Matthew Linderman, MBA '19

Matthew Linderman, MBA '19, joins Christopher Reichert, MOT '04, to talk about his career trajectory and his new startup, Aloha, which is debugging the social planning process by providing tools and guidance to help people be more intentional about they maintain and deepen their relationships. Learn more at: www.heyaloha.app/.

Sloanies Talking with Sloanies is a conversational podcast with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they're doing today. Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Google, and Spotify. 

Episode Transcript

Christopher Reichert: Welcome to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies, a candid conversation with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they're doing today. So, what does it mean to be a Sloanie? Over the course of this podcast, you'll hear from guests who are making a difference in their community, including our own very important one here at MIT Sloan. Hi, I'm your host, Christopher Reichart, and I'm with Matt Linderman, a 2019 graduate of Sloan's MBA program. Welcome, Matt.

Matthew Linderman: Thank you very much Christopher.

Christopher Reichert: How can people learn more about your app and what you're offering?

Matthew Linderman: Great question. Well, I'd encourage everybody to go to our website. It's www.heyaloha.app, and that will give you a background about what we're building and allow you to sign up for our wait list for the product.

Christopher Reichert: Great, and it's also available on the Apple store.

Matthew Linderman: It's available on the Apple store, and it will be soon available on the Android store.

Christopher Reichert: Excellent. Before we talk about what you've been up to since Sloan, let's step back. Your background shows a strong interest in investment management and consulting—very business focused. Back in college, you were the founder and Editor in Chief of the Cornell Business Review, which I'll touch on in a minute. Then you went to McKinsey and McKinsey Global Institute, their business and economics research arm, for four years more or less. Then you were at Calera Capital investment management, making investment decisions, helping with that.

Why did you choose Sloan?

Matthew Linderman: I chose Sloan because I had intentionally set up my first five years of my career to really get a broad swath of business skills. I had always known that I wanted to go back and use those skills to build a company. I come from a big engineering and doctor base family. They've used business relatively negatively and said, "Hey, if you're going to do it, you might as well use it to build a product and share the things you can create in the world." That was always my aspiration, and it was a good way to come back and actually build those products later in my career.

Christopher Reichert: When you say, “They used it fairly negatively.” What did you mean by that?

Matthew Linderman: I think they viewed the world more as, “Hey, go out there and do something immediately. Go create a product, go engineer it, go treat a patient.” They didn't have business people around them growing up. I don't think they realized that you could go and deploy those products to a broader audience using the business skill set. That was something that I was always very excited to do. To step one level higher and say, "Hey, can we lead a team of engineers? Can we lead a team of doctors (back earlier in my career) to actually deploy some product to the world that can be shared more broadly?"

Christopher Reichert: My father was an architect, and I think his love was getting in front of a drafting board and drawing up some idea from his creative side. He had his own practice, and I think the business side was something that he looked at as something that was bolted on, that was a necessary evil. Was that your upbringing? The way your parents thought of it?

Matthew Linderman: That was the first reaction. Especially going into something like private equity investment management, the reaction was, "Are you just doing this for the money?" I think for me, it was about gaining the right skill set so that I could go and do something impactful later in my career, and that's really why I came to Sloan. Trying to use those skills to actually build something. Really, there's no better place than MIT Sloan to actually learn how to take business skills and apply them to build a product and deploy that into the world.

Christopher Reichert: Where was your internship?

Matthew Linderman: I had worked at Innospark Ventures which is an AI focused venture capital firm.

Christopher Reichert: Here in Boston. That was for just the summer? Or did you stay on afterward?

Matthew Linderman: I actually had done that this past fall in the second year of my Sloan time.

Christopher Reichert: Okay. While you were at school?

Matthew Linderman: While I was at school, doing about 20 hours a week and was able to learn about the VC investing methodology, and I was also working on my startup the summer before, so was able to kind of do both in parallel.

Christopher Reichert: I want to come to your startup in a few minutes. The Cornell Business Review Editor in Chief and Founder—Cornell never had a Business Review before you started it?

Matthew Linderman: So it's surprising. We had a major publication, a student newspaper, and they've had a number of different business publications but never one review magazine. It was smaller publications or smaller event groups. We decided to say, "Hey, there's a lot of students out there who really want to be aware of the broader things going on.” But it's hard as a student to be aware of everything in the outside world when you're really focused on classes and learning. We said, "Hey, let's summarize what's going on in the broader world, and let's spark a discussion on campus about those debates and issues so that students can get their head around them and really learn from each other."

