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From FBI Dreams to Big Tech Legal: Alice Bisgrove, VP & Associate General Counsel, Procore
92 Plays1 year ago
After an unexpected detour from her initial plans to join the FBI, Alice Bisgrove built a career in tech law working for tech giants like Cisco and Procore.
In this episode, she discusses how she remained a legal generalist for over a decade at Cisco, taking on new roles and building relationships across the massive organization.
Alice describes her transition to Procore as it grew from an established startup to a public company. From her impactful career journey, we will learn lessons on collaboration, problem-solving perspectives, and continually adapting to new opportunities.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-21
Topics:
01:07 Introduction
04:36 Moving into the tech field
09:57 Sensing when an applicant is hungry to work
11:01 Staying curious as a corporate generalist at Cisco
15:03 Driving alignment after identifying a major problem
20:24 Building trust with stakeholders in your business
21:42 Finding ways to maintain customer centricity
25:46 Transitioning to Procore Technologies
27:38 Working cross-functionally
30:08 Management role and building a team
32:11 Book recommendations
33:54 Advice to younger self
Connect with us:
Alice Bisgrove - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicebisgrove
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading CLM platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues. Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
Alice Biscrove's Career Beginnings
00:00:00
Speaker
They offered me a job and I was gonna go and I was gonna work in New York as an FBI agent. And then I got the word that I had flunked the background check. What?
Spotdraft Introduction by Tyler Finn
00:00:20
Speaker
Before we get started with today's episode, I want to tell you about Spotdraft. If you spend hours every week drafting and reviewing contracts, worrying about being blindsided by renewals, or if you just want to streamline your contracting process, let's talk about an end-to-end AI-powered system that'll save you time. Spotdraft is a contract lifecycle management system that helps in every stage of contracting.
00:00:43
Speaker
From creating and managing templates and workflows, to tracking approvals, e-signing and reporting via an AI-powered repository, Spotdraft does it all. And because it should work where you work, it integrates with all the tools your team already uses. Spotdraft is the key that unlocks the potential of your legal team. Make your contracting easier today at spotdraft.com.
Legal Challenges as Opportunities
00:01:07
Speaker
Your sales leadership comes to you with a problem. Solving it will require standing up a whole new process and collaboration with the product team. It could even lead to a whole new team within the business being established. For some legal leaders, being tasked with solving this seems terrifying. Others see opportunity. I'm your host, Tyler Finn, head of community and growth at Spotdraft.
Meet Alice Biscrove
00:01:29
Speaker
And today I'm here on the abstract with Alice Biscrove, the VP and AGC for commercial legal at Procore Technologies.
00:01:37
Speaker
pretty cool company in the construction tech space. She has dealt with scenarios like the one above at companies big and small, public and private.
From Nonprofit to Tech Law
00:01:48
Speaker
I'm really excited to have her here to share some stories about how she's taken on problems outside the legal function and the opportunities that it's created for her. Alice, welcome to the abstract.
00:02:00
Speaker
Thanks, Tyler. Glad to be here. I think this is a pretty fresh topic for us to be talking about. And one of the things that I really love about your experience as well is not only have you been at Procore, which we'll talk about, but you spent 17 and a half years at Cisco, which is a huge company. A lot of our guests don't have that kind of
00:02:19
Speaker
big corporate experience. But before we get into your career and some of the challenges that you've tackled for those
Procore's Strategic Planning in Q4
00:02:28
Speaker
businesses, what's top of mind for you at Procore right now?
00:02:33
Speaker
Great question. Well, we're entering the middle of our Q4, our year end. So, tippity top of mind for me, since I lead the go-to-market team, is making sure we're in lockstep with our sellers and with our customers and so that we're able to close a solid year and meet our targets and hopefully exceed them. So yeah, that's tippity top of mind.
00:02:57
Speaker
I would say also we're in the financial planning process right now, strategic planning. And actually Procore is about to launch a new three-year strategic plan. And so it's a particularly fun time to be in the planning process because
00:03:14
Speaker
We get to be involved in the corporate strategic planning, figuring out what are the initiatives that we need to do this year to help us achieve on our strategic plan. And also as a legal department and as a team within that legal department, what are the things that we need to prioritize this year to help us succeed? So that's top of mind for me and for us.
