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00:00:00
00:00:01
Beth Birnbaum
70 Plays8 months ago
We talk about going from investment banking to two sided internet marketplaces to becoming a professional board member.
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Transcript
Introduction and Career Beginnings
00:00:01
joewaltman
All right, today we've got Beth Birnbaum. Beth, thank you for joining.
00:00:05
Beth
Joe, thanks so much for having me. It has been such a pleasure to listen to everybody's stories and I'm excited to be with you today.
00:00:13
joewaltman
ah First question, same as always, refresh your memory, what were you doing before in CIAD and what have you been up to for the last 20 years?
00:00:20
Beth
I had a really weird ah okay introduction to NCI compared to most people, I think. I started out after college on a more normal
From Hollywood to INSEAD
00:00:31
Beth
track. I did investment banking. And then I got to hop the track completely, wound up working in Hollywood doing script development, and then wanted to move back to the East Coast while my grandmother was still alive. And I wound up at an internet travel startup that was incubated out of BCG. And I did a couple of different roles there. And then September 11th hit. And I thought, perhaps it is not a great time to be at an internet travel startup.
00:01:00
Beth
And there was a guy in my office who had gone to INSEAD, and he was by far the coolest guy in the office. And so I thought, well, this, you know, I was a little bit ah dubious about the experience of going to school in the US for a few reasons, and INSEAD really kind of addressed all of those concerns. And um and so there I was. I i wound up at INSEAD. And really, ah
00:01:32
Beth
enjoyed that experience, but also I think enjoyed that it was so different than what other people were doing in the US.
00:01:39
joewaltman
Yeah. Yeah. Amen. Amen. All right. Then what have you been doing for the last 20 years?
Expedia and Industry Challenges
00:01:45
Beth
Again, I think ah kind of took a different tack than a lot of other people. I wound up doing product management and my first role after in Seattle at Expedia in Seattle at HQ. um At that time, product was not that developed as a discipline and you could really kind of jump into it either from the technical side or from the business side if you had some sense of strategy in business and some thoughts on you know how to kind of distill all that into granular technical requirements. And I think that I had been at a travel startup helped, but it was the industry was still really rebounding after September 11th. And it was a pretty weird
00:02:29
Beth
Time um and so i was kinda happy to find a job and pretty determined to stick with it but i think it was really looking back there were a lot of challenges i think i had four managers in my first six months. And it it was pretty depressing, honestly, um because i I felt a little bit lost there. And I think I got a bit of a break because I think I was walking around the office and I must have been looking kind of glum because the CEO sent me an email and he said, I saw you looking kind of down. um Is everything okay?
00:03:04
Beth
and i I wrote him back and I said, you know could I maybe switch to this other group? I've gotten kind of dumped into this particular group where I don't really feel like it's the right place for me for various reasons. And and that really helped, um kind of winding up in ah in a better situation. And I stuck it out and eventually stayed eight years at Expedia, ah moving through different product and commercial roles. and got to go ah lead um kind of a Six Sigma effort at a travel agency in China for one point um kind of how that we had a majority interest in, spent about seven months living in Beijing, got to do really all kinds of different cool things and and really enjoyed it. but
00:03:57
Beth
um At some point around then, this must have been like 2011 or so, I'd gotten married to somebody who actually went to INSEAD but was not our year, was five years before who I met at Summer Ball Story for another day. um and And he had moved to Chicago, so we were commuting back and forth and we had gotten married and we were trying to start a family.
00:04:12
joewaltman
Oh yeah, that must be, that that sounds spicy.
00:04:24
Beth
And ah for a while, I was just kind of like, well, i we can make this work in different cities. But at at some point, I think when I was pregnant, I thought about it a little harder. And I thought maybe that wasn't the best idea. So I started looking for,
00:04:37
joewaltman
Wait, you had, you had gotten married and, you know, and pregnant while you were still living in different cities.
00:04:43
Beth
yep. Yeah,
00:04:44
joewaltman
Interesting.
Grubhub and Going Public
00:04:45
joewaltman
Wow.
00:04:45
Beth
maybe not the best plan in retrospect.
