Mews, the maker of a fast-growing, cutting-edge hospitality software platform used by one in three hotels in the Netherlands and growing steadily in Europe and the rest of the world, has been nominated for the Tech Hero Award. “It makes me very happy that we are making an impact with simple solutions that make travel better,” says CEO Matthijs Welle.
What is the biggest task facing your organization?
“The tremendous growth we are experiencing. We bet on remote first after COVID-19. I think it’s very good, very inclusive. You just have a lot more freedom to hire different kinds of people. So then you grow very fast as well. This year, we hired about 400 people, and now employ 1,200 people in more than 20 countries. But it’s intense. Especially with remote first. Because how do you build a culture in such an environment?
We are venture-backed so there is a very hard push to grow the company. We have to find the human balance and expect sufficient output. Seeking that balance in a remote-first company is really much harder than in a traditional organization where they want to see everybody in the office for five days. But I don’t believe in that – working remotely is the future.
Salespeople do need to be based locally because customers want personal contact. But if you look at the product teams … the developers may be in the Czech Republic, but the product leaders and the designers are in Spain or the Netherlands, because there are more companies exposed to modern design elements. Apart from Europe, where we hired people in almost all countries, we have 150 people in the US and Canada and another team in Sydney, Australia.
The remote-first mindset means I have much more access to talent, in different locations. For example, we have 100 people here in Amsterdam. They come to the office, but they don’t work together much, if at all. The office is mainly there to work undisturbed. They mainly work together with people somewhere else in the world. It’s kind of special, this new dynamic.”
What role does technology play in your scale-up plans?
“Technology is of course very significant because we are a technology company. But also in terms of how we think about healthy productivity. That’s one of our objectives and key results (OKRs): getting more out of people but in a healthy way. We use OKRs to guide how we build the company forward. So not that we just make people work harder, but that they work in a smarter way.
In Europe, of course, there is suspicion about AI and data sharing. We are still so behind here in how we deal with AI.
So we are looking very closely at AI. To give you an example: Salespeople often call customers and must ask them many questions. Then they have to spend an hour manually filing that information in Salesforce, field by field. Obviously, an AI is ideal for that. Because I just want people to be able to go straight into the next call.
Here in Europe, there is, of course, suspicion about AI and data sharing. We are still so behind here in how we deal with AI. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. But politicians’ understanding of it is very poor, and that’s not good for technology and the future. Also, because the GDPR is so complicated, companies here don’t know exactly what they are allowed and not allowed to do with data. This unfortunately holds European companies back, which is kind of painful. But that doesn’t mean I think the GDPR should go away, because there’s a lot of good in it.”
What are you proud of?
“What I am most proud of is that we have an impact on the hospitality sector. At hotels, I noticed that technology is getting better. And not just our tech. We were the first to open up an API on the website. Why keep an ecosystem closed? And now all of our competitors have an open API. That’s because we talked about it publicly.
In the Netherlands, one in three hotels now uses our platform. We notice that, when our contacts go work at another hotel and interact with another system, they contact us to switch, because they can do much more with our software. That makes me very happy. We can have such an impact on an industry by building simple solutions that make travel better.”