00:03:34
Speaker
Strategic planning is a fun, sometimes tough, but I think rewarding process. I've been through that a little bit. And Q4, a busy time to do it. Okay, quick question for you. If you put yourself in the shoes of a commercial lawyer who's working with their sales counterparts, what would you tell the salespeople? How can they make your lives as commercial lawyers easier as you approach quarter end?
00:04:00
Speaker
Great question. I think alignment, communication, one of the things in our strategic team that we've been working on is we've set up weekly calls as an entire team and we bring in commercial, we bring in professional services, we bring in all the key stakeholders.
00:04:18
Speaker
and we go through all the top deals that have to close and we just do a status update. Where is it? What's the outstanding piece? What needs to happen? And so getting that alignment, making sure that everybody's on the same page and driving it so that we know who needs to do what for us to close, I would say that's the number one key.
00:04:36
Speaker
Stepping back, we'll walk through your career.
Transition from FBI to Tech Law
00:04:40
Speaker
I'd love for the audience to hear a little bit about your time at Cisco, including how you ended up there because you didn't start your career in tech. You had a bit of a career beforehand in sort of the nonprofit policy sector. Tell us how you got into tech and what the early days at Cisco were like.
00:04:59
Speaker
Yeah, so I really kind of fell into tech as you suggested. I started out, well, to be perfectly honest, I started out trying to join the FBI. I worked for a prosecutor's office. I was in law school. Yeah, I know, right?
00:05:14
Speaker
I'm totally off the beaten path there. But yeah, I worked for a prosecutor's office and I was really excited about the whole idea of criminal justice. And so I decided I wanted to join the FBI and actually got all the way through the process. They offered me a job and I was going to go and I was going to work in New York as an FBI agent. And then I got
00:05:34
Speaker
the word that I had flunked the background check. What? I mean, you seem like you're a pretty straight-laced person. What could they have possibly... I was desperate to know, but they wouldn't tell me, so... Maybe there's another Alice Biscrove out there with a criminal record who...
00:05:53
Speaker
I know, it does make me sound a lot more interesting than I actually am, but it is kind of a fun story in hindsight to tell. But I was still determined. I was like, well, I have no idea what I'm going to do now. I guess I'll go to New York anyway. So I moved out to New York and I found a job.
00:06:09
Speaker
in the nonprofit sector. And it was an education nonprofit, a national nonprofit. I took a job as the director of policy and program advocacy, which who knew what that meant, but I was interested in doing something that mattered and I was lucky enough to fall into that work. And I did it for several years and I learned a lot and I loved it, but I decided at the end of that that I wanted to move into more of a legal focused role. And so I found an opportunity
00:06:38
Speaker
to work for a tech company that was kind of a startup called Metricom. They were putting routers in place. They had this wireless router and they were putting them in place all across the country. And so it was an interesting job because it was lobbying municipalities to put those routers on utility poles, but it was also contract negotiations. So you would negotiate a contract for that with the municipality. So
00:07:04
Speaker
It was the perfect transition place into tech law because it was a combination of government relations, but
Securing a Role at Cisco
00:07:11
Speaker
also doing contract negotiation. And I loved it. It was so much fun. I mean, it was a couple of years out from the bubble bursting, so the company didn't make it. But I got the bug. I got the bug for sure. And it was, you know, the energy and the innovation, the creativity was so exciting and exhilarating. And then mostly I just loved being in
00:07:39
Speaker
after the bubble burst recovered to find a job at Cisco. And that was a journey in itself getting that job because I really, as you can see, I didn't have much experience at that time. And I managed to get a job in the commercial legal department supporting the New York area. But at first, they turned me down because I wasn't really qualified for the job. And it was really,
00:07:57
Speaker
house being a part of something like that. So I was fortunate enough to
00:08:07
Speaker
Looking back now, I had no idea how out of my depth I was, because it was supporting all the New York customers, and I just had a little bit of experience in contract negotiation. So they turned me down, and then I offered to work for free. Wow. I know, I did. I was really scrappy at that time. Like an intern, ex-turn, but with a better title. It was like, just give me a shot until you find who you're looking for, knowing that I could talk them into keeping me on.
