 Thank you so much for taking the time to come and listen to the people, people chat. We are thrilled to be here at Slush, and thank you so much for taking this pre-nap time moment to hang out with us. So I want to quickly introduce myself. My name is Caitlin Holloway. I am founding partner at Alexis O'Hanion's venture capital firm 776, and I am joined on stage here by two phenomenal executives and people leaders and entrepreneurs. So we have Sophia here, who is co-founder and coach at Mamboo, and Vanessa, who is co-founder and chief people officer at Pitch. And we have so much to share with you today, and such a short amount of time. And so I want to start first by not burying the lead. I want to give you the headline of our talk today. And I can tell you this with full confidence, because as a people leader and executive and now investor who has spent the last decade and a half dragging HR out of the back room and into the board room, I can tell you this. We are about to enter an incredibly challenging chapter, not just for technology, but for every business. And the companies who have the capacity to build people-first companies will be the ones that succeed. Everyone else will not make it. And so we believe that people strategy is fantastic business strategy. And it is your job as founders to maintain and manage and tweak that triple bottom line, which is mission, people, and business outcomes. And so today we're going to share a little bit about our combined experience. We all have been deep in the trenches of building companies from the bottom up. We all have been a part of high growth, high success companies from the earliest days through exit. And so we want to share with you what we have learned and what we have discovered along the way. But I challenge all of you as we are having our conversation to really think about your own responsibility and your own organizations in leading people first. And so I don't want you to just think about surrounding yourself with phenomenal people leaders or leaders who happen to believe in leading culture first, but also how you can build your own capacity to become that people-first leader that you're going to need to be to survive this next chapter. And so without further ado, I would love to have you both set a little bit of context please. Vanessa, we'll start with you. Can you share a little bit about how and why you decided to move from being a people leader into being an entrepreneur? Yeah. First of all, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you both on stage today and talking about people-first business leadership. Yeah, my background has always been in HR and people-focused work. I was always interested in building organizations that are progressive and innovative. And after being an operator for a very long time, I really knew that in order to really shape the culture of a business, you need to start from the very beginning. And that's why I knew you have to become a part of a founding team and be there in the early days. And because to me, people-first culture start with the first people you hire. It's the first rituals you're starting with your team, even if it's tiny. Yeah, the first 50 people are dictating your culture in the future. And that's why I think it's very, very important as an HR professional to actually be there from day one and be part of the founding team. Yeah. Excellent. And Sophia, how did you translate your HR career into one of starting a company? Mine was a bit of a typical path. I was coming actually from a clinical psychology background. And I moved on then to do a master's in human-computer interaction. That's how I met my future co-founders and how the idea for Mumbo was born. And we were coming from very different backgrounds. So we had one from computer science, the other one computer science and business. And I was the only one with a people-related role in past experience. So it came naturally as having me as the co-founder that would be focusing on people. Because that would bring the people-first mentality that we wanted, we knew we wanted to have in the company. Most excellent. And can you share with the audience quickly a little bit about both of your companies and what those products are? Sorry, Sophia, I'll start with you. So Mumbo is a cloud-based core banking software. We started in Germany. Now we expanded to quite a few countries. And yeah, we've been building that product since 2010. Excellent. And what about Pitch? Yeah. At Pitch we are building the next generation of presentation software. We are believing in rethinking the way how people build decks, interact with decks and share and consume them. Yeah. We've been starting four and a half years ago and have been on the market since two years. And yeah, lots of people already use it. I hope some of you will also check it out after today. Yeah. Excellent. Thank you. I find it interesting that both of those products are very related to people, how we communicate with people, how we tell our stories. And most importantly, how we set those goals to really create those outsized returns. And so it's no surprise that having someone with a background in people makes a lot of sense in that founding team. Now I understand that many founders, and I understand this after years and years of coaching and advising founders, they always ask me, when should I hire my first HR leader? And typically they're asking me this question around their series A, sometimes series B, when they have somewhere between 30 and 50 employees. I fundamentally think that that is wrong. It is too late. And so understanding that both of you started your companies from day zero with a people first strategy and really considering, again, that triple bottom line from the very, very beginning. Vanessa, can you share a little bit about how you think leading people first from day zero actually has impacted not only your company culture, but your product? Yeah, I think if you have someone in the leadership team that actually really thinks intentionally about people and the type of organization you are building, you are basically also able to prevent certain errors that a lot of people make in hiring the wrong people, potentially promoting the wrong people, but also thinking about building an accessible product for various types of users, I think. That's one aspect. But then also, yeah, being part in every conversation that goes into the business strategy, in the end, it touches everyone in the company and all your workforce. So I think it's very important that the people are being considered in those conversations. Absolutely. And what about you, Sophia? I would probably answer that question with a focus on diversity. So the core founding team, we were coming again from diverse backgrounds, nationalities even. And prior to Mambo, we had been working together for at least one