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Ep 62: From Serving in the Army to becoming a CEO with Ethena CEO Roxanne Petraeus
46 Plays28 days ago
How can corporate leaders make compliance training entertaining enough that their employees will pay attention? How do you know if compliance training is effective? What has a founder in this space learned about building for and selling to HR and legal?
Join Roxanne Petraeus, Co-Founder and CEO of Ethena, as she discusses how her company is changing compliance training by making it more personalised, effective, role-based, and specific to scenarios happening in her clients’ companies. Starting her career as an officer in the U.S. Army, she made the leap from consultant to founder and built a platform that saves time, engages distracted employees, and satisfies regulators.
Listen as Roxanne discusses why content is as important as technology, how to measure the success of compliance training, the value of balancing quantitative data with qualitative feedback, and how her company is leveraging AI to better serve their clients, and more.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-62
Topics:
Introduction: 0:00
Finding the inspiration to serve in the military: 1:30
Leaving McKinsey & Company to found Ethena: 6:25
Scaling up content quality alongside technology: 9:04
What companies are getting wrong about in-house training and how to make a change: 11:44
Measuring the success of a new compliance training: 13:34
Going beyond boring or cringy compliance trainings: 16:45
Observing new trends in compliance training: 20:40
Leveraging AI as the founder of a tech company: 23:16
Comparing compliance issues and needs between small companies and enterprise clients: 29:02
Mapping the future for Ethena: 31:50
Favorite part of your day and pet peeves: 34:12
Book recommendations: 35:50
What you wish you’d known as a young founder: 36:58
Connect with us:
Roxanne Petraeus - https://www.linkedin.com/in/roxanne-bras-petraeus-2292b8109/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading contract lifecycle management platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues. Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
example of An officer was giving me my performance review and I had like phenomenal ratings, like top officer, but he kept the door open and I was like, why are you keeping the door open? And he's like, no, you just never know.
00:00:10
Speaker
And I was like, what do you mean you never know? like you know And I realized like he was well-intentioned, thought I was a great officer, but was also kind of saying, like at any
Open Door Policies and Gender Dynamics
00:00:19
Speaker
point you could ruin my career, which I think is really unfortunate, because that is not the message that people should be getting, that women are just really dangerous. And if you interact with them, it's dangerous, because that you know makes mentorship really difficult.
Roxanne Petraeus: Army to Athena
00:00:37
Speaker
How can corporate leaders make compliance training entertaining enough that their employees will pay attention? How do you know if compliance training is effective? And what has a founder in this space learned about building for and selling to HR and legal? Today I am joined on the abstract by Roxanne Petraeus, co-founder and CEO of Athena, which is an all-in-one compliance training platform.
00:01:03
Speaker
Before starting Athena, Roxanne was a consultant at McKinsey & Company. This is her second startup. She previously started an online marketplace for chefs. She actually began her career in the US Army where she spent a year deployed as an engineer officer in Afghanistan, and four years as a civil affairs officer with multiple deployments to the Pacific. Roxanne, thanks so much for joining me for this episode of The Abstract. Thanks for having me.
00:01:30
Speaker
You actually have a pretty different starting place in your career than most of my guests. You served in the army. Totally. Can you start by telling us a little bit about what inspired you to serve in the military? Yeah, it's not the most common founder. but um Background though, occasionally I bump into other people and with military backgrounds in tech and it's always really fun because it's a small group but a very supportive group.
00:01:54
Speaker
Yeah, so i am I did something called r ROTC, Reserve Officer Training Corps, which essentially pays for college in exchange for for doing service. And I'll say that the reason I joined is not particularly high-minded, like I i wish I could say it was, but you know it's like you're a teenager, what do you really know about the world?
Lessons from the Army
00:02:12
Speaker
um So I had gotten into Harvard, was really excited about it, and didn't have the money to pay for it. was like Pretty simple. So I learned about this thing called ROTC and ah both of my parents had served in the military for short periods of time. So I i at least had some familiarity with it even though it was largely before I was even born. And so I just thought like, okay, maybe I'll try it. And if worst case scenario, I get a year of college paid for, I quit, you know, it's fine.
00:02:37
Speaker
But I just ended up really liking it. I liked the people, I liked the leadership, I felt like it was just kind of this group of people that I kind of wanted to be when I grew up. I thought that that training was phenomenal. And it just kind of felt like a place where I could, yeah, just like become a better version of myself as corny as it is. And so while I sort of joined for reasons that were kind of more about just like solving an immediate problem in front of me, I ended up staying because i just I just thought the people were by and large like phenomenal. I thought I could learn a lot. And I also thought, you know, it's like the recruiting posters, but kind of like see the world kind of thing. I was like, you know, this is a time with the we're at war. And it just sort of felt like I would, my like eyes would really be open to this like world that I otherwise wouldn't wouldn't really see.