00:08:35
Speaker
But they, you know, they just kept kept looking. Eventually I ended up interviewing with the head of sales one last time. And I remember going into that interview thinking, what in the world am I going to do to land this plane? And I walked in and he had a picture of himself running the New York City marathon on the wall. Just run it. And we spent the whole interview talking about
00:09:01
Speaker
what we learned in running the New York City Marathon. And then the next thing I knew, I got the job. So there you go. Never know what's going to help you. A personal connection. And I also like that you bet on yourself there, right? And being willing to take it on for, you know, less than probably a typical salary and without the title and that you had faith, you would ultimately convince them that you were worthy of all of that. That's amazing.
00:09:29
Speaker
I think that's also something that I think about when I'm hiring people. I think about the position that I was in at that time and how I really wasn't qualified, but I was so hungry and I knew I could do it. And it was super scrappy. And so I find myself more inclined to look for that scrappiness, even if the resume isn't just exactly right. Are they hungry? Are they motivated? Are they willing to roll up their sleeves and do whatever is needed to get it done?
00:09:56
Speaker
How do you identify that when you're interviewing? That's something that I hear from a lot of folks. And I'm always curious, how did they actually go about, you know, if you only have a few hours with the person over the course of a series of interviews, how do you identify that sort of hunger? I think you can sense it, you know, in the energy and in the enthusiasm and in the
00:10:18
Speaker
you know, the energy that they bring and the motivation they bring into the conversation, are they approaching each question as an opportunity to show you how excited and interested they are and how, how good a fit they are, but what they're going to do with each opportunity, with each question. So yeah, I think it's, I think you can really tell
00:10:39
Speaker
when a person just kind of expects a job or is feeling kind of mediocre about it and when they are just willing to do whatever it takes to get it and to do it. And they have the chops to do it. I like a person for whom it's just slightly out of reach because then they're just thrilled. They feel like they won the lottery and they're going to do whatever it takes to prove to you that they
00:11:02
Speaker
that resonates. You spent 17 and a half years at Cisco, which is a lot longer than most people spend at businesses these days, especially tech companies.
Staying a Generalist at Cisco
00:11:13
Speaker
And I think one of the things is we've gotten to know each other and we've talked that you're proud of is that you were able to remain a sort of generalist throughout that period of time. I guess a sort of two part question there. How did you do that? How did you remain a generalist in a big org, which
00:11:30
Speaker
I would expect just sort of by its nature kind of drives people towards specialization, right? And also like, how did you stay curious? How did you want to continue to come to work day in date? Maybe those two things are linked day in, day out for, you know, a little more than a decade and a half.
00:11:45
Speaker
I didn't start out intending to be a generalist. I mean, I started out being a commercial lawyer thinking, this is the best thing ever. I love this work. And it was actually my boss at the time who I was really hitting my stride. And he's like, you know, you should think about moving into a different department. I mean, into a different practice in the legal department.
00:12:07
Speaker
I thought, what are you talking about? I'm killing it here. And he said, well, you could learn more. And you also could end up feeling pigeonholed in this role forever if you're really successful at it, but you don't move around and try other things.
00:12:23
Speaker
And it really struck with me and struck a chord. And I realized, you know, he's right. I may end up back here, which I have. I have come full circle. But I knew that I had a lot more to learn. And so I started branching out. And fortunately, so I was fortunate to have a boss who was thinking about what was best for me and not necessarily what was best for him and the team.
00:12:49
Speaker
And Cisco was great about it, actually, even though in some ways it might have been in their interest to keep people in their area of specialty. They really encouraged us to move around and to learn the different sides of the business.
00:13:01
Speaker
I think they understood that it kept people fresh if they wanted that opportunity, but it also helped them gain that 360 understanding of the business. You aren't just gaining incremental knowledge. You're really understanding how it all fits together, and you're gaining empathy and perspective on the different clients and the different customer needs. They welcomed that. They even gave us the opportunity to do rotations.