00:04:48
Beth
ah but um But it all turned out OK. I wound up getting connected to a couple of different early stage companies in Chicago and wound up choosing to work at Grubhub. And this was really in the early days, very early days of online food delivery. There were maybe 100 people there. um They had just taken a big investment from a venture capital firm benchmark. And the remit was Go National and
00:05:19
Beth
kind of suck less in terms of the product. Honestly, we you know we were very, very scrappy at that point, and we did all kinds of things. We didn't have an Android app you know experience. I don't think we had an Android app. I don't think we had really mobile web. We stored your credit card places we shouldn't store, you know like all kinds of things that we had to go in and fix.
00:05:38
joewaltman
Sure.
00:05:41
Beth
um
00:05:41
joewaltman
And, and partially thanks to Groupon, Chicago was a little bit of like a, like a micro like startup hotspot.
00:05:42
Beth
and
00:05:48
joewaltman
Right.
00:05:50
Beth
ah Yeah, I mean, those were there were two companies that started with G, and I met with both of them.
00:05:54
joewaltman
Yeah.
00:05:55
Beth
And ultimately, grubhub was really the the place for me, I decided it was, um there were some real parallels to what I've been doing at Expedia, it was also a two sided marketplace, but one where the supply was much more fragmented. And, um you know, like independent restaurants actually saw a lot of value in a marketing partner. that could help bring them incremental business. um And I had been working for a bunch of years with airlines and at Expedia and and commercial relationships there and and the product and technology around that.
00:06:31
Beth
And it was super fun and interesting, but it was like going to war every day at that time um because the airlines were determined to kill us.
00:06:35
joewaltman
Yeah.
00:06:38
Beth
This is before they had figured out a lot of things. And now the airlines are running their businesses really effectively, but at the time, they kind of had their the online travel agencies really in the crosshairs. um So yeah, so I went up at Grubhub leading product there, which was basically just me at the start. I was leading myself and then got to build out a team. um And that was a pretty wild ride. We merged with our biggest rival um in the US called Seamless.
00:07:11
Beth
we expanded across the country. We took the company public. um And you know lots and lots of highs and also some real, you know challenging times I was thinking about it earlier and I mentioned I was pregnant when I joined I think I had my my children were both premature and I think my first son was born like three and a half months after starting and I think I didn't really understand the law and I thought I wasn't entitled to like a maternity leave, you know with ah the FMLA and
00:07:27
joewaltman
Bye.
00:07:43
Beth
And I'm thinking like probably most of the people in Europe like have nine months or more maternity leave, and I think I had maybe six weeks. ah Basically, like I healed from my C-section. He came home from the hospital. I think like the day he came home, I went back to work, um which is not not recommended. um And then you know when I came back to work, I think we um You know, the nobody had had a baby. And so I remember sitting down with the woman who led HR and I was like, okay, we got to figure this out. um And ah gosh, you know, we didn't have any of the maternity stuff set up. So she said, well, if you need to pump up, you can use a conference room and you'll have priority on the conference room. And sometimes I would just have to go kick people out of the conference room and
00:08:36
Beth
They were like, okay Oh, okay, you know, we get it. We'll go find another place.
00:08:41
joewaltman
Yeah.
00:08:42
Beth
um But eventually, I think I was there a little more than five years. So we're right around five years. And um my husband kind of wrapped up his work in Chicago and um And I felt like, you know, it was a reasonable good time for me to go as well. And so we decided to move back to Seattle and back to the West Coast, um where we had been before, before moving to Chicago.
Return to Seattle and Startup Journey
00:09:08
Beth
and um I didn't really know what to do when I got to back to Seattle.
00:09:14
Beth
I you know i didn't didn't really want to slot into kind of a role.
00:09:15
joewaltman
When would this have been?
00:09:19
Beth
This was 2016, and you know I talked to Amazon and i i know various companies, and and there were none of the roles really felt right.
00:09:21
joewaltman
OK.
00:09:30
Beth
you know When you're kind of at a medium-sized company and doing really big things, to go slot in at a giant company, it it doesn't It's hard to find the right role that that feels really interesting in stimulating. um I wound up reconnecting with a friend of mine from high school who was doing and a startup building games for sorry building um developer tools for ah developers who were making online games. ah kind of a suite of microservices. And I had been an angel investor in this company, and I you know came back and I said, Hey, James, you know do you need any any help? Is there anything I can do to help you be successful? And he basically, I just wound up
00:10:16
Beth
taking over all the COO functions there and doing everything that was different than what I had been doing in product roles. I was doing like all of the other functions, um which was really fun and a great learning experience for me, even though I made a million mistakes. ah And we grew very quickly. We um kind of had, I think, 80 million users, monthly use active users on the platform. And then we were growing 10% month on month. we weren't monetizing that you know so successfully.
