 So, welcome to all of you, Katarina, Anna, and Katelyn. And I'm really excited to be hearing today about the lessons that you've learned from building HR capabilities at some of the world's most successful tech organizations. And in particular, how those lessons can be applied much earlier on in the journey. So I wanted to start off by just a kick-off question. Just briefly, for each of you, what stage in the scaling journey, in the startup journey do you think is the most critical for building culture and team? I'll take that one. We, it's funny, we were actually talking backstage, this is the question that we have received the most, just being attendees out and about. And we joke that, is there any HR professional that would ever say, ah, just wing it. Or like maybe at 5,000. I think the answer is pretty unequivocally as soon as you start thinking about building a company. Culture starts with you, the founder, and it grows from there. So I would say it starts before employee number one. And it's hard to disagree. I think there is no such a time as now, right? So from the start. And then it's one of those things that you have to keep at it, right? It's hit for hit and remind. So you can either be in the school of you get a culture because you will have a culture. And I don't think it's, it might be semantics, but it's not really about, you know, having a strong culture. It's about having the right culture that is relevant for what you're trying to do and what type of company you are. So early stage, I think maybe you could have a bit obviously before you're 75 people, but I wouldn't recommend it. I think get at it. Hit, hit and remind. Culture, culture, culture. Yeah. So I guess I would say I would prioritize transition time. So right when you're starting the company or when you get to a place where you're moving beyond products, market fit and you have a go to market component or once you've got the second office or once you have your first international office or when you move from just having managers to having managers of managers, so really paying attention during those transition periods, I think is important. Cool, well, I think that that generally validates the premise for this session, which is how can you, what lessons can you apply really early on? So I mean culture came up. So when it comes to culture, you know, we're always being told that culture, you know, success is 100% down to culture. And above that, we're told that culture echoes the personalities of the founding team. So I'm just really interested to know sort of Caitlin, like can founders reverse engineer for culture or is culture just something that is going to grow of its own accord, organically? I think it's actually both. So I've had the pleasure of being a part of a number of different technology companies from film at Pixar Animation Studios to the Silicon Valley tech world of fast iteration, quick moving, you know, companies are dying as fast as they're growing. And I really do think it's a combination of the intentions and values that you set early on to Caterina's point earlier. It has a lot to do with your product and how it fits in. So for example, at Reddit, given that we are the home for community and culture and belongingness online, it's really, really simple for us to take that model and actually apply it directly to our employee base. So for as much as on Reddit, you can find your home, whether it's you are a sneakerhead and you love shoes or you're interested in world news or you're a parent, literally you can find your home on Reddit. So we want to make sure that you can find your home at Reddit as an employee. So finding that translation from product, which typically is, you know, it's the brainchild of the founder, but taking that value set, whatever you believe in most, and then applying that to your culture back at home. Yeah, yeah. I mean, either of you add to that or... No, I think, you know, when you're a founder-led company, a lot of things, if you have a good founder, it comes by itself, right? It comes a bit natural and it could even be a bit of cheating if you are very much aligned and the chemistry and the notion of where you're going and what you're going to do and in what order you're going to do it. But I think I find myself to be in a position where also I have a very great understanding that culture is important, is prioritized from the whole, you know, the whole lead team, obviously, from starting with Daniel. But it's also so that I have been in other companies where when you have that really cool and relevant culture that you want to cling onto it, right? You don't want to change it and you spend a lot of time or that could at least happen. And I'm not really sure if you have the same experience, but that could actually be what is a winning bet, could be a losing bet, right, if you cling on because when you grow or you go to your first international or you become a globalist, obviously the people in the organization is the culture, right, and the culture is the people. So when you bring more people on, you don't want to have status, right, that would be strange if you want to keep it. And I have seen so many CEOs or so many founders and especially if that is the same person, it's like let's not do anything, let's not break what's not broken, let's keep it. And then it inhibits like the growth, but also the new people, it inhibits actually inclusion and belonging, which is a really dangerous place to be, right? And it also gets a bit immature, right? You have to grow, it doesn't have to be that you then become a mature grownup. It doesn't mean that you become corporate, it means that you evolve. And in my case, and at Spotify, Daniel is very aware about that, that as we grow, as we bring more people in, the culture and the values will change. There are a couple of things that are maybe more golden, but the culture needs to grow and we need to let the people also guide us and you have to be trusting them because people also socialize in a way that the people that are already there will help to vaccinate the people that are brought aboard. So if you're very scared or you are very much of let's keep what we have, I think you will end up in a place that is not that really healthy. But Anna, I mean, I thought it was interesting, Katarina's saying sort of values changing as well. And maybe we think culture shifts and evolves, but do the values, what changes between values, mission