The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - Sarah Jones Simmer: The Foundation of Trust

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

Sarah Jones Simmer calls on her years of experience as an advisor, investor, and top-level executive to offer a series of crucial career tips, and discuss how work helped rehabilitate her following a frightening cancer diagnosis. Simmer goes deep on scaling a business, making the right hire for your company, female-led companies, fundraising, setting boundaries, and how she learned to re-focus on the big deals in life. Simmer is the CEO of Found, a company focused on making evidence-based, sustainable weight care for all. She joined the company in September 2021 after serving as the Chief Strategy Officer at Bumble, Inc., the parent company of the wildly popular relationship app. During her time with Bumble she was responsible for core strategy, international growth, marketing initiatives, business operations, and expanding Bumble’s rapidly growing team. She also led the investment strategy for the Bumble Fund, the company’s early-stage investing vehicle. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I had this moment in our treatment journey where the doctor was worried about metastasis and she said, look, worst case, I can get you five years. And there's something very special about that five-year time frame. You know, if you had 30 days, you would change everything. And on the other end of the spectrum, all of us live right now, like we've got infinity in front of us. Like, what if you have five years? What would you do differently? you do a lot more changing on the margin.

And the reality is we should all be thinking that way every day. You know, what are the things that I would drop if I actually only had five years? What would I be so disappointed that I didn't do if I only had five years? Welcome to the Knowledge Project podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. The goal of this show is to master the best what other people have already figured out so you can unlock your potential. To that end, I sit down with people at the top of their game to uncover what they've learned along the way. Every episode is packed with timeless ideas and insights that you can use in life and business. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like special member-only episodes, before anyone else, transcripts, and other member-only content, you can join right now at FS.blog slash membership. Check out the show notes to this podcast for a link. Today, I'm speaking with Sarah Jones Simmer. Sarah's the CEO at Found, which has a mission to make evidence-based, sustainable, weight care accessible for all. She's the former

CEO of Bumble, where she was responsible for core strategy, international growth, marketing initiatives and business operations as well as the expansion of Bumble's rapidly growing team. Sarah also led the investment strategy for the Bumble fund, which was Bumble's early stage investing vehicle launched in 2018 that was focused on the next generation of woman-led businesses. My friend Kat Cole, who is one of our most popular episodes ever, recommended I speak with Sarah, and after you listen to this episode, you'll know exactly why. Sarah has a remarkable story. We talk about scaling a business, hiring others, her journey with cancer, woman-led companies, fundraising, boundary setting, and so much more. It's time to listen

and learn. What are you obsessed with right now? Strength training. I've gotten really into lifting heavy weights. There's something that's so cathartic about just like picking up a huge kettlebell and swinging it many times. And I feel like I, you know, I've had various chapters with fitness in my life and mostly lean towards endurance stuff, like long distance swimming, running. I did do an Iron Man at one point, but had never really gotten into strength training until for health reasons, I was told, you know, my bones are at risk. So I need to pound them, basically and make them stronger and started working with someone

who's really helped me with that and then love it. I do it twice a week. It's like the highlight of my week. So I would say I'm obsessed with training. That's awesome. You joined Bumble in 2017, and your job was to scale the company and take over strategy. What did you do specifically to scale the company, and what do you know about scaling that most people miss? So, yeah, I joined Bumble in 2017.

It was about 30 people in a two-bedroom apartment at that point. and there was more creative energy and passion and just clarity of purpose than I think I'd ever experienced at a business in my life. And this was an interesting learning for me because I think I've seen other instances where, you know, the business model was there, the financial models work, there's this beautiful detailed Excel model that like the infrastructure is there and the heart isn't. And Mumba was the exact inverse, right? Like there was this incredible heart.

There was such clarity. There was really clear competitive positioning. There was product market fit. Women who were trying the product were falling in love with it because it met their needs in a way that nothing else in the market had. And so that made my job easy around scale, to be honest, because when you have that beating heart of something that's so clear, then it's just about setting up the infrastructure for scale, but doing it in a way that doesn't crush the magic.

I have this visual in my mind, especially as I think about my early days there, where it's my job to build scaffolding, right, to set people up for success. And so they knew where the walls could go and grow and they understood their role in building it. But I had to do it in a really systematic way so that the weight of process didn't crush this like absolute heart and energy and passion and joy that the business was bringing into the world. And so some of it was very methodical and tactical. I spent a lot of time listening, understanding the business, building real trust with the people who had gotten the business that far. And I think that's a lesson that I've taken to, you know, every project, every role since then is like build the foundation of trust. Otherwise, you're not, you can't go back and re-engineer that, right? You get one shot at the beginning of really getting people to trust you and how you're going to layer in your vision to the growth of the company.

So I spent a lot of time listening and building relationships and building trust. And then kind of thought systematically about the pieces of the business that would unlock the most horsepower, the most quickly. And so something like analytics, right, coming in and helping to build an analytics function that could surface real insights and just help every other part of the business get smarter about the work that they were doing. And so I spent a lot of time in those early days, like recruiting and trying to build. that muscle because it was going to be this enormous amount of leverage and unlock for the rest of the business. And I think thinking about an analytics function as a true growth multiplier, you know, this isn't like bean counters and just throwing out numbers, but how do they partner with the people who are controlling budget who are controlling different activities? How do we give everybody a layer of

insight and made some really wonderful hires that I think helped us to develop the art and science of the business and create that mirror that everybody else could use for their growth and then moved on to some things like legal finance, HR, like building that kind of operational backbone that would enable scale elsewhere. You know, the people are ultimately the heart of any business and they're the greatest asset that you have. And so investing heavily in not just HR from a cover your processes, get the benefits in 401K working, but like how do you build a performance review cycle? How do you actually think about culture and communication? And in a team that's growing so fast, how are we equipping emerging managers? And I don't think we got everything right,

but I think we had so much intention around that and understood how that was again going to create that scaffolding that allowed us to build on top of it. And then, of course, spent a ton of time on the commercial engine of the business, that kind of intersection of marketing and product, this, like, how do we really dig in to knowing the unit economics, how do we understand what those look like in a scaled market versus something earlier stage? There was a time when I was so obsessively discussing this with Witt that she bought me a birthday cake that said LTV to KAC ratio. And I, you know, I still have a picture of it on my phone.