year in different projects, and we knew the value that there was in that diversity. We had seen firsthand how each of us coming from a different mindset and contributing to the same problem, the same business case, the same project would give it such a richness that we would never attain if we didn't have that different mindset. So we knew from the get-go that we wanted to have a diverse team to also serve a diverse set of customers. And we focused on that so much that we actually moved our headquarters from Stuttgart in the south of Germany to Berlin where we would be able to attract a more diverse talent. And by doing that, we gained not only that richness of ideas and just contributions from different perspectives, but we were also able to tap into market segments that otherwise we might have not been able to do it because customers were coming from all sorts of also backgrounds, but countries and cultures and having someone in the team who was able to understand the subtleties and nuances of those cultures and communicate with them, understand their needs and translate into the business was key for our success. Right. I love that you bring up communication because communication is actually a very, very big part of the work that we do as people leaders. I think that oftentimes folks relegate HR to payroll and benefits administration, but the reality is that our work impacts not only everyone within our organization, but to both of your points, all of our users as well, which is really where, again, those business outcomes live or die. And so thinking about our roles very holistically, communication is actually very, very, very key to all of our strategy. And especially going into this next chapter where the world is shifting and things are not as known as they were from funding and fundraising becoming more challenging because of the macro and micro economic climate to really watching what's happening with our consumers as they are maybe pulling back or making different business decisions or consumer decisions for themselves. And so when we think about communication internally, it's a really, really powerful tool and most importantly to manage expectations. So oftentimes our employees become upset or they are in a position of not understanding the decisions that executive teams are making because they simply don't have the context. And so a lot of our jobs, as I've mentioned, is communication. How have you, in both of your organizations or at previous organizations, use communication strategy to help you drive or deliver those outsized returns? I believe that Vanessa, you were the one who you have a pretty unique approach to all hands. Is that true? Oh, we do, yeah. We are building a remote first team since day one. So since we started hiring our first employees, we basically decided to have a distributed company across the country and across Europe and then US. And yeah, for us it was very important to set clear intentions around how do we manage a distributed team that's not in the same place and not having these dedicated one-to-one situations. And one aspect of that is asynchronous communication. For that we used our tool pitch in order to have team bulletins going out every Friday where everyone is sharing their progress on their work with the whole company. This is one aspect of replacing these weekly all hands and having this type of moment to share and celebrate each other's work but not being at the same meeting every week. We also just practice very intentional ways of documenting our work, sharing progress in open channels, having transparent communication across the teams and across functions. And yeah, this is just a few of those things that we consider when we think about the communication strategy internally. That's excellent. And how about you, Sophia? How have you used communication as a strategic tool to help your team not only feel engaged but ready to perform? Yeah, I think transparency is key, has always been key but it also evolved as we grew. So in the beginning it's very easy to just communicate. You're seeing people are in the same office in the same space. In our case we were in the same office. So that was very easy to have that two-way communication but as we grew of course that was not sustainable and not scalable. So we started having more formal ways of capturing the overall sentiment of the team, various surveys but we also have our all hands which we call Town Hall which is communication to the team about giving them updates, keeping them in the loop of everything that happens in the company. And we have a more localized approach also for the different offices that we call Village Halls where that information is in a way translated and so that people know how that impacts them in that location. And we have also what we call the Ask Me Anything sessions where leaders sit with anyone can join and they can just ask them any question really and just to break that formality a little bit more in addition to surveys. We have pulse surveys, engagement surveys and so on so to keep that two-way communication going but we had to go a little bit more formal somehow. That makes a lot of sense. I think that there's a pretty strong debate around transparency within organizations. How much or how little a leadership team chooses to share out with employees when, where and how they solicit feedback from the team in order to build their plans and goals for the next quarter. I'm curious to get you both of your takes on the level of transparency that you choose to employ and if maybe that has been different at different organizations and why. Sofia, we'll start with you. It has also evolved and of course I keep saying this, the more the better. However, I think each company will have to look at that and see for their needs and for the team they know and what is needed for them to know. I would always default for more and to share more where I was telling this earlier where we're dealing with adults ultimately and I know as founders we have that tendency to patternize a bit and to protect and it's that parenting just keeping them away from stressful situations that happen at this level but I don't think we need to do that. People are adults, they chose to be there as an adult and they like to be part of that communication that those situations and who knows where ideas can come from maybe because someone heard that we're going through this challenge or this situation then can come up with an idea that will actually support us and help us getting out of it. I love that, treat people like adults. What a novel, shocking thesis here. You heard it first on the stage. Treat people like adults, I think it's salient. How about you Vanessa, what are your thoughts on transparency? Yeah, they totally go into the same direction as a people leader I believe in enabling your team to make