00:10:48
Beth
But we were you know had really kind of great hooks into the developer community.
00:10:52
joewaltman
Mm hmm.
00:10:53
Beth
And ultimately, Microsoft started circling around um because they had just decided to make gaming. They were de-emphasizing Windows and making gaming their big fifth pillar. And They had a big hole in their strategy, which basically ah could be filled by us. And so we wound up selling the company to Microsoft. And for a while, I worked at Microsoft. But again, you know they they were like, um huh, what do we do with you? Do you want to be a sales leader at Azure? And I you know i i was doing sales because i you know it needed to be done, not because I have any business doing sales.
00:11:33
Beth
so um
00:11:33
joewaltman
Mmhmm.
00:11:34
Beth
So that that was a lot of fun, but I knew I wasn't going to be there in the long term. And around that time, my husband um now, despite having wanted to move back to Seattle, was commuting to San Francisco. so And we had two kids, and he was four days a week in San Francisco. ah So I said, OK, what can I do where I either never, ever travel? So you know someone's home with the kids. Or I know my travel really far in advance, so I can negotiate with him and tell him that he has to be home these days. because someone's got to be home. And coincidentally, I got a ping from a recruiter about an independent board role at a public company and kind of through luck and being in the right place at the right time managed to ah get that role and realized that board service could be a really nice ah
00:12:32
Beth
thing
Board Service and Strategic Insights
00:12:33
Beth
on a number of levels. I think from a personality perspective, I've always really been the kind of person who says, like well, what's happening in the meetings I'm not in? you know What do those people over there do that I'm not doing? And I was always really curious about the stuff that I wasn't doing and what I found with
00:12:50
joewaltman
Would nosy be the, be be the right word for that?
00:12:53
Beth
It's certainly nosy.
00:12:55
joewaltman
Okay.
00:12:55
Beth
And I found with board service that you know you there's really you you get to peek under all the hoods and see what's going on and really understand what makes a company tick in a way that you don't get to do in an operating role um unless you're the CEO. And so I just found it kind of endlessly fascinating and also from a lifestyle perspective, it was a way to solve my problem of, you know, not not having a travel clash with my husband who was always traveling.
00:13:32
Beth
um And then not too long and this was, you know, sorry.
00:13:33
joewaltman
yeah I've got've got a question about about you know board service. I've never really been in a real board meeting. The crappy companies I founded don't count. ah How much work ah you know per week, per month, per quarter are you actually doing as as a board member? and don't Don't take that question as as a ah ah judgmental one. on your ah
00:13:55
Beth
No, and I think it really depends. um you know i I think with one board, um you know if you're doing an operating role, you can fit it in pretty well because you basically have intense bursts where you know I would say for two weeks a quarter, you have a pretty intense burst. And then other than that, it can be fairly manageable. Or you can lean in more if you want to because there's often opportunities and needs for people to lean in more. take on a leadership role, chair a committee, that kind of thing as well.
00:14:26
joewaltman
And that two weeks is sort of around the quarterly board meeting, that that that that burst.
00:14:29
Beth
Yeah, exactly.
00:14:31
joewaltman
Okay. okay
00:14:31
Beth
So you have preparation for the meeting, you have committee meetings, you have preparation for the committee meetings, travel and the actual meetings.
00:14:38
joewaltman
Okay.
00:14:40
Beth
And that's, some and and, and so I wound up,
00:14:45
joewaltman
Do you mind me asking, which company is this?
00:14:46
Beth
um
00:14:47
joewaltman
Would would would we know of them?
00:14:48
Beth
ah So, yeah, um I don't know. um This is ah the first company I joined um is called Wiley, and it's a um publisher of scientific and academic journals.
00:15:00
joewaltman
Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
00:15:02
Beth
And so you might have had textbooks in college that said John Wiley and Sons as well, because they have an academic publishing division as well, and trade publishing.
00:15:02
joewaltman
Yeah.
00:15:06
joewaltman
Yep.
00:15:09
joewaltman
Yep. Hmm.
00:15:10
Beth
So it's it's a publisher, but um the bulk of the business. the The biggest part of the business is is in in them and journals.
00:15:15
joewaltman
Hmm.