Christopher Reichert: You studied applied economics and management. When you went into college… where did you grow up by the way?

Matthew Linderman: I grew up in Rome, New York—small town about an hour East of Syracuse. I always like to say middle of nowhere, but there was an Air Force research lab there, and my parents both worked at the Air Force early in their careers, and it was actually a wonderful place to grow up.

Christopher Reichert: So Wegmans Country.

Matthew Linderman: Exactly, exactly. Early days, Wegmans.

Christopher Reichert: Where did you start your interest in business, or running a business as opposed to practicing some sort of craft? I mean not saying running a business isn't a craft, but in the traditional sense of ‘Shoemaker,’ ‘dentist,’ or whatever it is?

Matthew Linderman: Yeah, so it started really early. When I was 16, it was either work at the local McDonald's or work at the Air Force Research Laboratory, so I was lucky. Got a job there.

Christopher Reichert: At McDonald's, why? Because you were hungry? Oh okay, Air Force—got it.  

Matthew Linderman: Air Force lab. We were doing speaker identification and language identification technologies. What you call today “Machine Learning.” Back then it was before the hype had really risen up. I had seen people who had really dedicated their career to what we'd call Artificial Intelligence or this space in certain niches. They had gone through the AI downturn or the gap. I had seen that some of these folks had dedicated their whole career, and they had made slow progress, slow, steady progress, and they could have launched products throughout their career, but they stayed on the research path. That really motivated me to say, "Hey, there's so many applications of this technology, (especially back in 2006 when I was working on it) to be deployed in the real world, why can't I build a career about taking a technology, building a team around it, and sharing it with customers who would love the technology?"

Christopher Reichert: Interesting. How did your time at Sloan change you? When you came in, what did you think you were going to do there, and how did it evolve?

Matthew Linderman: Yeah, so I came in really thinking, “I want to create a company, or join a company, and really grow that after school.” Big picture, that's still the same, but I learned a lot about how you actually do that. I worked with three different startups throughout my time at Sloan and learned a lot about the dynamic that is required to be successful. A lot of that is about the team, having a good team, and a good idea paired together with the right skills. What we found is that one was a great idea with a bad team. The other was a great team with a bad idea, and finally we've landed on one that's a good pairing of good idea with a great team.

Christopher Reichert: Let's cover that in a minute. Sloan is talking about these three different paths. You're an MBA, right?

Matthew Linderman: Yeah.

Christopher Reichert: So you’re in the two year MBA program. They talk about the “super highway,” the “dirt road,” and the “jungle.” Sloan and all of the top business schools have been very good at the superhighway for, forever. They get you into investment banking or consulting or whatever it may be. I think the entrepreneurial side is now coming to the fore as a need for students coming in. When you came to Sloan, did you know that you weren't going to go back to the superhighway path?

Matthew Linderman: Yeah, I had seen the super highway. I was at McKinsey for four years. I'd seen the private equity path, and I could see that trajectory. In many ways, it's a great trajectory. You learn a tremendous amount, there's good pay outcomes, and there's a life that's really quite positive, but when you think about what you want to achieve in life, some people want that predictable path. For me, it was always about creating something. If you're advising in business services, whether it's financial or whether it's management consulting, you're not creating something. You're helping to create something. For me, to distinguish that difference was a big thing to mention.

Christopher Reichert: Kind of arm’s length.

Matthew Linderman: Exactly, for me it was about not only building a product, but also hiring people and building a team that can really deliver a product to the world.

Christopher Reichert: I want to hear now about your startup.

Matthew Linderman: Absolutely. We started a company called Aloha Wellness last summer, and it didn't start as a company. It started really as a problem. It was a phone call that my aunt had given me last April. She said, "Hey Matt, you should really call your mother." Apparently, it had been five weeks since I had called my mom. Which I was a little embarrassed by. I started to realize, people generally consider me a pretty social person, but I had a whole number of little issues in my personal life with my relationships. I thought, “If I'm having all these problems, I wonder if other people are too?” I spent the summer asking people a relatively simple question, spoke with about 80 to a hundred people and said, "Hey, how do you maintain your relationships, and how do you deepen your relationships?" We basically found that people all have a similar process. There are a lot of pain points along it, but they just weren't conscious of this process. It always runs in the background. The general concept here is how can we help to bring that process to the forefront, help people be a little bit more intentional about how they maintain and deepen their relationships, and provide some tools and guidance as to how to do that much better than you do today.