decisions and to foster innovation and I think people need to know context and have as much information as possible in order to lead their teams, in order to make decisions, in order to also bring the right ideas to life and I believe that you are building a better business if you're letting your team participate in what you're doing and where you want to go and transparency and open communication is the way to go for that. I love that. Another one of my favorite tools in the HR toolkit is actually policy which sounds, I know riveting, watch out, policy, we're gonna talk HR policy for a little bit, I wanna talk HR policy because I think that it gets a bad rap. The employee handbook, the traditional legalese compliance handbook that we all have to sign away all of our rights the second we started an organization I think is actually highly underutilized and it's become overly bureaucratic. My favorite way to use policy with an organization is actually to serve as a communication tool both internally so to our existing employees to drive employee engagement and to create safe spaces and then also to signal to our new recruits our helpful employees who we are and what we stand for as an organization and so some examples that I've employed throughout my career have been around parental inclusion so ensuring that you have a paid family leave policy especially for us back in America our government has not done a very good job of ensuring that that is protected for our citizens and so the job then rests on the shoulders of the private sector to go ahead and buoy that up but additionally I think that you can take it further and use a policy like loss of pregnancy leave which is something that is very challenging and hard to talk about at work but through my own lived experiences I had had a miscarriage at work and it was not protected thankfully I had a manager who was very understanding and was able to give me that time to grieve and also physically heal but that showed up nowhere in my employee handbook and so I led the way on creating a policy that I then open source to share with other people leaders and other founders to say this is something that every handbook should have to signal again not only to potential future employees we care about this particular community of people but again to your employees to say this is a safe space when we ask you to show up as your whole self I want my policies to reflect that as well and so I typically take the approach of we make rules for the many and not for the few and then deal with the edge cases because you don't want to have again that overly pedantic employee handbook but really thinking very strategically about when we implement a policy when we might adapt or change a policy and when we might want to not include a policy because they work on all directions and so now Sophia I know that you have also used policy in your favor before specifically around employee engagement can you talk to us a little bit about your sabbatical policy? Yes I'm so with you in all of that I used to cringe at the word policy as a founder and thinking no we're all for agility and I would say no policies are hindering agility we want to be an agile company why are we having policies and then I changed my mind because of that so I saw how policies can actually be used to actually design the culture that we want to have in the company and to support us in that design so what we did two years ago about two years ago was to implement this sabbatical policy where every five years employees would get to enjoy a one month paid sabbatical and that was all good until we had the question from a more traditional HR person saying so what happens to people who are now celebrating their sixth, seventh or eighth anniversary when we implement this policy which to me was a no question to me obviously we will back date it and they will get to enjoy that and this was there was a bit of discussion all because not that there were bad intentions from this person but because again they were coming from a more traditional background they were almost lost the ability to ask why why are we doing this why are we not doing this and they had their argument and I was able to fortunately show the human part of it what would happen if we don't do this to these 10, 15 people who are in this situation and so gladly we were able to overcome that and eventually implement the policy for all of them I love that it's so important I really I have a lot of thoughts on policies in general but I really think that if you show up and remember the human and so I challenge all of my founders I say when you are speaking with an employee so you know giving you a handbook filled again with legalese for you to rubber stamp and say yes we're going to use this policy or yes I approve the handbook in whole what happens when a real human knocks on your door or goes into your zoom room and shares something really challenging something very real very human that probably has nothing to do with your work but everything to do with how they are able to show up and participate what happens when someone comes and shares that they've just lost their partner an unexpected loss are you going to pull out the handbook and say here's our bereavement leave you get four days off absolutely not you're going to look at the whites of their eyes and say this is this is the appropriate thing to do here and so why would we not write our policies as if that person was sitting across from us before I move on and continue to wax poetic about policy Vanessa do you have anything to share about your thoughts or views on policy yeah I think for us in a remote first environment I think you need to have ideally as little as possible policies but the right ones and the right ones also for your stage so I think ideally you help your team to thrive within the frame that you define and also within the culture that you want to facilitate and ideally you need to evolve this over time also depending on your growth pace or the size of team you are and ideally communicate with your team and see what are the themes that they are thinking about what is concerning to them what are they struggling with and how can we as a company help efficiently for us for example one thing we implemented during COVID we always had a budget for a personal trainer for everyone for a physical sports coach and during COVID we felt like it's actually much more important to help people dealing with the complexities of the pandemic and we said everyone can see a therapist for a period of time that is also on us and I think this was a reaction to what we felt was needed and we still have a version of that in place and I think this is how we as leaders should interact with our companies I love that the ability to evolve a policy that was implemented at one point is very important similar to