00:13:24
Speaker
and just sort of dip your toe in the water, maybe spend a couple of months in a different practice area. And one of my colleagues took a rotation in the business for a couple of months and learned a ton. That's interesting. Yeah. And so maybe that- There was no kind of the structure of the sort of, of the business allowed in order to do that. That's right. They were very heavy into development.
00:13:44
Speaker
And I think that's how people end up staying so long. So that then allowed me to become a generalist. And the more that I learned, the more that I wanted to learn. And I never planned to stay as long as I did, but there was always something more to learn. And in terms of curiosity,
00:14:02
Speaker
having the opportunity to do new things allowed me to follow my curiosity. But also, I will say it was a closed door. Early on, I applied for a job to manage the commercial team at the time. And I had only ever really done that work, and I didn't get the job. And I was so bummed. I was so disappointed they didn't choose me. But in hindsight, I quickly realized that it was the best thing for me because
00:14:34
Speaker
it required me to learn more than just that. If I'd just gone straight into management, I would have only known that subject matter, really. I'd probably only had that expertise. And so moving around and having that management door closed at that time liberated me to think less about going here and learning this way horizontally. And so I wasn't as worried about going on that track as much as I was just, what do I want to learn next?
00:15:03
Speaker
We talked about a pretty interesting example. I think when we first met actually at a TechGC dinner in New York about how you took on a project where you really drove alignment across the whole business unit and all the functions within that.
Aligning Business Units at Cisco
00:15:18
Speaker
And you were the one who identified the problem and sort of raised your hand and said, this isn't really within the legal remit, but I want to take it on.
00:15:28
Speaker
Tell us, talk us through that process of identifying the problem, building trust, driving alignment. What was that issue? I will back up by saying I was really lucky at the time to be a part of a new team in the legal department, which was focused on essentially solving problems, helping the company in this transition to a software and services company for being predominantly hardware to software and services.
00:15:57
Speaker
And there were a lot of things that were in our way. That's a huge transformation for a giant company like Cisco to do. And so we had a group of lawyers that were set up to essentially help the legal department support that transition better and to tackle the things that were getting in our way.
00:16:16
Speaker
incredibly exciting remit to have as a lawyer to just sort of look for problems. And it tended to be full of people like me who had done all the different roles and had that 360 understanding of the business and could identify, oh, this is what's really getting in our way. So that context was there in terms of having the space and the remit to identify problems.
00:16:39
Speaker
So we focused on the legal problems at first, the things that were within our scope, and then we started to look into what are the bigger problems. And I don't know that I identified it so much as the problem was we had too many software meters, too many different ways to buy software. And that was because they were stood up
00:17:01
Speaker
within the context of that product that it made perfect sense at the time, there wasn't an effort at the time to harmonize those meters in a way that would drive alignment or consistency across. And so once we started selling solutions or started selling multiple types of products, security and networking or whatever,
00:17:22
Speaker
then the customer was trying to reconcile these different ways of monetizing or metering. And it was confusing and it was overly complex. And so we kind of knew that there were mushrooms in the forest, so to speak, in terms of software.
00:17:37
Speaker
software offers, but it's a huge job to try and solve for that. And I think at one point they tried to solve at an executive level, but that was from the top down versus the bottom up. And so we decided to tackle it from the bottom up and really look at all the different software meters that were out there. It was a huge project, right?
00:17:59
Speaker
jump in and try and analyze everything that there was. And one of the reasons that I tackled it was because I had supported a BU and was responsible for capturing and documenting those meters. And there were so many different ones, so many different ways of buying, even within a specific BU, because they were being responsive to the customer's needs. But again, ultimately, it just became
00:18:23
Speaker
complicated when you try to combine it with other things. So we decided to tackle it. We'd had enough success in trying to tackle other things that we thought, hey, maybe we can do this. And so we analyzed all the different software offers that were out there. We determined that there were more than 50 different ways of monetizing software, and there were more than 100 different definitions. So you might define user in different ways across different VUs, which made sense in that context.