And I think, one, it just speaks to like the kind of human she was and these like amazing acts of generosity that she would do. But that was the kind of fun we were having, right? Like we were digging in to unit economics and understanding them on a market by market basis, and we were having a ton of fun doing it. And I think that's the really, that's the energy of high growth that's intoxicating. It's like you're building something that has such purpose that's changing people's lives. You're figuring out the infrastructure as you go, but you really feel like you're part of something bigger than yourself. And I think that's the, that's the greatest joy that I find in scale is when you believe so deeply in the problem

you're trying to solve and the outcomes you can drive for people as a result. At Bumble, that was the relationships we were bringing into people's lives. In my new role, it's helping people get on a healthier path with their physical health. But when you believe deeply enough in that, I think that like the scale is an outgrowth of that. You have to build the infrastructure, but it's really about letting the heart come through. Talk to me more about that infrastructure. sure. You mentioned leverage in the sense of analytics being a key to rapidly scaling. Are there any other leverage points that you can think of that come to mind where you're like, that really made a big bang for buck even if you didn't expect it to. Interesting. You know, I think part of that

is actually in the leaders that you hire. You know, there's been conversation about this concept of T-shaped leaders because every hire you make, especially in the early days, is going to, shaped a trajectory of the business, right? So how do you find people who are T-shaped in the sense that they can cover a broad range of things, but they can go really deep on one or two things and own that, but have the chance to kind of grow and flex and, again, give you leverage? So one example I'll think of is we had a finance leader that I brought on. And obviously the immediate need was like, we've got to get the books closed on time. We've got to be driving insights from our accounting purposes. But he was such a sharp forward thinker as well that he could become

a partner to performance marketing and help them really think about their strategy differently. He could flex across other areas of the business. And I can think of dozens of leaders like that that I had the privilege to work with at Bumble. So I think there's obviously like the tactical functions of the business where you can get leverage, but I think a big piece of it is finding the people who are going to give you that because at those early stages, it's not about stay in your lane. It's like own accountability for your lane, but how do you flex and help the business grow? and probably the single biggest thing that you can do to get leverage is hire well.

Talk to me a little bit more about people because that's really interesting, right? In a rapidly scaling businesses and I've been involved in a few of them and on the periphery with friends who've sort of scaled from zero to like 200 employees in a couple years, there's a lot of people that don't grow with the job. And how did you handle that? The job grows because as you get bigger and bigger and bigger, you have to, you have to, you have to scale individually, right? So how did you handle people who couldn't grow with the job?

Yeah, and maybe the nuance I would say there is that people who didn't grow at the same pace as the job. That's a great way to frame it, yeah. And I think that what we also have to give ourselves permission for is like maybe the goal shouldn't be to grow at the pace of the business. Maybe it should be to write the chapter that you need to and enable you to pass the baton to the right person who's going to write the next. chapter. And look, I think this is a lesson I learned for myself as well. Like once Bumble

went public, I really had this urge to go build again. And it took a minute for me to give myself permission to sort of sign off and admit that my sweet spot is the early stuff. Like, I wanted to go build infrastructure again, the conversation that we were just having. And I think there's such a push in the business world to be able to like endlessly scale as the business. scales, and we've got to give ourselves permission to be like, where do I find joy? What is my sweet spot? Where am I the biggest force multiplier on the business? And I'm going to go find a role that matches to that. So I think even the people that we felt like maybe weren't growing at the same speed of the business, like their imprint on the business was indelible. And it wouldn't have

been the same business otherwise. This is a really funny reference. But I remember reading an interview with Brad Pitt at one point. And someone asked him about his quote. a quote, failed marriage to Jennifer Aniston, and he said it wasn't a failed marriage. It was a great marriage while it lasted, and then it was over. And then obviously he has written some subsequent chapters, but point being, like, doesn't have to last forever for it to be great for both you as the employee and for the business. And I think getting to a place where as business leaders and as employees, we accept that careers are going to come in chapters, gives both sides a lot more freedom to have then the harder conversations when it's necessary. There shouldn't be this pressure

to stay in the same business or same role for 20 years or even five, right? If it's through a high growth period. And I think that is a big lesson that I learned both as an individual and as a manager. I think that's a great perspective on that. And you mentioned the IPO. Well, going through the IPO, you were also going through a pretty big personal issue. Are you comfortable talking about that? Yeah, yeah, I am. I would say I used to not be. And then I think what's been eye-opening for me is so many people go through a version of a health challenge and are trying to think about how to navigate their career while they go through it. And when I did finally start sharing my story, I was touched by how many people reached out and were experiencing something

similar. And I think there's so much solidarity in that shared experience. So in May of 2020, I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. I didn't have a family history. I had no reason to suspect that I would have it. And so it was very blindsiding. And this was shortly after Bumble had been acquired by Blackstone. I was loving and thriving, working with the private equity team, restructuring the business, working through the 100-day plan.

It was terrifying. And Whitney was one of the first people that I told. And she was an unbelievable support through that process. But one of the things I felt like I realized pretty quickly is that I didn't have the same degree of emotional bandwidth as I might have before. I can specifically remember getting a biopsy and like awaiting the results and then going through my inbox on my phone. And like I couldn't even process some of the things that were coming up and like this person's title and like when are these performance reviews and whatnot. Like I just didn't have the brain space. I needed to focus my emotional bandwidth on myself, my family.