and behaviors in that linkage with culture? Do those also change over time or? So I think it really depends on the organization, right? And what works for one does not work for another. For us, one of the things that's immutable that doesn't change is the mission. And we like to say that's tattooed on the wall. Everything else is up for grabs and all of the people that we hire have an opportunity to influence and impact how we evolve. But relatedly, right, you know, our mission and our business goals are ours and they're different from yours. So the programs and interactions and behavioral norms that we need to develop that allow us to achieve our business goals while being in line with our values is very unique to us. And I think that the most valuable thing I could say to founders or CEOs early in their journeys is to be very intentional about it, right? We talk a lot about building the culture as in the same way we build the product, right? What are our goals? What are the end users? What, how do we design it? How does it evolve? How do we test it? Where are the bugs, right? Like what's going wrong? And let's be eyes wide open about that. So it's quite unique for each of us. Okay, great. Well, I'd love to move on to something else, which is in the early days, the people agenda is really dominated by recruiting. Yeah. So, you know, one of the earliest HR issues that therefore like proper HR issues that comes up is about onboarding, onboarding new hires. So I mean, Catherine, maybe you can tell us something about how you've optimized onboarding at Spotify and what can those processes, can early stage companies apply some of those processes and practices to sort of help make sure that new hires hit the ground running, having maximum impact, but they're still feeling supported and integrated into the team. First of all, I think you have to then define early days because we still find ourselves to be in hybrid growth. So talent acquisition is still, you know, first and foremost, the way that we build out the business. So it's very central and it's very strategic for us. But then onboarding, of course, if you are still a semi-small organization, you have to swallow that bite, right? You have to onboard people in a smart way. And it is a lot like the snake that is too big for lunch or for dinner. So we've found a couple of ways that works for us, back to what you said. So hopefully, you know, if the pipeline is healthy and we screen and we interview the right amount of people to the right levels and, you know, in the right pockets of the world, onboarding, a couple of things have been very important to us to find a much more, you know, digitalized, front-leaning, much more proactive, but also everything with us. And I guess that goes for you, too. It's very data-informed, right? But since we are a Swedish company with the headquarters still in Stockholm, we have found it to be very good when we onboard to bring everybody, no matter what job or role they have, to the headquarters and spend a week. And for everybody, no matter if they were based in Singapore, or Sydney, or New Mexico, or, you know, in Europe, to understand the strangeness of what it means to work for a Swedish global company. You know, they're ficus. Only one week makes such a difference. It does. It does. On a blitz of making the relationships, looking people in the eye, then you can use tech. After that, you can use technology to communicate. I totally agree with that one. So people usually say, like, isn't that very expensive and time-consuming, but just to connect with the founders and the founder stores and their mission and really make that your own journey, understanding, yes, I said, the strangeness of the Swedish fika and the full autonomy and that we don't really care about titles and hierarchies, more about the impact and a good idea is a good idea, whoever comes with that, which is a bit strange for a lot of our good talent and superstars and rock stars in Asia and also in the US, that it's flat and it's open-door policy and we don't really care about your background or your CV or what role you have. It's like your idea and the impact you can have here. So I think if I can point one thing out, it is more the intro days where we fly in and you spend, and it's not gonna be that, like, here's my org shot, this is what we do in HR or strategy-dob, so this is what we do in sales. It's gonna be trying to bring people on board so they understand what makes this animal called Spotify tick and how can I make use of that and how can I start to navigate. So as you said, I can hit the ground and start. So it's coming out of the starting blocks and hit the hurdles as fast as possible. But you know, I usually say on intro days, welcome to control chaos. It used to be chaos, right, with the hypergrowth. Now it's at least controlled and it's still all about the build and come grow with us and when you grow, we will grow. So we are still trying to figure it out, but I would say the intro days, introduction and really vaccinate everybody about who we are, our values, where we're going and why we're doing it. So it's purpose, purpose, purpose, right? It's the why. You know, I would say we just got a new COO at Reddit named Jen Wong and she works out of the New York office and we're based in San Francisco. And when she came in and did the appropriate thing, which was to audit our processes and make sure that we were being mindful with our spending, one of the questions she said to me is, is it really necessary to bring everyone out for that first week? And I answered, it is too expensive not to. I think that that costs up front, pay that tax right up front and the dividends will pay. So I completely agree. Do you measure that more in terms of retention or in terms of the impact, getting up to speed quickly or how can you measure, if your CFO or COO is saying, justify this might be a multimillion dollar cost? OK, so take one of the roles that maybe is a little bit more bottom line oriented in sales. That ramp time, if they are remote and they're working and they don't have the connection to the CEO, they don't have the pitch down, they don't know the mission and the vision and the values and the way that people that are constantly interacting with these folks do, it will take them, I haven't put pen to paper, but I would guess at least 3x to 10x longer to actually ramp and become profitable in their role. And I think that