Matthew Scullion’s exit as CEO of UK unicorn Matillion may have come as a shock – but his response to the announcement definitely didn’t.
News broke yesterday that Scullion was being replaced as CEO by Girish Pancha and would remain an ‘active member of the company’s board of directors’.
His response was to take to LinkedIn to say: “The handover is real: Girish is the CEO, the company is his to lead, and he has my complete support.”
It’s the dignified response anyone who knows Scullion would have expected.
Fittingly, Pancha reciprocated by praising Scullion for building ‘exceptional technology, a stellar customer base, and an outstanding team’.
Pancha inherits a company with more than $100m in recurring revenue, a global customer base and an AI data automation platform – Maia – which is in the market and growing.
I last interviewed Scullion a couple of months ago for The Naked Founder podcast, and he was in a chipper mood.
Wearing his trademark gilet, he gave no hint that he would be stepping aside any time soon.
“I’ve been doing this for 15 years,” he said. “I feel like we are half-way through the first move on the chess board.
“I still work at 2x + of a normal working week, every week and that’s structured at desk time.
“On top of that you’re constantly travelling. Anytime I’m not in a meeting on Zoom, talking to a customer or doing something structured that is diarised, you’re thinking about the business all the time. That’s 15 years in. That’s what you’re signing yourself up for.”
Scullion’s achievements are vast. He took Matillion from a small serviced office in Booths Park, Knutsford, to fabled unicorn status and its shiny new 28,000 sq ft offices at Salford’s Two New Bailey.
However, the biggest compliment I can pay him is that he never fundamentally changed as a person.
“I try not to drink my own Kool-Aid,” he said to me in an interview in 2023. “I don’t think it’s very attractive, I don’t think it makes the boat go faster and I don’t believe it.”
Scullion never saw achieving unicorn status as the end of the journey, but merely as a moment in time.
From an early age, Scullion always had something about him that set him apart.
Cheeky teenager
An article in The Times in 2021 described him as a ‘cheeky, slightly belligerent teenager’ and recounted how he revised solidly for 24 hours after his French teacher at Altrincham Grammar School predicted he’d get an E in his GCSE. He ended up getting an A.
At the age of 17, he co-founded his own software company before going all-in with his friend Ed Thompson in 2011 to launch Matillion.
By 2014/15, Matillion had grown to a modest 12 people and had ARR of less than $1m when Scullion and Thompson made the game-changing decision to build their own software.
Six years later, Matillion became a unicorn when a $150m Series E funding round took its valuation beyond the magical $1bn mark.
Scullion’s profile soared on the back of it, and in 2021 he was voted EY Entrepreneur of the Year.
He recalled: “EY give you a holiday to Monaco and you get to take your family.
“I took my wife and two daughters to Monaco and there were signs up on the street lamps with your face on it.
“My kids were like ‘Daddy you’re famous’. I said ‘I’m definitely not famous’ and one day my eldest daughter said to Alexa ‘who is Matthew Scullion?’ and Alexa said ‘Matthew Scullion is the CEO of Matillion’.”
Scullion’s job title may have changed, but the person hasn’t. He’s the tech boss who refused to drink his own Kool-Aid.