Every week, Matt Welle books 20 minutes with three of his highest performers. No agenda. Just questions like: "Do we deal with underperformance fast enough?" Their answer is almost always no."They're the 10x employees," Matt says.

"They're picking up the slack, and they get frustrated when we don't take action fast enough." When he shared this on LinkedIn, people pushed back: shouldn't a CEO spend time with underperformers too?

Matt's answer is very un-Dutch: "They're not all equal, unfortunately. High performance is the thing I seek out."

Since his last visit, Matt raised $300 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. Mews now runs 15,000 hotels worldwide. But this year he also restructured 170 roles, to build a faster, AI-native company.

In this episode of Deal With It, we talk about:

✅ Why he spends his time with high performers, not underperformers

✅ How AI turned 7-person product teams into one "builder"

✅ How to do a restructuring the right way, for those who leave and those who stay

✅ Why work-life balance is a myth for founders building at this pace

✅ Why Europe makes it hard to scale, and why you should start anyway?

Is Matt right? Should leaders invest in their best people, or in the ones who are struggling? Let me know in the comments 👇🔔

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