applies to all of them, but sales is the easiest. And I mean, it's like differing B2B because perhaps there's more of a sort of product induction required. I'm sure everybody joining Spotify already is going to be a mad user already. But maybe in B2B there's more induction required on the product side or it's not really. You know, it's not, there's an element of training and onboarding that is sort of in the traditional way. But I actually think that the important piece is the in-between. And the way that we measure it is we have a pretty exhaustive three-month onboarding program that includes 30 sessions spread out over it. And throughout it, we survey employ the new hires and their manager about where they're, how equipped they feel to have impact. Because while I think onboarding is important, I want to have, I don't want to have too much, I want to dial it exactly. And we look at the difference in survey questions for people who come out for a week or two versus don't. And it's, the data is really clear that it makes a difference for us. Yeah, cool. We'll just stick in with you. I wanted to move on to sort of compensation. Sure. So when you're trying to close a new hire and you hit an issue around compensation, what do you think is more important to stick with a consistent comp framework across the whole team or to know when to make an exception for great talent? And I'm expecting you hit this problem. Yeah, you're in the Bay Area, which is the most hyper-competitive talent environment in the world. So how do you face up to that challenge? So I'm going to answer your question by zooming out a little bit. Compensation is, you know, it's kind of like politics and sex that makes people really uncomfortable to talk about. And I think it makes people insecure. It makes people worried that they're not being treated fairly. I think there's a couple of things that you can do, whether you have five employees or 5,000 employees. The first thing is to be proactive and transparent about what the philosophy is. And this doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to be, you know, 10 pages long. But, you know, what do we think about compensation? What are our practices? What can you expect of us? And part of that is outlying what the programs are so that people know. And that might mean, hey, we're going to look at everyone's compensation twice a year. It might mean that we use comp levels in this way. It might mean we are, we target the 90th percentile or the 50th percentile. But whatever it is, you need to be proactive in communicating it because if you don't, people will start making up stories. In the absence of that information, they will start making up stories. And those stories are not positive. They are negative. And if it gets really bad, they will take their stories and go to the glass doors or the reddits or the blinds of the world. And that's, you know, you don't want that. You want people coming to you and talking about it. So number one is that transparency. Second, now when it comes down to, you know, you want to have pay equity. That doesn't mean that everyone gets paid the same, right? You want, assuming that there's a paper for performance element of your comp philosophy, it means that people are going to get paid differently based on their impact. But when people are coming in the door, you sometimes have a situation where, in order to get that person, you have to be outsized. So I guess I would say a couple of different things. Number one, there are ranges for a reason and that allows you some flexibility. Secondly, to a degree, you can trade off equity and cash to try to sort of customize a package that needs somebody's needs while still being in the total comp range. The third thing is, you know, I think a lot of companies get very flexible about their sign-on bonuses to try to bridge a hurdle. And I think that how flexible you can be on this really depends on the stage. I think early stage you can be a lot more flexible because you might, you know, you're trying to convince somebody to come out of a very secure position to join your, you know, your tiny little startup. I think as you get more mature, you have a responsibility to be a little bit more consistent. And I think that that's really also tied to our diversity and inclusion efforts to make sure that we've got gender pay equity. And in general, I mean, the data shows that men tend to negotiate better than women. And I feel like as HR professionals, we have a responsibility to drive doing the right thing. Yeah, actually on that point, I know, Catrini, when we were talking last week, you were saying that you've been doing work trying to address gender pay gap. Yeah. Do you want to tell us a bit about it? So it's not really, in this part of the world, it's not really a revolutionary because by Swedish law and in some parts of the Nordics, you have to do the gender pay gap, kind of analyzes at least once years. And yes, I can't pronounce analyzes in the English way. But so we do that. And then we do regression kind of analytics on top of that. And then we look into the things that could, you know, like performance or other things that would be OK. But when it comes to gender gap, then we do that in the pieces of the world where we allowed, for instance, race and ethnicity. We do that for US, but you can't do that in the Nordics because you're not allowed to keep that kind of track record. So we're trying to do that. And I think I totally agree with everything that you said, Anna, but when we are on the equity thing, since that is something that we have had to do for a long time, what we just decided to do, obviously, that we would have that in a global, as we're growing up and getting bigger and older, you need to have some consistency. So just do that type of things that we, by law, had to do in Sweden and just keep it for the Nordic market and not for the world. That would be strange. So that is what we have done with all those type of and comp and bend necessarily. The total comp is not a benefit, right? That is usually what is the right and what everybody expects. But that is what we'd have done with all our policies or the programs that we have. So if we think that we are ahead for some reasons in this region, then we push it globally. That goes for the flexible holidays initiative. That goes for something that we love and keep near and dear together, the parental leave, right? Did you have the same