Christopher Reichert: Interesting. I guess in the old days when people lived in the same village all their lives, they knew everybody and had that. I read a book years ago that talked about the different technologies, and I use that word broadly, that people have at their beck and call and what it means for different things. For example, if you use email for your wife or your girlfriend, it pushes them away. If you text, it brings them a little closer. If you use a phone call, in person obviously draws them in, but if you have an old college buddy that you haven't spoken to for a number of years, Facebook will draw them closer, but Facebook will push your girlfriend or your wife further away. It depends on the nature of the relationship you have to pick your tools to achieve your goals. How does Aloha Wellness address those different types of, I guess, rings of relationships that you might have?

Matthew Linderman: Absolutely. Each medium has its own value. There's a lot of discussion, “Is technology actually making us lonely or disconnecting us?” Even though we're more connected than we've ever been before. I actually think it's more nuanced than “technology is causing issues.” There's a role for everything here.

Facebook, as you mentioned and Instagram do a great job of helping you get the life update about your friends and family. Especially that more distant ring of people that you might not call or speak with regularly. There's a huge benefit to that. However, it also requires time, and you spend a lot of time actually getting that life update, and we're busy people. We're overworked. We're burning out in many different ways. So often, the people who are taking the brunt of that are the people who are our closer relationships. The people who we love in life—our family, our friends, our loved ones—and we're really trying to help you do a better job with those relationships. Call it the closest 50 friends and family in your life versus the 50 plus where you're going to get that update through Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or other platforms.

Christopher Reichert: From a time allocation perspective, or at least the resources that you and your startup are focusing on, it's not about fixing the Facebook depersonalization. “Oh my God, my college friend is doing so well. Beautiful life, beautiful holiday.” Whatever it is. It's really about, like you said, that 1 to 50.

Matthew Linderman: Absolutely, it's helping you actually focus on those 50 folks and do a better job with them. Because if you're focusing your time on the other folks, a lot of times you're just not thinking about the people who are closest to you.

Christopher Reichert: How do you define those 50? Let's say I sign up—which I will by the way. Assuming I can?

Matthew Linderman: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We'll send you a link after.

Christopher Reichert: All right, so what's the process, the on boarding, so to speak?

Matthew Linderman: Absolutely. You go through a process, first of all, of just thinking who really matters in your life. A lot of people don't really think about this, and when they do, they think it's awkward. “Am I ranking my friends or family?” That's really not the point. It's really to think, “Who are the people who, if I want to maintain or deepen a relationship, who are those people that I really want to keep in my life?” That process, just by explicitly going through it, usually leads you to have anywhere from 10 to 20, 30, 40 people in this app.

Christopher Reichert: It's pretty easy to kind of populate it with that.

Matthew Linderman: Yeah, it's really whoever matters to you. We're not forcing it. It can be family, friends, and professional people. It's whoever matters to you.

Christopher Reichert: It's a name, it's a contact medium, whether it's email or phone or whatever it is. Okay. So I've got them in there. So I've got my 20 people, let's say. Then where does Aloha Wellness take me from there?

Matthew Linderman: So V1 of the product is really focused on helping you keep in touch with these folks and giving you a visualization of how you're doing. The friends start essentially close to you, and they actually quite literally drift away from you over time in relation to how often you'd actually like to meet up with these folks.

Over time, if you meet up with your friend Fred, you click on Fred and say, "Hey, I connected with Fred," and we'll reset that timer essentially. That's the basic status tracker functionality in the app. Is there anything that they told you that you should follow up on later? Are they struggling with something? Are they celebrating something? What the research says, when you actually look at scientific research, is that it's often the people who remember these meaningful elements in your life that you actually bond with later on because they spent the mental capacity to actually remember these items about you.

Christopher Reichert: Right. So, “Last time we spoke you were having problems with blah, blah blah…” Or, “you had just gotten a promotion,” or whatever, “How's it going?” It makes it a meaningful check in. It's almost like Salesforce for your personal life in the sense of tracking it.

Matthew Linderman: In a way. There's actually a whole category of apps that have tried and failed. They're called Personal CRM's, or Customer Relationship Management apps. That's their basic functionality. However, when you think about using Salesforce for your friends and family, it doesn't feel natural.

Christopher Reichert: No it doesn't.