And so I had a conversation with Witten, and we constructed this narrower, deeper role as chief strategy officer that would enable me to go from my team of like 150 to 4 or 5. And it would take on transformative strategic projects across the business, and the first one would be the IPO, which may sound counterintuitive to want to take on something like that during a cancer journey. But, I mean, first of all, I felt like I had to work. I did not want to be a full-time patient. I love work.

I get so much joy from it. If that was also taken away from me, in addition to what surgery was going to take away, what chemo was going to take away, I did not want to lose my ability to lean in intellectually and build something that we were continued to be so proud of at Bumble. So I knew I wanted to do that. And strangely, with enough planning in the IPO process, like we could make it work. I made it work around chemo sessions and surgeries, and I was so lucky to have this incredible team.

mostly that by women across city, Golden Sacks, Blackstone, even our internal team that was supportive of things like, you know, putting my major surgeries on the calendar and working deadlines around that. And so it was really empowering to not be relegated to patient status and to be able to lean into that process. And then by the way, when I did get to a point where, because radiation was daily and I just needed more time,

I felt truly empowered to take a leave. And I know that not everyone gets to be in that situation. And I certainly do wish that level of agency for more folks facing something like this. But I think the chance to really lean into something that meant so much to me professionally while I was struggling with something in terms of illness, it just felt really powerful. I think I needed that. And there's even another layer to this, which is that during this process, you got a brain aneurysm. Yes. I never tell this part of the story because I feel like it sounds like so crazy. But in a strange way, cancer may have saved my life. So I, as a result of how advanced the cancer was when they found it, they did a bunch of additional scans to check my bones, lungs, liver, the places that this typically metastasizes. And the kind of cancer I have often metastasizes to the brain. So they checked my brain and came back and said, well, we've got good news and bad news. Good news.

is there's no tumor. The bad news is you have an unruptured aneurysm that's effectively a ticking time bomb. And on the one hand, it's actually great that we know know about that. The likelihood that would have ruptured is fairly high. And so I've subsequently had it stented. But part of the reason that I've had nine surgeries on a cancer journey is that two of them were related to my brain and making sure that we could address the aneurysm. That's a crazy story. I'm so glad you're okay through all this. I'm curious. Like, I have two, like, I have a lot of empathy for, for how that would have felt to get this news and go through that process and work with these people. And then my mind just jumps to, like, how did it change you? How did it change you

professionally? How did it change you personally? What do you do differently now as a result of this? How do you live life differently? Yeah, I think the quick answer to your first question is, like I do feel like I got an up close and personal view of the healthcare system, the good, bad, and otherwise. But I'm incredibly grateful to the team of providers that I had the privilege of working with here in Austin at MD Anderson, you know, UT Neurosciences. And so just unbelievably grateful for that. It does change you. I hate that it takes something like this to give us that level of perspective, but that genuinely is the silver lining for me. I just think there's a level of gratitude that I have for like the the simple things and an understanding and clarity

of purpose you know on the one hand it's freeing because like my daughter and I talk a little bit about big deals and little deals you know we'll have like little deals like being late for school right which like before might have given me so much anxiety and and now I'm like well the big deal was surviving a year and a half of cancer treatment it a lot of these other things it helps us to put them into perspective. But I think for me, it was super clarifying professionally as well. As I said before, I love work. I really do think part of what brings me joy and energy in my existence is the outpouring of things that I can build into the teams that I get to be a part of and the amazing products that we make that change the world. And I think some people will go

through a health experience like this. And for them, like that may change the way they think about work and they may deprioritize it. For me, it made me be crystal clear about what it was in work that I truly cherished and enjoyed. And in my case, that meant the answer was going back and building again. And going back to that like infrastructure development phase, really getting to build and scale a team, wanting to make that bet on myself as CEO. I had this moment in our treatment journey where the doctor was worried about metastasis and she said, look, worst case, I can get you five years. And there's something very special about that five-year time frame.

You know, if you had 30 days, you would change everything. And on the other end of the spectrum, all of us live right now. Like, we've got infinity in front of us. But what if you have five years? What would you do differently? You do a lot more changing on the margin. And the reality is we should all be thinking that way every day. You know, what are the things that I would drop if I actually only had five years?

what would I be so disappointed that I didn't do if I only had five years? And the good news in my case is, you know, we all think I have more than five years now. I'm doing well with treatment. There's amazing drugs for the kind of cancer I have and I'm doing well with them. So I don't have to have that five-year time frame in a literal sense, but I do try to think about it in a figurative sense. And the other related point I would make there is like that it gives me permission, I think, to prioritize things that I might not have before. So one of the rhythms that I've tried to develop for myself, especially because I now work in a remote first context, is like, how do I give myself permission to lean into work when I want to? And then permission to lean out when I also

want to. And I do this exercise in the evenings where I try to ask myself, what am I blocking? What am I advancing? How did I make people feel? And when I can answer those questions, just even knowing answers will give me permission to then move into a different phase of my day, right? And go spend time with my kids or exercise or landscape, whatever the case may be. But that clarity of sort of giving myself permission and guardrails to prioritize all of the things that bring me joy. And like, I by no means have it all about. No one does. That's a lie. But it gives me permission to reflect. And I think I do just spend much more time on reflection and thinking about, how I feel, how I made other people feel, and ensuring that that's a priority for me.