00:18:50
Speaker
But we understood that was unwieldy for the customer. So then we came up with a plan to simplify it. We submitted that to the BU. We had to work closely with all the different product managers for the different products to make sure we got it right and that we were capturing it accurately. We then went to the head of engineering and said, hey, we have this idea. What do you think? And that was nerve wracking in itself because you never know. You're kind of calling their baby a little bit ugly. You never know how they're going to mess up.
00:19:20
Speaker
But he was really receptive and frankly grateful. He's like, you know what?
00:19:26
Speaker
We've been so busy working on products. We didn't have the time to address this. This has been a huge issue. Thank you for tackling it for us. We also partnered with, there was a group that was responsible for software offers. And so they could have been really annoyed with us for taking this on, but they weren't, you know, they embraced us and partnered with us. And part of that was for us to be open-handed with it and be willing to partner, be willing to share the credit.
00:19:54
Speaker
and understanding that we need all of these stakeholders with us in the boat in order to be successful. So, you know, I'm simplifying what was actually a lot more work than that. But it took an enormous amount of graciousness and collaboration and partnership and coordination to make that happen. I will say having my general counsel or CLO at the time go in front of us and say, this is important work. This is an important problem they want to solve and sort of blaze the trail for us helped a lot as well.
00:20:23
Speaker
I hear a couple of themes in there. One of them is really around building those sort of trusted relationships with other stakeholders in the business. Tell us a little bit more about how you go about doing that. Is it coffee chats with folks? How do you go about building those relationships so that way you can actually execute on something that's deeply cross-functional like this?
00:20:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think it is understanding who your key allies are and building relationships on a regular basis. I will say right now at Procore, I have
00:20:59
Speaker
monthly one-on-ones with a lot of key stakeholders just to keep that relationship going. I just had dinner last night with one of them and we laughed about how there's so much opportunity for our relationship to come under stress and that we both are committed to investing and keeping that relationship intact. So I think it's being very intentional about who you want to have that relationship with and
00:21:27
Speaker
cultivating it all along the way so that when you need each other and when issues come up, I mean, first of all, you're talking about stuff. So stuff bubbles up as you're having those ones. But when the rubber hits the road and things get tense, you have each other's back. Yeah.
00:21:41
Speaker
I think a second sort of theme in what you were talking about in that example is thinking from the perspective of the customer, right? Not necessarily what's easiest for the business or what's historically been done for the business, but what's best for the customer and really being customer centric. That is not always easy to do though when you're in sort of a, well, legal isn't always internal facing, but when maybe your cast is being slightly more internal facing.
00:22:09
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about how you build that sort of perspective around the customer or how you try to maintain a customer centricity in the work that you do. A couple of things come to mind there. I didn't start out working for a firm as a parent, right? And so I've looked back and there are a lot of things that I could have learned and wish that I'd learned in working for a firm. But I can also see their advantages to being formed as a lawyer in-house. Yeah.
00:22:39
Speaker
And I think that concept of being formed as a lawyer in-house kind of trains you to think about legal issues within the context of the company's goals and their customer, right? So that's just in your DNA. It's thinking about everything within that context of the company's mission and vision and their goals.
00:23:03
Speaker
and the customer that they're trying to reach. So that's first where I would start is it really helps a lot to spend time in-house and really forming your legal lens in light of the company's purpose. And then second, I would say, I mean, starting out as a commercial lawyer, spending time, you know, the cool thing about being a lawyer is that you are focused on your client. Your client's interests become your interests.
00:23:32
Speaker
right? Because you're so zealously trying to represent them. So if your client is a salesperson, then you're all in and trying to understand their customer and their customers needs. And you're also spending time sitting across the table from them. And if you are negotiating with enterprise and strategic customers, then you are just trying to get a transaction closed. You're trying to build a long term relationship, which means you have to understand what they want and what they need and what their pain points are. So I would say there's nothing like
00:24:01
Speaker
spending your day trying to understand and build relationships with customers, right? To help you understand and see the world through their lens. And then I think you bring that to your other roles, to product, to think about what does the customer need? What are their pain points with respect to the product? And then it just becomes a lens, a set of glasses that you just see everything through is how does the customer think about it? You don't have to even consciously do that because you're always, you always have them in the back of your mind.