Matthew Linderman: You get behind on your friends and family list and you never really want to use the app anymore because you're like, “This isn't natural.” It feels transactional, it feels strategic, and you give up. What we're doing is essentially taking a similar functionality but putting it in a completely different user interface that feels much more user-friendly, much more gamified, to actually feel like it's something that is natural to do with your friends and family. That's really the crux of what we're trying to solve here.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah, because I would think that building the habit of updating it would be a challenge. Change is hard, right?

Matthew Linderman: Yeah, and the reality is we actually do a pretty poor job of maintaining our relationships versus our expectations.

Christopher Reichert: Right.

Matthew Linderman: If I had asked you, “How often would you like to stay in touch with any of your friends?” you're probably going to say a number that's actually more frequent than you will keep in touch with them. The reality is we often underperform, and that's frustrating, but in real life we don't see that. It just expires, and we then say, “Okay, that's life. I'll meet up with them next time.” If you track it, then it actually looks quite negative. That's one of the biggest elements that we're looking into—how do you actually help people set realistic expectations with their relationships and then help them go about their lives to meet those expectations?

Christopher Reichert: Yeah, and I would think it would change over the course of someone's life. I remember back in my 20's, I had a “tribe” as I used to call it, and we would meet pretty much every weekend, every other weekend. It was easy to kind of maintain those relationships, and it was large, 20 to 30 people. Then people get married or they moved to other jobs or in my case, I literally left Australia. Now, thank goodness you know Facebook came along, so that's my 51 plus that pulls that in. How do you envisage what version 2 or 1.1 of the app moving forward?

Matthew Linderman: To address your prior point, relationships do change over time, right? In your 20's, you have your close groups from usually school and your first few jobs. Then you get married and there's this trimming down period—it's actually in the scientific research—and then it changes after that as well. In reality, this is always changing over time, and any application to follow something like this needs to also adapt over time.

The way we actually see this app going forward, part of it is tracking the status, nudging you to take actions that you really want to be doing anyway, but longer term we really view it as how do we completely reimagine the social planning process? How can we save you time when you're trying to plan, “What am I going to do this weekend?” How can we help you do more interesting and more meaningful activities? And then how can we get you together, in person or on a video call, with the people that you care about more often, having those joyous moments?

Christopher Reichert: Now, I will say that you have strong will. You gave up coffee.

Matthew Linderman: It's true.

Christopher Reichert: What, six months ago or a year ago?

Matthew Linderman: Now, nine months ago.

Christopher Reichert: Nine months ago.

Matthew Linderman: Nine months strong.

Christopher Reichert: Do you go to the gym regularly?

Matthew Linderman: I do.

Christopher Reichert: You do.

Matthew Linderman: Not always, but as of two years ago, four times a week.

Christopher Reichert: I heard that, your breakfast that you described earlier was high protein, berries—

Matthew Linderman: And fiber, very important. Keeps you full.

Christopher Reichert: Right, and fiber exactly. For the rest of us, who drink coffee, go to bed late, who eat pizza, whatever it is. How do you change our habits?

Matthew Linderman: First of all, I was absolutely one of everyone, and I still am in many ways. How do you change a habit? It's extremely hard. I've been reading every book I can find on this, scientific papers on this. The reality is people really don't change their habits easily. They die very hard.

Now, there's a whole study about how can mobile apps change your habits. A lot of it actually is viewed in a negative sense about how they get you addicted. As Nir Eyal, the author of "Hooked", says, "Getting addicted to a good habit is one of the best things you can do for life." So that's actually what we're building into our app, it’s the same exact addictive habits but addictive in a way that's actually beneficial for you instead of harming you.

Christopher Reichert: Are you in private beta at the moment?

Matthew Linderman: Yeah, so we have a closed beta. The app is actually on the app store, but there's limited access to it.

Christopher Reichert: If I were to click and install, it would ask for an email and then you would consider whether or not—

Matthew Linderman: You get the app and then you sign up for the waitlist. We'll be opening to the public relatively soon. We encourage everybody to go sign up for the waitlist, and we're adding people on a weekly basis to add and test the app. We're excited to actually launch it publicly once we've gotten that feedback to really launch it more broadly.

Christopher Reichert: So you started this here at Sloan?

Matthew Linderman: Yup.

Christopher Reichert: With classmates or was it... tell me about how you built the team.

Matthew Linderman: Well, it was interesting because I really worked on this over the summer in between my first and my second year at Sloan. I had done much of the legwork in terms of research, and the person who I needed on my team at the end of the summer was a software developer. It's a mobile app, so it needed the key technology person.