I think that boundary setting is really hard in an online world because you're not physically leaving your space anymore, right? Like you're in the same space. And so one thing that I've seen effective is sort of like just walking around the block and going back to your house too, like to signal the beginning in the end of the day. I want to come back to something that you said earlier about it became really visible for you. And I don't want to sort of like monopolies. this part of the conversation, but I had a friend who had a heart surgery about five years ago. And when I went to see the doctor, and I was talking to the doctor and the doctor, you know, all these behavioral sort of changes have to be made, right? Like diet, exercise, and health need

to become a priority. And I was just talking to him and I said, well, what percentage of people actually changed their behavior after this sort of like near, near-death experience. And what he told me, I'll never forget it. What he said, like, he'd been doing this for like 40 years. And he said, it used to be almost everybody. And he's like, now it's much lower. And I said, well, how is that? And he's like, well, now I don't have to break ribs to do heart surgery. You know, we have this little thing. You're in and out. You don't feel, it's not visible and real to you in the way that it used to be where you're lying in bed recovering from the heart surgery and you have all this time to sort of think about it. And so he's like, it used to

be like, I forget the stats he said and I'm going to butcher it, but it used to be like it was like 90% of people change their behavior. And he's like now I'd guess, you know, like 40 to 60%, which to me is a dramatically like lower number. Yeah. That's fascinating. And you're right. On the one hand, gosh, we've got to celebrate the advancements in modern medicine that make this possible and hopefully that's creating more access to surgery, earlier intervention. And I think on the other, behavior change is hard. We know this from the work that I do in my day job as well, which is around weight and driving healthier long-term outcomes, you know, things like changing your diet, things like changing your movement routine. It's hard. There's ways that we can reinforce

behavior change. This is where technology can be leveraged to amazing effect, right? There's a lot of maybe negative behaviors that tech has introduced things that distract us. But there's other ways that technology can be a driver towards great behavior. You know, streaks, meaning you do something day in and day out, right? Like, streaks mean one thing on something like Snapchat, but streaks when it comes to something like remembering to take a pill every day and remembering to move and remembering to your point to get up from your seat and walk around the block, these can be great things that tech, I think, can help us reinforce.

course. But behavior change is hard. And that's where I think finding a cohort, finding other people who are going to hold you accountable or who are doing it alongside you. One of the gifts I had during my cancer journey was connecting with other women who'd been through this who like me were really still chasing their dreams professionally, who had small children at home. The ability to share an experience with someone matters so much. And I think that's also part of what I've tried to put in place for the behavior changes that I need to reinforce. So like coming back to that conversation about strength training, I'm at a super high risk for osteoporosis now. That's why I lift. And I knew that doing it with my partner, for example, would hold me more accountable. And so he

and I do it together twice a week. And we've so much fun doing it. But you, you almost have to like hack your own behavior changes and figure out what it is that's going to make it possible for you. And give yourself permission to do that. I take two hours out of my workday to lift weights so that I don't have osteoporosis. And you know what? It makes me a sharper thinker. Every time I jump to a call after that, I'm super sweaty, but I'm much sharper. And I've then had the chance to like pull back from my inbox, pull back from the Zoom screen and get perspective again, even if in just some small way. And I think we've got to like give ourselves permission to do those kinds of things and prioritize that behavior change that really is going to drive towards healthier outcomes.

I think that's a misunderstood point about work, right? We often think about the hours and not the outcomes and you can be a lot more effective with those sort of like two hours during the day or even if you take a nap at your desk or you do something, you for a walk and we consider that that's not work, but it really leverages the time that you do spend working. And it's a really interesting and entrepreneurs tend to think very differently about this than sort of people who work in large corporations because I think entrepreneurs sort of see that it's about the outcome whereas people who work in the corporation just get conditioned to

it's a you have to be here or work this many hours and it's not about output per se let's let's switch gears a little bit and talk about what you're doing now and I know you guys just raised a series B so I'm interested in some of the reflections that you have you or lessons learned that you had in doing that yeah so the company I'm with now is called found, which takes its name from the idea of it's not about what you've lost. It's about what you've found. So yes, we are helping people with weight care and weight loss, but it's really about driving them towards the healthier outcomes, the joy that they want to find in their body. We get the most amazing stories from people who can now run a 5K or keep up with their

kids on the playground or go for a walk around the block with a colleague and not be out of breath. It's life-changing stuff. It really does improve the quality of life for them. And so we're building a platform that brings together coaching one-on-one, as well as a community and a mobile app. And the big unlock and the differentiator from other things in market is it brings medication to the table. We have a clinician that engages with each of our members. And if indicated, that person can prescribe FDA-approved medication. And the reality is that for many people who struggle with weight, the challenge is that it's so much more multifactorial than the weight loss industry would have you believe, right? There's this culture around calories in calories out

or eat less, exercise more. And if you don't have the willpower to do that, then maybe you don't deserve a body you love. And candidly, that's just wrong. The science shows that that's wrong. There are things like biology that have a significant effect on that. It's your hormones. It's your genes. It's your lived experiences. It's many social determinants of health. There is no way that we can actually bend the obesity curve in this country by only focusing on Keller's in and Keller's out. And so what we're trying to do is take this platform approach to solving this really thorny problem, which I would argue is the biggest problem facing public health today. I started to dig into the ecosystem. There's so much funding. There's so many businesses,

so much of the narrative is focused downstream on diabetes, heart disease, blood pressure, cancer, and the root causes many of these things tie back to weight. And so how are we equipping Americans with better tools to take care of their weight. And how do we do it in the context of self-acceptance and empowerment and body positivity? We're not a culture of shame found. We're really focused on helping people and equipping them with the tools to drive towards the things that are going to give them the quality of life that they want. And I'm just so proud to be a part of that. And I think we each have an experience with weight or someone we love who's had challenges with weight and their self-image or their reflections on themselves and their self-worth has been

dictated by their size. And we want to be a tool that helps to really shift that narrative. And I think what's been exciting is that's resonating with investors. I think, as you said, we did raise this series B. We were meaningfully oversubscribed. We weren't even planning to raise, but I think investors understood the size of this market. This is a challenging problem. 70% of Americans are overweight or obese. And by the way, the average American gained 30 pounds during the pandemic. So there's an urgency to this. And think about it.

It's for all those multifactorial reasons we just talked about. We were stressed. We were tired. We were sitting too much. We were eating too much. We were drinking too much. It's multifactorial. And the pandemic just like heaped on top of that.