00:24:29
Speaker
One last question on the Cisco example. You built the solution and rolled it out across the different BU's. Did you end up owning that? Did legal own that in perpetuity? Or did it get handed off to pricing or some new ops function? What ended up happening with that solution? That's a great question.
00:24:55
Speaker
we did end up handing it off because we really weren't the rightful owner.
Handing Off Projects to Business Units
00:25:00
Speaker
And that has been a model that I've replicated throughout my career in terms of not assuming that because I tackle a problem, that means I'm the rightful owner of it. And you can hand it off at many different stages. But in that specific example, once we had
00:25:21
Speaker
to really identify the problem and then it became time to implement and manage the care and feeding of that system and that process, then it made perfect sense for us to hand it off to the organization that should really... And in terms of who it was, it was that group that I mentioned, the offer management organization. They were responsible for software offers, so they took it, ran with it.
00:25:45
Speaker
As you transitioned to Procore after a great run at Cisco, you were moving to, I think what some of us in this startup space would call like a decently well established business, but relative to Cisco, a lot, a lot smaller. Tell us about that transition and how you knew it was the
Transition to Procore
00:26:02
Speaker
right time. And were you scared? Was, were you super excited? What was that like?
00:26:07
Speaker
Yes. It didn't feel so established to me, although it was. I can see, of course, why you would say that at the time. It was just coming from this nearly 80,000 people, very well established, lots and lots of best practices in place. And I think I knew it wasn't that I had lost interest. I loved having the opportunity to learn everything.
00:26:33
Speaker
that I had learned at Cisco, but there wasn't the next thing that piqued my curiosity there. And so I knew, I was hungry to take all this great stuff that I'd learned and go use it somewhere at a company that was trying to become established and be able to help them get from point A to point B. So I was very clear on that.
00:26:59
Speaker
next step for me in that hunger. And Procore happened to be just about to go public, which is, of course, kind of exciting time to join a company, but it was more than just the public transition. It was an inflection point where the company was ready to
00:27:20
Speaker
you know, be accountable and to put things in place that were more mature practices and ways of operating because they were going to be accountable in a completely different way. And so that was the very exciting time to join a company and to be part of that process. That was why.
00:27:38
Speaker
We've talked a bit about cross-functional sort of work and projects. Since you've been at Procore, are there any cross-functional projects that you've or accomplishments that you've had that you're particularly proud of that you'd want to talk about and share with our audience?
Cross-Functional Projects at Procore
00:27:56
Speaker
I'll say other than the one that I just mentioned at Cisco, that was really an exciting problem to solve. Since I've been at Procore, there's just
00:28:06
Speaker
Because, as I mentioned, we're in this inflection point, there's such an openness to working cross-functionally. And because of the size of it, even though it's a large company by most measures, in comparison to a really large company, it's manageable in terms of being able to reach out to all the different functions to get a thing done. And there's this hunger and this openness and this desire to partner together to get it right.
00:28:31
Speaker
So one example is there's a particular vertical that a couple of years ago was stood up as part of expanding the business and it had a lot of special requirements and we didn't necessarily know all those requirements at the time that we stood them up.
00:28:49
Speaker
at the time we stood it up. And so we've been trying to figure out as a company, as a people who support that vertical, what are the issues? What are the problems? What are the ways that we've been floundering a bit in trying to be successful?
00:29:03
Speaker
And so we partnered together across deal desk, across legal, across ProServe, across sales. All of us came together and really analyzed the problem of our success and what it was going to take to be more successful. And we sounded the alarm and shown a spotlight and did all the things. And we're still in process. It's one of the strategic initiatives that we have as a company. Now, we're really coming together. We brought in some outside help.
00:29:29
Speaker
We're still in process, but we've accomplished an enormous amount in identifying what we need to do differently and how we need to collaborate better as cross-functional teams to stand up the business the way it needs to.
00:29:45
Speaker
to run. So I know I'm speaking in generalities because I don't want to disclose too much. But that's been an example of coming together all of us in the middle of a lot of friction and a lot of flailing and deciding to link arms, identify the problem together and come up with a solution that we all own.
00:30:08
Speaker
One last question maybe for you on your time at Procore and then I've got a couple of fun ones.