00:15:20
Beth
And and i I just really have loved that work. And so um so I said, OK, maybe I'll see if I can do more of this. And over time, I wound up joining a second public company board, ah a venture back board, a PE back board, and a kind of bootstrapped board. And so, um and and that's now I'm four more, five total, and I'm kind of part folioed over five boards.
00:15:44
joewaltman
What's a three more?
00:15:48
joewaltman
Four more, all right.
00:15:52
Beth
And it's a little different, I think, than in Europe, like being a board member in the US is is kind of a different gig. um And I think it's, um you know, there are there are, I think there are differences in terms of the time commitment and expectations and the governance and, you know, kind of whether you get compensated in equity or not, like there are a lot of differences. But but I think in the US, it's a, you know, it's a different kind of career than what I'd been doing in an operating role. But it's it's a viable career and one that I find really interesting. And I also appreciate the flexibility because you schedule things out usually pretty far in advance. And
00:16:38
Beth
you can manage your time so that, especially because I have a lot of things on the East Coast, you can manage the time so that you're done in time to pick your kids up from school or you know whatever is important to you.
00:16:51
joewaltman
Well, so you're you're just, you're sort of a professional board member now.
00:16:55
Beth
ah Apparently, ah not it's not something that I expected to be doing, but it it kind of happened.
00:16:57
joewaltman
Mm-hmm.
00:17:06
joewaltman
Interesting. Interesting. and And presumably you're being caught compensated for this. ah Yeah, that's, that's super interesting. Did did you, do you mind me asking, you know, you've been, maybe not deliberately, but, but, but not not sharing the names. are Would we know of any of these other companies that you're on the board with?
00:17:22
Beth
Let's see, there's ah an auto insurer called Root, and that would you would only know if you lived in the US. It's basically using telematics and your driving behaviors and a lot of other data that you opt into sharing to help price and underwrite insurance ah doing a more effective job than, you know, kind of the legacy insurers that are pricing and underwriting. um And then there's a company that was a sort of splinter from Wikipedia ah called FAN, now called FANM, it used to be called Wikia.
00:17:58
Beth
And it's ah kind of the pop culture um entertainment gaming ah version of Wikipedia and that's a media company that is advertisers supported. ah There's a waste management company out of New York City. and That's a really fascinating industry waste management.
00:18:16
joewaltman
Yeah.
00:18:17
Beth
I had no idea. and then a company out of Chicago that is doing tech and enable tech- enabled legal services for law firms that specialize in mass torts, which are things like when the firefighter foam turns out to cause cancer.
00:18:28
joewaltman
Huh.
00:18:35
Beth
Again, this is very US specific where we have light regulation and then ah heavy lawsuit action um when things go wrong.
00:18:36
joewaltman
Mhm. Mhm.
00:18:44
Beth
And so there's There's actually, it's kind of fascinating. There's a huge amount of hedge fund investment that goes into basically betting on the outcome of these mass torts.
00:18:57
joewaltman
oh Interesting. and and how how did you How did you find all these rules? is is this sort of like Are you now in the the the the rarefied air of board members and they're they're they're always like trying to find all the board members? or how How do these come to be?
00:19:11
Beth
It's a really interesting question. um I think that there are the profile of board members has really diversified. I used to be, I think, you know, sitting or recently retired CEO. I may be a CFO or public accountant because you know someone has to lead audit committee, that kind of thing. And I think it's really diversified into people with backgrounds that are relevant for the company. And so my background, I think of myself as what I've heard of as like a T-shaped individual. I am deep in product.
00:19:45
Beth
But I'm also you know broad and strategic enough that I can have a conversation about things that have nothing to do with my area of expertise. And so ah you're seeing more profiles like that on boards now, people who've led marketing, people who've led product, people who have led people functions, and obviously also people with deep financial expertise and general management expertise.
00:20:12
joewaltman
Interesting.
00:20:16
joewaltman
Can you talk a little bit about um what the relationship is like between the board member and and somebody? but I assume you're primarily dealing with executives, maybe maybe you know ah lower down the total poll within these companies. how is it how you know collaborative, confrontational, is it?
00:20:36
Beth
ah Yeah, um I think you are, I mean, you're right that you spend most of your time with senior management because those are the people who are in the meeting with you at the time and you spend the bulk of your time in meeting. But you you do have, and and you should have opportunities for engagement with folks that are a little bit broader than that group. And so ah typically you'll have a maybe a happy hour or you'll sometimes, I just recently went to a sales conference for one of the companies that I work with and you know spent three days in Arizona talking to all kinds of sales and marketing people and really you know trying to get a sense of what was on their minds and you know in addition to seeing you know how things operate at that kind of conference. So you you get like a lot of different lenses if you're able to
00:21:32
Beth
ah get together with people deeper in the company. So it's definitely something I i strive to do, but yeah it's not ah you have to kind of go outside of the bounds of the just the board meeting itself.