values you know values and policies are used to inspire the behaviors we would like to see within our own organizations and therefore cannot be static so I really appreciate the notion of adapting or evolving a policy to help it serve the business needs the business outcomes and so I want to shift gears a little bit into this new chapter that we know we're about to embark on and what I mean by that is things are about to get very hard especially for founders and young startups and I have been around enough blocks I have been doing my job for a very long time and I've seen good and I've seen bad I've seen the contraction and expansion cycles and I think it would be helpful if we could share a little bit about culture and more specifically the founder culture and so I've often said that your culture will reveal itself when things are going poorly it happens culture whether we like it or not it's building itself in the background with or without your permission and when things are going great it's really easy to feel like you have a great culture because you're winning but when things are really hard and they become trying that is when your truest, truest self as an organization reveals itself and so as we know we are entering and some of you have probably already experienced this you are living through a more challenging time so again it's around fundraising it's about your ability to retain talent it's about your ability to hire those key hires how do you take feedback from an investor who just has given you whiplash from going from growth at all costs to focus on revenue and how do you really take those and adapt those into what it is that you have been building and so I would love for each of you to share Vanessa will start with you any advice you have to the founders on how maybe they can easily or more gracefully transition into this potential period of hardship I would say resilience is what we all need right now I think as leaders, as employees, as founders and practicing resilience within yourself but also within your team and your organization is I think key to navigate uncertainties and also uncertain amount of time and I think this is the most important thing then for you or the best possibility for you as a leader to be there for your team and be present and show up for your team members and next to that I think yeah you need to over communicate with your teams you need to tell them where are you at in terms of your thinking as a founder what is the situation outside of our business how do you think about the macroeconomics how do you you know what is the strategy changes we might want to take and I think all these things are super important to just over communicate them to your team all over the place and yeah so resilience and over communication I think are the things I would say I would upvote those Sophia what about you absolutely subscribe to that too and I would just add the fact that you don't have to do it alone again it's very easy for us to take it all and think we need to do it all this is our company we need to do it alone but you don't there's countless people wanting to help and I'm talking about your team of course so if you use that transparency you will have the team also supporting you and giving you ideas but also mentors, advisors people who have done it before and it's not that you're looking for a prescription but you're looking for someone who has done it who has gone through similar situations who has overcome that and who can give you some tip some advice something that will make you feel that you're on the right track people are far more generous than you give them credit for I've discovered this multiple times in my career ask the worst they can do is say no but people are willing to show up and lend a hand and link arms especially folks that have been there and done that because they know they know what it feels like to sit in your shoes you know we are we are getting close to the end of our time on stage here I would share the advice get really good at doing less with less it's a great business practice in general but now it's the time to really exercise that muscle but do less with less with heart there is no reason to neglect the fact that we all have lived through some incredibly challenging times outside of a frothy venture capital market for the last few years we have survived trauma collective trauma together and so do less with less but with heart and before we head off the stage I usually like to end our talks with a call to action so again I challenged you all at the beginning of our conversation to really think deeply about how you can build your own capabilities in becoming a people first leader and really showing up for your team in a way that is not only high integrity and values aligned but in a way that drives those business results and so the second part of that would be to really extend yourself to Sophia's point to surround yourself with people who do lead people first and to her point this does not mean go out and hire the best HR leader to sit by your side today although I think that's also good advice it means surrounding yourself with people who really understand what it means to build and operate a culture first organization and so Sophia what are your final thoughts your final call to action? I would just say remember to look after yourselves also it's really easy to get into our minds and our to do lists into doing, doing, doing and firefighting but ultimately and just like with parents we're better parents and this is our baby too so we're better parents when we have that time to restore, to re-energize to recollect our thoughts and then be able to give because if you just give at some point it's over, the energy is over so just remember that take some time to whatever you do to re-energize to do that urgently Vanessa? Yeah, I would say call to action for all of us founders is to really stay alert on what's happening and yeah, if you decide for things execute fast that's what I would say and then on top of that I think now in times like this when you want to invest in your culture I think it would be great to invest in the right tooling for your team to collaborate and to build out your culture and for that I would recommend everyone to use Pitch and download it and try it. Excellent. Well, thank you to all of you for joining us for the People People Talk we are thrilled to have been invited and like I said I encourage you to go out and make the connections with people who have this area of expertise because it truly will be your competitive advantage but otherwise, good luck out there you've got this, you can do this you're going to build great products that will change the world that are diverse and inclusive and really keep human at the very center of everything you do so thank you so much and we will see you out on the floor.