So I think these investors like believed and understood the town. They see that we had clear product market fit and what we were off. we're doing something differentiated by bringing this toolkit of medication to the table, but making sure that it is centered alongside lifestyle change. These things don't work one without the other. And we've built a platform approach to bringing all of these resources to bear. And then I think we've assembled an amazing and inspiring team. And I'm so proud of the colleagues that I had the privilege of being able to join. And I think folks were excited to back that. So yeah, we just recently closed our series B and announced that. And we have really, really big ambitions for

2022 as a result. And what lessons did you learn in sort of that series B process? Oh gosh. I mean, fundraising is always interesting and eye-opening. It was candidly a little bit of a worry for me early on of, you know, I have actually tried to raise funds before while pregnant, and that was challenging. And so I'm taking some of those learnings and thinking, gosh, now how are people going to react and I'm trying to raise money and they know that I've publicly been on this health journey? You know, what kind of questions am I going to get? Are they going to worry that I might die before we spend all of the money and give them their return? And I would actually say that I was pleasantly surprised by just how much investors bought in to what

we were building, the problem we were trying to solve my ability to help solve it because of the health challenges that I've faced. It gives me a deeper understanding of the problem. So I I didn't feel like that held me back, and I realized what a privilege that is, especially as a woman. Like, it is so discouraging to me that there are still so little capital that flows to women CEOs and women founders. And, you know, I've tried to do my part as an individual on that front. We did so much up on both to try to invest in women leaders, but we all really need to continue to stay focused on that and on the calibration that's necessary there. And I just hope that I can use this experience and prove to our investors and build a really high growth, amazing company that continues to like bust those stereotypes and open doors for

other women. Well, let's talk a little bit about women-led companies. What stands out to you about working for women versus working for men? Or working with is probably a better term than working for. Sure. Yeah, working with. And it's funny, I actually always really reinforce that. myself, folks will say, like, I work for you. I'm like, we work together. You work with me.

I think it's all about working with great leaders, whether they're men or women, regardless of gender, right? I think there are some really amazing things about working with women, though, that I have been able to cherish out Bumble, now it found, and at other places in my career. I think there's often a bias towards collaboration and having voices be heard, and that really mattered to me. And I think it mattered to a lot of the women and men around me in these conversations. I think there was also a bias towards listening and information gathering. And there, again, not to lean into gendered stereotypes, but I think there are wonderful qualities around the way that women operate that can be really valuable to business.

I think that's why the research on board diversity and executive team diversity bears out that businesses generate higher returns when they have more diverse voices at the table. You know, it's not about women versus men. It's about how do we bring the best of everyone's lived experience together to drive the best outcomes for this business because it enhances our perspectives. We actually have a stated value at found of build a bigger table. And that's what this is getting at. It's like instead of saying there's only one seat at the table for so-and-so or one for the other, let's just build a bigger table. And how do we do that in our, in the way that we've built the platform, right? It's bringing the clinician to the

table. It's bringing the stress expert to the table. It's bringing the sleep expert to the table in addition to design and exercise. But in the way that we run our business internally, it's about diverse perspectives and diversity through every lens through those lived experiences, race, ethnicity, gender, orientation, all of these things, the more that we can bring a diverse set of perspectives to the table, the better we can understand the problem we're trying to solve. I think you really hit on it with diverse perspectives. I mean, we get so caught up in gender race or all these other things. But what we're really looking for is we all have blind spots.

And the diverse perspectives illuminate some of our blind spots with when other people have different experiences or different scenarios, because often we make decisions based on anecdotes or our personal experience. And so getting that other experience is really key. Talk about hiring people. You've hired, worked with, evaluated people to join companies for scaling. what do you look for? What lessons have you learned? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think first and foremost, it's commitment to the mission. And I've had the privilege of working

at purpose-built mission-driven companies. But, you know, if all of the hard skills are there, but someone doesn't actually believe in what you're trying to do, that's a deal breaker, right? There needs to be this belief in what you're trying to build. And I don't think that becomes an excuse for things like overwork or underpay, I think it becomes a unifying factor that helps people remember what their North Star is. So I do look for that, first and foremost, look for a lot of curiosity. One of the things that we would often ask in Bumble interviews is for feedback on the product. And we were expecting that people had engaged with the product in some way, shape, or form. And luckily, Bumble had, you know, obviously it's a dating platform,

but also has friend-finding tools, it has business networking tools, there's something for everyone there. And I think it's important that people had enough intellectual curiosity that they wanted to play with it, that they had ideas for improvement, et cetera. I interviewed a woman the other day for a rollout found, and she came with a bulleted list of everything that she felt like we needed to change in the onboarding experience. And it was amazing, right?

I just loved the enthusiasm that she had, And it wasn't from a place of like, you're getting this, this, this, this, this, this wrong. It was like, here are the things. This is what I would do in my first week. Like, here's the things that I want to help unlock for the business. I love that level of intellectual curiosity. That's a bold strategy showing up to an interview with that, eh? She sort of waited until it was, she waited until it was an appropriate moment in the conversation.

It wasn't sort of like, hey, can I buy you a latte and here's my list. But it came up really organically. and she had really detailed thoughts about it. And I also appreciated that she had spent so much time in the onboarding flow. She had actually responded to one of the emails that you get from our team. It's like, hey, I'm here to answer any questions.

And she did. She asked a bunch of questions. And she asked the person to get on the phone. And I think that comes back to this idea of commitment to the mission. It's a problem. She cares about solving. And it resonates deeply with her. And obviously, there's a bunch of kind of technical

and skill assessment and stuff that we will always need to go through. But I think looking for that passion and looking for leaders, as I said before, with a lot of versatility, especially in the early days. If there is an instinct towards stay in my lane, you know, that's great at a certain stage of company. That's not always the most effective when you're in a really high growth phase. I'll tell a story, and then I should ask her permission if I can tell it. But I'm very close with my sister.