policies globally on things like parental leave? We do, but that is not totally true because, for instance, in Sweden, you have up to a year and a half, you have your 486 days, right? And then you split them between the parents. What we have done is we pushed out six plus one month to all parents, no matter if it's the same sex or a couple or an adoption or surrogacy. And as these two ladies know, but it's only two countries in the world that don't have that legislated, right? It's Papua New Guinea and it's U.S. So if you're a good, good, good employer, you would have three months. But for us, in this part of the world, it's like, how on earth are you supposed to come back after three weeks? And then three months, should you be happy by that? And then when we introduced six months plus one month oozing back, we were like, maybe that was not. But then, of course, we have to pay for all of that because it's not like set up with the government and the whole system. We thought that that was improvement and naive, good to be sometimes. I think the feedback from our people but also from the different countries where we operate is it's life-changing. Of course, if you can be home with your new, the newest member in your family together, with your partner, whatever setup you have home, the most important part of your life. Of course, good tool for attracting, even better for retention, especially if you have a lot of people in that segment being, you know, thinking about starting a family or growing a family. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Caitlin, do you have anything to add in terms of those elements of strands of diversity? And obviously, we're going through a massive upheaval, thank goodness, and change in our sector. But how's that playing out? Because obviously, Catriona, you're talking about it coming from a sort of Swedish philosophy, which is obviously world-leading. But how's it manifesting with Reddit? Definitely. So there's two things. So one, on the pay component compensation, Reddit actually believes in non-negotiation. So we have static bands and levels that actually have different milestones. And so when you are coming in as a candidate, and I actually inherited this philosophy and was, as a candidate myself, it was such an incredible difference in my experience, not having to negotiate. We focus on roles, not people, during the candidacy. And so when you come in, this is how much we are going to pay for role X. And then it is married to your tenure and then the experience with the interviewing process. And so you get what you pay, you get paid, and then that's final. And then when you come in, as we pay for performance, we have a knowledge skills and ability career ladder that you're measured against. And so it's a very predictable. And if you are having the right conversations with your manager, which hopefully you are, because we've invested in that training, it's a very, I like to think, and I like to hope in the feedback that we get, is that the Reddit employees don't think about their compensation. They're focused on the work that they need to do. It's the passing the printer test. So if by accident, finance or HR would actually print off everyone's salaries and someone else were to pick it up, there's no questions to be asked. So it reduces the noise and the drama of having to think about what is fair. And to Anna's point, making sure that we have a very published comp philosophy document. It's a part of onboarding. It lives in the wiki, et cetera. And then how do we help, so that the pay gap doesn't exist in that scenario. And then how do we think about inclusion with our benefits is another top consideration. And to your point, thank goodness the conversation has changed. Thank goodness people are being challenged on what is fair, what is equitable, and who we're focusing on retaining over the long haul in the United States. Well, not in the United States. In Silicon Valley, our average tenure is 18 months. So turnover is incredibly high. And what I like to say is I want to be your next employer as well. So how do we think about internal mobility? How are we making those evaluations? What cadence and who's involved in those conversations? So anything from investing in parents and saying, this is somewhere we'd like to invest. The small change and the small investment to make sure that people are taken care of during difficult times, whether they're inviting a new family member in, whether they're caring for an aging parent, whatever the scenario is for life, making sure that you are there to support those people regardless of the size. Three months now, six months now, in the long scheme of the relationship that you hope to have with an employee is a very small price to pay. Yeah, cool. Now I think we've only got a couple minutes left. So I'm going to have a quick question for each of you. You've all worked at extremely successful founder-led businesses. So there's a lot of founders in the audience here. What single piece of advice would you give to them in terms of how to succeed in their role as their company scale? Somebody else is going to go first on that. One single piece of advice. We're against the clock. Yeah, I mean, the word that I, you know, starting off from the first question around when should you pay attention the most? And I think we all have these examples or these viewpoints that it's always important. But I guess I'd like to say that if everything is important, nothing is important. So choose the two or three things that you can focus on to influence and manifest and evolve the culture in order to achieve your mission and stick with those, right? And that might take you a quarter or a half year or a year, but don't pretend that you can do everything. So choose the two or three things that really matter the most. Cool. Okay, short now. I know, I know. Stay passionate, curious. Oh, that was very short. Profound. I would say your job is to lead. Your job is to lead. It is very enticing to get stuck in the details. And that is actually not where you can be most helpful. Trust the people that you have hired and lead. Cool. All right, well, we're out of time. So thank you once again, Caitlyn, Katharine, and Anna. And we're gonna be carrying on this conversation in the Pink Studio now. So if you wanna join in and it's gonna be more audience Q&A, please come and join us then. But thank you. Great, thank you so much. Thank you so much.