Who are you & what are you building?
I am Lizzie Matusov, cofounder and CEO of Quotient. Quotient is an AI-powered developer tool that discovers, prioritizes, and resolves the friction slowing down engineering teams. Today, over 30% of an engineering team’s workweek is lost to avoidable friction in development processes—translating to $85 billion in lost global GDP. Quotient discovers the top areas of friction that slow down engineering teams, and leverages AI to resolve it directly.
Did you always want to start a company? What did you need to start a company?
When I was a kid, my friends and I spent our summers building businesses so we could buy Starbucks beverages or movie tickets without asking for money from our parents. Our most successful endeavor was a dog-walking business—we had rewards programs, fancy “spreadsheets” (on pen and paper), and a tightly optimized schedule to maximize the number of walks per day. It’s a fun story to look back on, but it also highlights that, from an early age, I was passionate about bringing ideas to life.
As I grew older, that desire only expanded in scope and scale. When I landed my first job in software engineering, I found myself constantly searching for ways to optimize how our teams collaborated to solve problems. On weekends, I’d bring home ideas and think about whether they could be applied more broadly across different organizations. As I built conviction that this was a space I wanted to invest more energy into, I realized that I had a lot to learn beyond just how to build a product.
How did the MS/MBA help you build your own venture? Did the MS/MBA Engineering Program and curriculum help you take more risks?
The MS/MBA Program became my two-year experimentation. The problem I was tackling was: Where can we reduce bottlenecks in engineering processes so teams can be most effective? In my two years at Harvard, I built numerous products aimed at addressing this challenge—leveraging courses, professors, and program-specific bootcamps to dig deeper into potential solutions. I would sit in lectures with world-class professors, listen to classmates with expertise in so many different industries share perspectives, and then apply that knowledge directly to test my hypothesis. I was given the resources to learn, the space to experiment, and the network to connect with to help advance my idea forward.
How has the MS/MBA Engineering Program empowered you as a woman in the startup space?
Women account for just 13% of startup founders, and technical women founders are less than a fifth of that already small number. This can have the unfortunate effect of discouraging brilliant women to pursue their ideas. There are so many untapped opportunities out there, and as women we have an advantage in thinking differently from the status quo on how to identify and pursue those opportunities.
My classmates in the MS/MBA were instrumental towards building that confidence. They helped me identify key insights, gave encouragement when I pivoted solutions, and continue to cheer me on through the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. It is an honor to build alongside my classmates—founders of Nominal, APEX, AllSpice, Artemis, Autumn Labs, CassVita, Claim, and many more—who are creating some of the defining companies of our time.
The article first appeared on the MBA Voices blog.