I have two sisters and a brother. But the one that's right under me, we have had similar career paths. I think we're both very ambitious, but we have different instincts about the phase of growth that works best for us. And, you know, she's had this amazing career. She started in Merrill Lynch,

and then she went to Ralph Lauren working in corporate finance, and she went to ABMB for a little while, and then she went to a startup. And I remember her calling me a couple times and saying, you know, there's just, there's all these things that I have to do, and they're asking me to do this, and it's not even in my job description. And I looked at her and was like, you have a job description? Like, I don't think I've ever had a job description. And, and now she's like a rock star at Nike. And like, she's back in this environment where she's really thriving and has had an unbelievable amount of promotions very, very quickly. And that's where she thrives. Like she wants that structure and that understanding. I love ambiguity. I love shaping things and doing a lot for, the first time and kind of figuring it out as we go. And we can both have these really energizing career paths, but we know what our sweet spots are. And I think that takes a level of

reflection and self-awareness. And what I love is finding leaders, especially in those early stages that are similarly curious, that thrive in ambiguity, they're excited to build the plane while we're flying. I recognize that's not for everyone. And I think there's certain ways that I've developed over time to just kind of test for some of those things, even in an interview process. Wait, wait, what are those things? How do you, how do you test for this? I mean, some of it is like, how do they deal with the ambiguity of the situation? Like, how do they react if there's a super long line or if they couldn't find the place or if they're running late? Like, it's just little cues like that that I think give you a sense of this person and how they

operate. There's another one. This is not an intentional interview question necessarily, but another thing that's very important to me is kindness and kindness over a niceness. And one of the things that the easiest example that I can give is that a kind person will tell you you have spinach in your teeth and a nice person won't because it's uncomfortable, right? But the kind person is going to set you up for a much better rest of your day because you're not running around with spinach in your teeth. And the moment I met, the woman who is my current COO at Found, she was in the business before I was. And I swear I didn't do this on purpose. But the very first meeting, I had lipstick on my teeth. And she told me right away. And I was like, this is it. Like,

I know I want to work with this woman because I want us to be in a place where we sharpen each other and want each other to be our best. And that tiny thing was just such a good example of like setting me up well for the rest of the meeting. And maybe there was this like momentary discomfort, but not really, right? Like it was a simple easy mistake. I wiped it off. We both had a better day as a result of it. But I think these examples of like how you live out your values and your day to day and the little things that you do as a result, like I noticed those as someone who's doing hiring and you're assessing fit with folks. And I think you should tune in to cues like that.

So much emphasis, obviously and rightly so, is on skill fit. But being clear about what your culture is and what your values are and how people show up and live those values, I think gives you the rubric that you need to understand that people are values and missions fit. And that's really important. I love this whole kindness versus niceness approach. Are there any other examples that come to mind when you think of that where you're like, I feel like the spinach and the lipstick.

one or the easy, like, tactical examples, I think the way that it plays out in the workforce is, especially in a relationship where potentially you disagree with your manager about something, often the nice thing to do is be like, okay, sure, good idea, that sounds good. But the kind thing to do would be to push them on their thinking and to feel empowered enough to come forward and share how that idea could be sharpened. I think it's also in the leader in that situation to create enough psychological safety that people are not afraid to tell you have spinach in your teeth or not afraid to tell you that your idea is not strong enough or could be sharpened in some way. And so I think just creating the dynamic where kindness can show through because it's

mutual is really important. When we talk about creating psychological safety, what are the key variables that come to your mind. I think if people are always worried about their job security or saying the right thing or feeling like they're questioning their worth in a conversation or in a meeting or in a role, you're not going to get the best work out of them. And each of our jobs as leaders, right, is to create the conditions where people can do the best work of their career. And so how do you make sure that they are standing on solid ground so that they're expending their intellectual energy on doing the best work of their career as opposed to expanding that same mental energy on trying to tell you what you want to hear or worrying about if someone also

jockeying for their job or going around them. And so I think this idea of like how do I give you solid ground to stand on is something that I do try to think about as a leader and that I coach and other leaders that I get to work with. But giving people that sense of stability. and some of that is being reliable as a leader. And again, creating that foundation. Some of it comes back to trust that we were talking about before,

knowing someone as a human, being clear that you care about them as a human, being kind, and then again, giving them a firm foundation to stand on. To me, those are the elements that create enough psychological safety that can empower honesty. And I think it takes a lot of intention to get there. I have found doing it remotely is hard. If you'd ask me pre-pandemic if I would want to operate in a remote first context, I probably would have said no.

And now there are reasons where I think it's absolutely the right thing for our business. We can find talent anywhere. We can find the work-life integration that works best for our team and give people more flexibility to wait train in the middle of the day or what have you. But you have to demonstrate even more intention. around building trust. And that may mean getting together in person with some frequency. I think it does mean going out of your way to find other opportunities for building trust,

like Zoom calls or talks on the phone while you're both walking three miles or some version of like those conversations that used to happen on the margin, right? In the kitchen or waiting in line for the restroom, that's where a lot of trust is built because they can authentically understand you as a human. And so finding ways to attempt to engineer that and still be intentional and authentic about it. But I think you do, it doesn't happen opportunistically. It has to happen with intention.

I've noticed a difference between sort of establishing trust with somebody you've never met before online versus continuing trust, which is somebody you already have an existing relationship with. And it seems a lot easier to continue than establish. There's something about this three-dimensional presence. And these conversations that happen on the margin that really add to our level of comfort with somebody else in terms of vulnerability, in terms of safety. Oh, sorry, I was just going to say, you know, I think that's right. And I think that's where some periodic in-person engagement is necessary. I do also think that's where as a leader demonstrating vulnerability and authenticity and sharing something about who you are outside of your work.

work life or something that matters to you or like sometimes I'll share an embarrassing story or something that I feel like I've learned the hard way as a way to kind of engender that vulnerability right like I'm going to share something with you that feels awkward to me and I hope that gives you permission to know that like I'm a real human we're all figuring this out as we go and that you can be equally vulnerable to me because I think I do think vulnerability helps engender trust and I think we just have to find ways of engineering that as as I said, in the absence of the stuff that would happen so organically if you were in the same place.