Building a Team at Procore
00:30:14
Speaker
You're now in a management role as well. You actually came back sort of full circle to that after talking earlier about wanting to take that on and run commercial legal or run a commercial legal team at Cisco. Tell us what that transition has been like and how you've spun up on your management skill set as you've built a team out here at Procore.
00:30:36
Speaker
I that the opportunity at Pro Corps was very unique in the sense that I was invited to come and stand up a practice area and build it kind of from the ground up and to build a team. And so I've had the.
00:30:52
Speaker
a unique opportunity to just build a team from scratch and just hire people. And I've been lucky to have a boss who comes alongside and offers help when I ask for it and appropriate times when I don't ask for it. So I'm coaching and guidance. But mostly he lets me make my own mistakes.
00:31:18
Speaker
And so I would say I've learned so much. I've had a little bit of management experience along the way at Cisco, but mostly I learned a tremendous amount from the people who led me and something from each one of them. And I bring that in to this role. And like I said, I'm learning from my mistakes.
00:31:37
Speaker
but it's been an exhilarating ride. I have the opportunity to build into people as I've been built into, but also enlist them in this great adventure of a high growth company that's just gone public and doing exciting great things. So it helps a lot to have a great vision.
00:31:58
Speaker
and some enormous energy around a cool product that our customers want. But I would say being given the chance to figure it out as I go with support along the way is the best thing I could ask for. Yeah.
00:32:11
Speaker
a couple of, uh, a fun questions for you as we, as we start
Book Recommendation: The Candy House
00:32:15
Speaker
to wrap up. One is I'm an avid reader. I travel a lot, so I like to read on airplanes. Uh, and I'm always asking guests for a book recommendation. It could be something you read this summer, or if you haven't had time this fall or, or just a book that, that you would recommend that our listeners pick up for the holidays.
00:32:34
Speaker
So one of my favorite books that I read recently is The Candy House. So I don't know if, yeah, if you're familiar. I've not heard of that. Yeah. Tell us more about it. Really, really good. It's Jennifer Egan, I think. I don't know how to pronounce her last name, but at any rate, she wrote like a visit from the goon squad, I think was the
00:32:52
Speaker
one of her other books that's well known. But at any rate, it has a tech premise, but it's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle as a story because every chapter is told from a new perspective. I mean, literally every single chapter in the book is told from a new perspective. And so the plot is unfolding and those characters are kind of peripherally connected to the other one. So it's a real mind teaser because by the end of the book, you're just like, oh my gosh.
00:33:22
Speaker
Can I keep it all together? But it's an holding something that you paid attention to maybe several chapters back. So it's a challenge. It makes me feel really not as sharp as I used to be. But it's also really fun because it's like seeing that these pieces of the jigsaw puzzle come together at the end. So yeah, I loved it.
00:33:43
Speaker
It sounds like something better right on an 8 a.m. Flight than an 8 p.m. Flight is definitely before. Yeah, definitely before your gin and tonic, I would say. One final question for you that I like to ask folks, if you look back on on your career and think about yourself as a very young lawyer in the sort of early days, what's a thing that you wish that you'd known then that you know
Career Advice: Embrace the Journey
00:34:11
Speaker
now?
00:34:11
Speaker
I think I would just say relax and just let it unfold. You've got this. I think that's something that, whether you're a man or a woman or whether you're a lawyer or not,
00:34:27
Speaker
I think we fret so much about how it's all going to work out. And I wish that I had known that the good decisions, the bad decisions, the steps forward, the steps sideways and backwards, they all are part of the journey and an important part of it. I wish I'd given myself more freedom to just relax into the journey, but here I am.
00:34:51
Speaker
What a great way to end this episode. Uh, Alice, thank you so much for joining us today on the abstract. Thanks, Tyler. It's been a fun, been a lot of fun. Um, and to our listeners, thanks so much for listening and we hope to see you next time.
00:35:14
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in today. Don't forget to subscribe so you can get notified as soon as we post a new episode. And if you liked this one, I'd really love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a rating or a comment. If you'd like to reach out to me or our guest, our LinkedIn profiles are in the description. See you all next week.