Michael Perez

Why I joined M13: Their vision for the future of venture resonated with me. At M13, I have the incredible fortune of sharing my skills and experience with founders who are trying to tackle the problems that I love solving. M13 allows me to work with dozens of companies as an interest-aligned partner—not a detached consultant.

My philosophy about data: Intuition shouldn’t replace data—it should learn from data. We’re all capable of honing our intuition with data-driven insights, but only if we understand the limitations of the data and the technologies that produced them. When the technologies or the methodologies are poorly understood, the findings tend to be misinterpreted or disregarded outright.

My favorite career milestone: I’ve always been intellectually curious, and that’s led me down some paths that were only tangentially related to my actual job. At Bonobos, I saw a gap in our organic acquisition strategy and campaigned to launch a “Refer a Friend” program. I led primary research, structured the incentive, and set up the analytics. The program had a higher ROI than any other acquisition channel.

A career lesson I’ll never forget: As an analyst, I tend to look for experiments that can validate or refute hypotheses. I love to challenge the status quo, and for a time, I believed that a well-designed experiment with conclusive results was a silver bullet. I went toe-to-toe with some colleagues and brought them evidence that I thought would be compelling. I was promptly disappointed. I learned to consider how other people make decisions before trying to bully them with data.

Why wellness and well-being matter to me: I think we can all be more intentional about how we invest in ourselves. I’m a big believer in chronic self-care. It’s obviously incredibly important to treat physical, mental, and emotional crises immediately—but many of us fail to pay the same attention to the everyday decisions we make that affect our health acutely.