One of the other differences working online that I think is now you have multiple conversations going on. There's the text message conversation. There's the Zoom chat conversation. There's the actual conversation. There's the background emailer. You know, the distracted conversation. What are the rules and norms and what have you noticed around this that's sort of like really

effective for getting the most out of people? I would not say we've perfected this, but we are trying. I think being clear about what happens on what channels, right? So Slack is our primary form of communication. We try to reserve email for things that require a lot of context or involve external parties. But it shouldn't be like the ongoing day-to-day engine that Slack is the water cooler in our case. both the water cooler and I think like general workflow management

text for urgent stuff phone calls more than you think I feel like we've gotten away from picking up the phone and talking to someone and I don't know about you but I've been in so many situations where you're like you know what the shortcut to this is I'm just going to call them like

something is being lost in translation and I think that comes back to the trust piece again like voice on voice does build trust more than slack to slack does so trying to be intentional about that. The other thing that I have found personally is that I do not do my best thinking in front of a screen where it is like, this ping and this ping and like all of these different

things popping up and distracting you, I do my best thinking walking and walking even more so than like sitting in a different room because I think you can eliminate some of those distractions. I remember there was a phase in my treatment where I spent a little bit. time in Houston. And I, you know, typically I really like to run, but I wasn't feeling strong enough to run at that point. So I went on very, very, very long walks, like four or five hours a day sometimes. This was during a period of medical leave. And I could physically feel my thoughts getting longer. I just lack the ability to really describe this adequately. But I could

like think about the same thing for much longer. I think we've gotten to a place where I've heard anecdotes of like attention spans are three seconds long now like we switch so quickly and when we sit in front of our computers there's so many things that are just fighting for our attention you're never going to do your best thinking when you're just switching from one thing to the next there is a time in place for that kind of whack-a-mole thing there really is I'm not saying we can eliminate it but I got so much juice from these longer thoughts and I just felt like I was doing some of the deepest introspection that I had done, but I was also able to just think much more creatively. And now I try to engineer those moments for myself. There are days. We have a practice around

flow Wednesdays where we try to hold no meetings, or at least no recurring meetings. There can be brainstorms. There can be off-site. I walk every Wednesday for a while. And I just try to use that time ideally in nature, not with cars whizzing by, with a cup of coffee in my hand, to try to get to that long thinking again. And these just like, as I said, I can't come up with the best word for it, but I just visualize these like longer ellipses as opposed to this like pointillism dot that happens to us all day.

And I think that each of us as we figure out what it means to operate in a remote first context as we figure out how to lead in a world that's fighting for our attention, we have to find the space to actually do our best, most effective thinking. Because you're not brought on as a leader that does manage, manage, manage,

trying to manage, you have to lead. You have to think. You have to have ideas for where the future is going to go. And you've got to give yourself real space to do that. And if you don't carve that out with intention, it's like impossible to get it. I think you hit on something key there. Your first thoughts are rarely your best thoughts. And so the ability to stick with a problem for longer than other people, which in this case might be, you know, four seconds or four minutes offers a unique advantage. perspective, right? And I often think about this is, you know, before I'll make a big decision. I usually go for a walk and it's like 20 to 30 minutes. And what I try to do is, A, I try to focus my mind just on that decision. And then I try to walk around the problem in a three-dimensional way. And I use

that as sort of an example to visualize looking at the problem through different perspectives. I'm curious to how you make decisions and what you've learned over the years about decision making that you could pass on to others. I tend towards slower decision making with conviction. And look, I think there are great leaders who have bias for action and they can make decisions really quickly. I have found that I really need to listen and gather an adequate amount of information before I can come to a decision.

And one of the things that I noticed from a more tactical perspective is if I throw out an opinion too soon. Even if I'm still feeling my way around the problem, but I'd say, like, have we thought about it, XYZ? I find that people start gravitating towards your opinion and telling you more what they think you want to hear as opposed to like their actual best conviction, their best understanding of the problem. And so I think it's my job to help frame the problem we're trying to solve. But for me at least, I then sit back and really try to listen. And and gather information until I have at least an 80% understanding of the problem. What has been interesting to me in some ways in this new adventure is like there are stuff

that's just like so far outside of my understanding, like a lot of these medications that are being developed, right? And I think as a CEO, and I feel grateful that I have a coach who helps me think through this, it's not my job to know everything about everything. It's my job to hire amazing people who can round that out. And then I need to be the one that can ask the right questions so that I can help propel that decision making. But it's more my job to ask those questions as opposed to have all the answers. And so I do tend to go through this process of sitting and listening and information gathering. And for me, at least, I have found that I'm more effective if I can make a decision with conviction and then move on and not come back and revisit it. Now, I've worked with

some great leaders that make decisions early and are really comfortable, like, changing their mind. And I think that works for them. But for me, what I have found is this a little bit slower bias for listening first is how I get comfortable. Talk me through a little bit about that the information gathering process. How do you know when to stop? How do you know when you've got enough information or the utility of the information you're collecting from this point on is really low. I don't know that I always get that right, if I'm honest. You know, I started my career to hedge fund and I think like in that role, like, you just, you do such a level of analysis that there's sometimes when I have that muscle memory of like, let's go a layer deeper, let's go a layer deeper,

let's go a layer deeper. But I don't have the time to do that, to be honest. If I did that for every decision, like the business would never get to move forward. And so I think it depends on the decision. I think this is also a place we're bringing on great leaders and being able to trust that they've done the exhaustive work and that they can give you their highlights and their best recommendations and then the right amount of data points to support that. And you trust that there's like an iceberg worth of data underneath it. You know, I think that's how I get comfortable moving a little more quickly. I think the times that I take a bit longer when there's a decision where two people I trust have really conflicting points of view on something. And I am probably still trying

