmination of what I’ve been thinking about for the past decade.

It’s human focused, community oriented, and editorially strong — paired with an incredibly strong retail experience.

Retail is about trading in a currency of relevance; you need to ensure what you’re offering befits the audience that’s coming into the room. If you’re not focused on delivering that, you’re likely offering a subpar experience. 

Creating a vehicle to help digital brands manifest in the physical world makes sense and, in many respects, can be fairly obvious.

What’s difficult, and requires nuance, is taking that idea and making it really compelling for consumers and brands alike.

That, for us, is going to stem from a sense of relevance for each given market and location we build out.

In Plano, we have a huge amount of space and a suburban audience that wants an introduction to these brands — often for the first time.

New York, on the other hand, is a much smaller space, but you can go in and have a blended experience that’s more organized around products.

On creative ideation.

I’m a big believer in work-life balance, so per that notion, it’s important to have time away from my work.

People who skew towards the creative side, including myself, get a huge amount of creative energy from giving themselves a bit of space.

With Neighborhood Goods — or any other creative pursuit — it’s like having a phantom limb that’s with you at all times.

You can’t help but wake up at 3 in the morning thinking about it. 

A trip with my wife or leaving the office for a couple hours to read can drive a huge amount of progress for whatever I’m working on or wrestling with.

There’s a misconception that you have to bankrupt yourself and work 24 hours a day. That’s entirely wrong.

There’s nothing wrong with pursuing an idea with a huge amount of passion, but in a way that you can get away from it from time to time because that space can generate a lot more high quality ideas.

On embracing fallibility.

I’ve always focused on fallibility as a key trait.

It’s important to embrace a sense of self-awareness while fostering a culture wherein people are willing to make mistakes and own them.

I look for people that understand that the opportunity to become close to others stems from vulnerability, not strength.

We focus on people that can come in and hold themselves accountable to build an exceptional business, while also experimenting and testing.

We’ve always been focused on having thoughtful, mindful, and kind folks around the table — just good people.

This job goes up and down and can be a little crazy, especially as we’re on this path to open a new store every few months in 2020.

We need folks that can run with a crazy schedule and develop resilience, while still being good to the people around them when it gets stressful.

On choosing investors.

When you’re first hiring for a company, it’s less about skills and more about personality. These are people you’ll be spending a lot of time with.

You ultimately want to look at them and know they’re thoughtful, caring, and mindful folks that care about the people around them.

You look for the same qualities in investors.

For us, there were immediately pragmatic elements where we wanted consumer-minded investors like Forerunner, GFC, and Maveron.

Those that have worked with a lot of brands in the space and are collectively looking for what’s next in retail.

Beyond the pragmatic side of things, it really comes down to people that you can trust, that speak in a similar language to you, and believe in what you’re doing while not exerting excessive will over it.

They’ve all bought into this long-term vision of what we’re building without wavering from that belief along the way.

On his fundraising process.

If I’m totally honest, fundraising actually hasn’t been that stressful.

That’s not to say it hasn’t had its difficulties and challenges, of course. It’s more to say this isn’t my first time, so I have a certain amount of elasticity and fluidity where I’ve grown accustomed to the ups and downs.

I’ve learned to remain somewhere in the middle emotionally.

It’s critical to retain a degree of awareness that fundraising is an ongoing process, and you just have to keep pushing.

When you have success in fundraising, it’s important to acknowledge it without treating it as more of an endorsement than it would otherwise be.

So, for us, we’ve been fortunate to raise a good amount of money, which has enabled our expansion and project so far.

But that’s hardly an endorsement of us. It’s just an aspect of the broader project. We have to bear that in mind.

On developing self-awareness.

The most important thing for any founder or CEO is embracing an over-abundant and almost uncomfortable level of self-awareness around your own weaknesses and shortcomings.

You need to know what you’re bad at to hire for your weaknesses.

Yes, investors buy into the idea and the founders, but, beyond that, they have to trust that the founder has the ability to hire for their weaknesses and know what they’re bad at.

With regards to building that awareness, identifying any one particular past moment, failure, or success is problematic in my mind. It’s the whole thing.

On his nightly routine.

It’s not particularly structured.

Just like I begin the day avoiding email, I try to avoid it before bed. When I’m at home in Texas I go to bed between 9 and 10.

A full night of sleep is crucial to me and I really prioritize that.

About an hour before bed, I’ll stop looking at email, then read and try to shut down. I keep this protected time where I’m afforded to relax a bit. 

As a general rule, I don’t like to read business literature and prefer fiction.

I was an English major, which is clearly a contributing factor, but I find more inspiration from stories and thoughtful writing in fiction than pursuing a blueprint of something already successful.

I like to rely on my intuition from a creative perspective, rather than pursuing what others have done before me.