The Asia Tech Podcast had the pleasure of catching up with Mat Ward, the Founder, and CEO at Workmate.  I have now known Mat for almost a decade and first had him on the show back in February 2019.  I had him on the show again almost a year ago, literally just before lockdowns due to COVID-19 began in his home city of Singapore and my home city of Bangkok.  That episode was filled with optimism (Mat is an optimistic guy, but a realist as well.) and you could not hear a tinge of doom or worry in either of our voices.  Neither one of us could have predicted how difficult 2020 would become.

I wanted to catch up with Mat because he has always been a voice of reason in a world filled with unnecessary noise and bluster.  After the tumult of 2020, I wanted a real opinion from someone I trusted about the impact of COVID-19 on a well-funded and growing business.

Topics we covered in this episode:

• We jumped right into a discussion on COVID
• Who benefitted, who did not
• Workmate grew a lot (doubled!) but not in the verticals that the team initially expected
• How COVID impacted staff and management from an emotional standpoint
• Face to face management versus remote work and management
• How culture gets maintained
• Managing through his first crisis
• The impact on funding
• Rolling out a significant new product

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