00:21:43
joewaltman
Sure. sure yeah do Do all board members do that now? Or are you sort of a unique ah unique bird in that you're you're kind of going above and beyond, shall we say, of what a typical board member does?
00:21:56
Beth
um It depends that was that sales conference that I went to there were four or five of us who went ah because even we We had honestly We had had a culture of trying to make it to a company event you know once a year or so, and the pandemic really disrupted that. But we're trying to get back into it. um But I try whenever I can to get in a bit early, ah have meetings with people. you have if The CEO has to be comfortable with that. But it's a you know if you're able to sit down and even spend an hour with a few people, you get
00:22:34
Beth
a different and deeper sense of what's going on than if you only get the presentations in the board meeting.
00:22:40
joewaltman
For sure, for sure, for sure. Yeah, ah super interesting. um but let's ah but Let's go into the two-parter last question. um Is there anything we as the community can do to to help you, aside from ah more more board positions ah and vice versa, what what what what you might be what might you be able to do to to help us?
00:23:05
Beth
Um, so I think I have, you know, I've been living like in the far corner of the world compared to most people from in Seattle. And I have not been amazing. Like Joe, I look at you and you just do such a good job of keeping in touch with people. And I, I do not. And I would really like to do a better job. I would love it if people came out on the West Coast maybe to see you. and If they turn their gaze northward and, you know, considered coming up to Seattle, it's beautiful.
00:23:33
joewaltman
Yeah, don't get your hopes up. Don't get your hopes up. These, these, ah these myopic Europeans, i'm so I'm shocked by how many of them haven't even been to California in their entire lives. They're such, such sheltered ah people. You think you think we have, you know, the MBA of the world and and these, ah these a-holes haven't, you know, gone past New York when they've gone to North America.
00:23:56
Beth
I mean, I will just say we are not very far from Whistler and you could easily, on one trip, you know hit ah Seattle, you could visit Juliet in Vancouver, you could go skiing in Whistler.
00:24:07
joewaltman
Yes.
00:24:08
Beth
there People should do it and it's fantastic here in the summer.
00:24:11
joewaltman
Yeah. And, and, and you can, you can visit, uh, Alex Kaloff loves having people visit him in Aspen. You can definitely stay there for like weeks at a time if you want to.
00:24:20
Beth
There you go. I'm telling you people, West Coast.
00:24:23
joewaltman
All right. So, so, so that people got a free place to stay in Seattle, uh, with, with the the burn burn bombs or, or whatever, whatever whatever your your sort of surname you're going with these days.
00:24:27
Beth
Definitely.
00:24:33
joewaltman
Uh, what, what, is there anything we can do for you?
00:24:37
Beth
um Well, i I mean, flipping it around, I think I know that there are some people who are interested as they think about ah kind of where their career is going over time. transitioning to board service or adding a board service component to their career. I do some um i did a um board readiness program, and I now mentor in that board readiness program and in another one.
00:25:02
joewaltman
Hm.
00:25:03
Beth
um So one for women, one for underrepresented minorities. I have access to you know some like pretty basic materials, but you know it's kind of compiled and collated stuff about how to prepare a board bio, how to think about ah positioning yourself for this type of stuff. So if anybody is interested and feeling like um they could use ah you know a sympathetic ear, I'm more than happy to chat with people about that and help them think about that that stage of their career. Again, I would say um it's it's what you make of it. And so ah you know
00:25:42
Beth
Some people want to do it because they think it's a nice credential. um Other people want to do it because they think it's really interesting work. And you know there are there are lots of good reasons to get involved with it. And I'm happy to help people think it through and explore the idea.
00:25:59
joewaltman
That's fantastic. and And that is, that's a topic that we we touch upon a lot here. Like, so what, what is the the next chapter of your career? And I think, you know, boards are, are, are one of the, the probably top three things that people mentioned.
00:26:13
Beth
Yep. So, you know, feel free to ping me.
00:26:17
joewaltman
Wonderful. Beth, thank you so, so much for your time. Really good talking.
00:26:22
Beth
Thanks, Joe. This was great.