to build the muscle around helping them come to agreement in the most effective way so that it really shouldn't feel like an either or situation, but a best of. And candidly, that's a muscle that I'm still building. I am new in the CEO seat. I've been doing this job for three and a half months now. And that is a difference that I have noticed versus sitting in the COO or chief strategy officer seat previously is that like I do have that ultimate accountability for decision making. But I hate to sound like a broken record. But I do think it comes back to like finding great people, building trust with them and then doing the best you can with the information that you have at the time, you know, and coming to the right level of intellectual rigor,

which I think does vary problem to problem. But having those people you trust get you there is a key part of agility and being able to move fast enough to actually. grow on scale of business. You mentioned that you had a coach. There seems to be a stigma around coaches or sort of like getting external help in areas where we need it both personally and professionally. I'm curious as to sort of like, what made you decide to get a coach? And what do you get out of that?

How does it work? I mean, I think first and foremost, like, I think I run that stigma, right? Like dating online was stigmatized 10 years ago. things about weight care or stigmatized like I'm sitting here telling you about stage three cancer and so like professional professional sports players have coaches there's doctors who have coaches like there's no it makes elite people better yeah I don't think there's any problem with this no I agree but there is a perception I don't think there should be stigma right and I think I try to be candid where I can because I do want to see more women especially

but more people in general, like, step into their potential as leaders. I love working with the coach. I feel like none of us has all the answers. The coach doesn't have all the answers either, by the way. They're there to provide frameworks and to help you arrive at decisions and to think about things through a different perspective. And so I feel really lucky to have found someone that I, and I've actually had two coaches now,

and they've both been amazing for different chapters of my professional career. but it's also a safe space to go sometimes you know there's right there there's there's there's there's sort of a rule in operating right like you can only vent upwards like if you vent down you can build a lack of trust even if you sometimes vent sideways like you don't you know when you have peers across the business I guess you should be able to build relationships but really you should be venting up you should talk to your manager about things my manager is the board right now. And I have a great relationship with each of my board members, but I also sometimes just need a safe space to think out loud about something. And I think that a coach is a wonderful

resource for that. And in the same way that I talked about strength training and how my coach there pushes me to lift heavier things than I would probably ever push myself to and comes at you with the best amount of tough love, right? It's tough love that comes from a place of believing you can do it. my professional coach is the same way. He doesn't let me off the hook when I feel like I don't know how to do something or think about it, but he comes back to me with a different framework of thinking about it. And he's giving me tools that I wouldn't have had otherwise. And so, sure, could I have developed those tools through experience?

Probably. Can I get there faster if he helps me think this through and understand it? Definitely. So why wouldn't I want every advantage I can have as a leader to really operate up my best? I like that a lot. One of the things that you said that stuck out to me was a safe space to think out loud. And I'm just sort of thinking that in the context of the internet where we don't have a safe space to think out loud anymore. We can't play with ideas. How do you feel about that? It's an interesting statement. Maybe some of this even comes back actually to the conversation around attention span and how much is fighting for our attention. I think sometimes as a result of that, even things online like tend to a place of vitriol or like, you know, can get ugly quickly. You know, Whitney talked a lot about that in her origin story of Bumble and how the experience that she lived with on things that were said to her online, like really shaped her vision for what Bumble could be. And so I think maybe that's a part of it. It's like

we, the internet allows us to feel like we have a mask on and people won't know our true selves. We may say things that we wouldn't say in person to folks. I think that there, These are all somewhat interrelated ideas. And that's where I also think there's no replacement for like true quality relationships and finding those safe spaces in all of your lives, right? Like investing in friendships, investing in sibling relationships.

Our relationships are what make us human and they give our life so much quality. And I hope that we can all find safe spaces somewhere in our lives to like really say things out loud reflect on who we are, reflect on what we're challenged by be able to do it in a way that doesn't create fear or mistrust. I think it comes back to this idea of just being really authentic and intentional around it. This has been a great conversation. I've started sort of ending the interview with the same question now, which is, and I think you'll have a unique and interesting

perspective on this, which is what is success for you? There was probably a time in my life when I would have been like two and a half kids and a mortgage and whatever. For me, success. now is finding joy and knowing love, truly, as Pollyanna as that may sound, like, how do I find joy in my life? How do I find joy in the set of activities that I do in the time that I spend with my kids? Like, joy is the word that is emblazoned on my brain. And how do I know love? And I think knowing love is different than finding love and giving love and taking love. It's like, if you really know and understand love, it means that it's coming at you from a whole direction, right you're receiving it you're giving it you deeply understand it that's honestly all that matters to me

right now and i try to reflect at the end of every day probably in part because i had the zanurism i had cancer like you never know when you're going to go right which is kind of a weird place to be so a lot of times at the end of the day i'll reflect and be like so it was a good day like if i go tonight what happens and and i can genuinely say that like that practice of reflecting on that and of like identifying those moments during the day when I found joy and when I I did know love. Like it's an unbelievable way to live. And it makes me far less focused on things like external success or the number of zeros in my bank account or the titles or whatever. Like I care about how I make people feel. I care about the things that bring me joy in life.

And if I can focus on those, then hopefully that means I'm doing things right. That's a beautiful answer, and your journey is incredible and inspiring. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. Thank you. I really had so much fun. I appreciate you taking the time. The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Farnham Street. I'd love to get your advice on how to make this the most valuable podcast you listen to. email me at shane at fs.blog. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog slash podcast.

To get a transcript of this episode, go to fs.blog slash tribe or check out the show notes. Can you do me a small favor? Go online right now and share this episode with one friend who you think would love it. Thanks for listening and learning with us. Till next time. Thank you.