Matthew Linderman: I had looked all over MIT, found some great folks, but in terms of just expectations on a whole number of fronts. It didn't work out with the folks I met at MIT. But through a friend of a friend, I met an individual named Luke who is a mobile app developer at a cybersecurity company, and he runs his own development shop. We actually joined forces in January to build this out. He had always loved this space. He'd been looking for something that he can join full time, ideally once we raise funds and he said, "Yes, let's do this. I love the idea, let's go and get it."

Christopher Reichert: That's great. Tell me about some of the courses you took at Sloan and did you build the business plan as part of a course? Tell me about the courses that you took that helped inform this business model and plan.

Matthew Linderman: Yeah, so there are some terrific courses at Sloan when it comes to learning about entrepreneurship, especially if you have a startup. One of the best courses was called Scaling Ventures led by the Martin Trust Center. It was led by the founders of HubSpot and PillPack. Super hands on, great stories about what challenges you're going to face right at the beginning and then as you scale your venture to grow it down the road.

Christopher Reichert: And those have scaled hugely.

Matthew Linderman: Absolutely.

Christopher Reichert: Wasn't PillPack purchased by Amazon, was it?

Matthew Linderman: Yup. For about a billion dollars just recently.

Christopher Reichert: Nice, excellent. Good for them.

Matthew Linderman: Absolutely. So yeah, great inspiration. Then there's many other more tactical courses from entrepreneurial finance, to entrepreneurial strategy, to one course led by Kit Hickey about how you deal with founding dilemmas. All of these courses I think really helped me, especially going through the startup experience in parallel, to really process the information in a way that you might not process if you just took the course alone.

Christopher Reichert: Some sort of framework. Did you participate in any of the business plan competitions, $100K?

Matthew Linderman: Not the competitions themselves, but we did participate in the fuse accelerator, which is led by the Martin Trust Center over the winter IEP session.

Christopher Reichert: Excellent. Yeah, that's a great time to explore areas with less pressure.

Matthew Linderman: Absolutely. And it just gives you time to focus with resources. The EIR's, or Entrepreneurs In Residents, are there to really guide you and help you think about the things that really matter at that moment with your startup.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah, and I would encourage alumni out there to continue to participate in IAP.

Matthew Linderman: Absolutely.

Christopher Reichert: I mean there are online components too and if you're in the Boston area it is a really great 2 or 3 day experience just to kind of dive back into the classroom. Maybe it's a subject that you're doing on a daily basis, but maybe it's something that you've been thinking about, and it's a great way to discover whether you want to do it more or not. I would encourage that. That's just a side comment.

Do you have a favorite professor at Sloan that you have a memory of?

Matthew Linderman: That's an interesting question.

Christopher Reichert: Or a course?

Matthew Linderman: I think there's a pair that have really helped me, and these are the professors that teach that founding dilemmas course. Kit Hickey and Aaron Scott have been tremendous mentors for me. Kit had a background actually leading a startup out of MIT when she was an MIT Sloan student, Ministry of Supply, and is now back as an EIR. So very hands on. Great practical coach. Then Aaron Scott really comes at it from an academic perspective of, “How do you set yourself up for success to tackle one market after another, after another from a strategic point of view.”

Christopher Reichert: Interesting.

Matthew Linderman: The combination was terrific, both from that class and as a pair of mentors.

Christopher Reichert: If you had one more year at Sloan or even a semester, is there a course that you wish you had taken?

Matthew Linderman: Is there a course I wished I had taken?

Christopher Reichert: Or two?

Matthew Linderman: Really, I view it as I took the courses I wanted to take. The leadership at a crossroads course was terrific. Just CEO's speaking about their experiences and their struggles throughout their careers. Then that scaling ventures course. Those were the two that I was really excited to get into and they lived up to expectations.

Christopher Reichert: How about a do over? Anything that you'd want to do over?

Matthew Linderman: Anything I'd want to do over?

Christopher Reichert: Maybe not go to that C function and stay so late…

Matthew Linderman: As I went through it, I would have absolutely said that some of the startups were painful, but I think they're painful in a way that you learn, right? Because it's either an idea that really shouldn't be started around, or it's a team that's just not clicking, and those are painful as you go through them, but I think those are actually some of the most valuable experiences that you can get at Sloan, and seeing those issues really provides a list of things to avoid moving forward.

Christopher Reichert: What's your definition of success?

Matthew Linderman: For me, it's all about—

Christopher Reichert: Besides having been the Cornell Business Review founder and McKinsey and now starting this app.

Matthew Linderman: Well, I mean for me, I think you have to remember I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Rome, New York.

Christopher Reichert: Didn't all roads lead there?

Matthew Linderman: There are some big ones, but it was always about what can I do to improve the world for everybody? Not just the folks who are in the business world or the folks who are in the big cities, but what are the problems that everybody is really struggling with that are day-to-day issues? And how can you use technology to actually solve those problems? Or at least make a small difference, because a lot of things are just five minutes of your day, but if it brightens up your day, that in my head is success if it's done at scale.

Christopher Reichert: Interesting. Any advice for prospective Sloanies?

Matthew Linderman: Absolutely. If you're interested in entrepreneurship, I would absolutely get involved with the Martin Trust Center. Their accelerator programs, the fundraising competitions. I think the entrepreneurial environment here is terrific, and there's a bunch of people trying to decide, “Do I want to be East coast, West coast? Is Boston the right place?” The one thing I've learned is that Boston is a terrific place to start companies, and I'd really encourage them to look into the entrepreneurial resources at MIT.

Christopher Reichert: Excellent. What's next for you? You mentioned going to New York.

Matthew Linderman: Yeah, I will be moving to New York at the end of the month and we are trying to fundraise for the startup at the end of the year here and then really try to grow this thing and get it out there. As with any B to C business consumer product, you don't really know until it's out there whether it will be successful, and it's an iterative process.

We're about to launch here more publicly. As I said, there's the wait list out there that you can sign up for, and once we launch, we're really hoping to get that traction, get people sharing the product, loving the product, and then really dedicate our lives to it for the next few years.

Christopher Reichert: Is that Android and iOS?

Matthew Linderman: At the moment it's just iOS.

Christopher Reichert: Okay.

Matthew Linderman: But we should be able to deploy to Android soon as we're developing on across platform.

Christopher Reichert: I'm curious why New York, not California or really anywhere else?

Matthew Linderman: I think one of the things I learned at Sloan was it's about really balancing everything in life, and part of my life is that my family and my fiance's family are in the New York and East coast area more broadly, and that was a big consideration. The other consideration is that New York really has had a whole number of successful consumer startups come out of it, and there's a whole number of programs that are feeding great developers, great designers into that ecosystem. I think it's a great ecosystem to build up the app that I'm looking to build, and it's also the area that my family is around.

Christopher Reichert: That's true. Then did your partner—what role does she play in you going to Sloan versus other schools?

Matthew Linderman: Well, she went to school across the river.

Christopher Reichert: Oh, really.

Matthew Linderman: At HBS.

Christopher Reichert: Oh, the community college up the road.

Matthew Linderman: She was there a year ahead of me. It really helped me to see, “What is business school?” Is this the right time in my life for it? I had always known that it would make sense to go, but it was a question of, “When is the right time?” From that experience I had realized that I don't necessarily need to spend more years in finance. It was the right time to take the leap to really go and start a company and try to make that work as my career after Sloan.

Christopher Reichert: That's great. So tell me what's the—this is going to be a funny question because I think you do a lot of this probably—but what's the last thing you really geeked out about? Or maybe didn't geek out about?

Matthew Linderman: I must say I have a bit of an addictive personality because I get so deep into so many topics, and I think the last thing I really geeked out about…there's a few. One Artificial Intelligence. I was working at AIVC Fund. In high school, I was doing what's now considered Machine Learning AI. I've loved the topic. My family's involved with it. Absolutely love that. I think there's so many opportunities there.

The other thing is habits, like you said earlier, it's so hard to change someone's habit and there's a lot of research now coming out on that topic. Those are the two areas that I absolutely love and will continue to geek out on for the next few months and years.

Christopher Reichert:     That's excellent. Well, I hope people are developing a habit to listening to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies about ideas that matter. Thanks to Matt Linderman for joining us. I'm your host, Christopher Reichart, and thank you Matt.

Matthew Linderman:     Thank you very much, Christopher.

Christopher Reichert:     Sloanies Talking with Sloanies is produced by the Office of External Relations at MIT Sloan School of Management. You can subscribe to this podcast by visiting our website, mitsloan.mit.edu/alumni, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

Support for this podcast comes in part from the Sloan Annual Fund, which provides essential flexible funding to ensure that our community can pursue excellence. Make your gift today by visiting giving.mit.edu/sloan. To support this show or if you have an idea for a topic or a guest you think we should feature, drop us a note sloanalumni@mit.edu.