00:03:23
Speaker
And I mean, you did see some interesting places, yeah Afghanistan being one, I know you had different, you were deployed to different parts of the Pacific. um Can you tell us a little bit about those those deployments and what that experience was was like? Yeah, I deployed to play Afghanistan world that the conflict was still going on. And it's like, I find it a little hard to summarize it in like one pithy yeah statement, it was just so many different things. It's like, geographically, the country is just stunning. Like it's just like,
00:03:53
Speaker
beautiful and kind of looks I grew up in Florida it's like flat and hot and Afghanistan has these like mountain ranges and these like fertile valleys and you're just like you know it it it truly feels like a different world obviously it's like also a world that looks really different just in terms of like the people the culture it was like wow like you know I have never seen like kind of a society like this And then like overlay all of that with the fact that there's like an active ground war going on. And that was just pretty wild to see US forces, um international forces, and Taliban, like the sort of security, like outsource security firms. And it was just, I don't know, I feel like I kind of walked around with like ah deer in the headlights, like just looking around at all the different wild sort of things that were going
From McKinsey to Athena
00:04:37
Speaker
on. And it was like really informative and I think took a long time to process and to think about and obviously has been like you know
00:04:43
Speaker
I think that was like diplomatically to say it was like certainly wasn't a phenomenal success like and in terms of like what foreign policy looks like but in terms of like being able to see like just I don't know humanity at an extreme like it was it was absolutely that.
00:04:57
Speaker
deer in the headlights Do you feel like there are aspects of that experience in the military that prepared you well to be a founder of your own company or or more, I guess, to the point like, do you feel like there are lessons from that time that you still draw on today now that you've started a business? Totally. I think, you know, there are often like not necessarily the kind of taught in classroom lessons. There are more of these like sort of mental images I have of Like I can't think of, the base I was on got a lot of indirect fire, so like mortars and things. And I just remember this one officer who was like really always very like cool and calm and collected about it. And I was like, that's just like kind of, you realize like you kind of want to follow someone like that. You're like, I don't know. They seem like they were just kind of like, they're going to figure this out and it's going to be okay. And I think a lot about like how really great leaders can kind of turn them down the temperature in a room.
00:05:50
Speaker
Because the you know you don't do great decision making under extreme stress. like you know Very few people make great decisions when they're panicking and flailing. like it's just It's not confidence inspiring. and so of course my and role now as a co-founder and ceo in no way has the physical danger that um accompanied something like Afghanistan, it still absolutely has stress, right? There you are. um You have customers, you're trying to win big deals, like you have fundraising, and all of those can be really stressful moments. And in those, I try to remember some of the great leaders that I saw and how they just kind of navigated hard situations by somehow turning the temperature down.
00:06:25
Speaker
What was it that inspired you to start, Athena? i mean i'm really I'm curious, you know one, deciding, okay, I'm going to take the leap. I'm going to start my i'm goingnna you know leave McKinsey behind. I'm going to start my own business. But two, like why? Why in compliance? what What about this did you feel like was a space that you needed to bring sort of your perspective to?
00:06:43
Speaker
Yeah, I knew very little about the compliance space. And instead, I just had a really strong perspective on and one really, really like this small, relatively small sliver of it, which is as an harassment. So in the army, as a woman, um and the army was like, I don't know, you know,
00:07:01
Speaker
80% men, something like that. And like um there's just been a lot of documentation about, um it's an institution that like has definitely not not always like flawlessly handled gender integration. I mean, to the point that you know it's also a very recent issue. like and When I joined the army, certain roles were still just close to women. So it's not even just the cultural exclusion, there was just you know sort of straight up, women can't do X, Y, or Z.
00:07:28
Speaker
And so I think being in a world like that was like, you know, just taught me a lot about like gender dynamics, sexual harassment, and then also seeing training that just felt really bad felt like it, if anything, made the whole situation worse, like it would have just been better not to have done the training, and because it was so bad, it was cheesy, it was corny, it was the sort of like, thought of jokes, you know, is and it was, it made soldiers sometimes feel like this,
00:07:52
Speaker
example of An officer was giving me my performance review and I had like phenomenal ratings, like top officer, but he kept the door open and I was like, why are you keeping the door open? And he's like, no, you just never know.
00:08:03
Speaker
I was like, what do you mean? you know like you know And I realized like he was well-intentioned, thought I was a great officer, but was also kind of saying, like at any point you could ruin my career, which I think is really unfortunate because that is not the message that people should you know be getting, that sure women are just you know um ah really dangerous.
Athena's Mission in Compliance Training
00:08:21
Speaker
And if you interact with them, it's dangerous because that um you know makes mentorship really difficult.
00:08:25
Speaker
And so a long way of saying I didn't necessarily have a perspective on compliance training because it's not something I knew a lot about, but I did have a perspective on how you could and make sure that like your whole team, to include women, could participate effectively at work and also what caused them to leave or caused them to like not ah not be able to be like full team members. And so that was the particular insight. And then it ended up, turns turns out, being very applicable to the space more broadly. But at the beginning, I just saw this one specific issue.
00:08:53
Speaker
That's interesting. and then you know you People will learn if they go to Athena's website and and and look around and explore. right It's expanded totally on that to a whole host of different areas. I actually think that engaging content around compliance training is super important. that it just won't re like In some ways, it's actually a content issue. It's just as much a content issue in my mind as a tech issue. yeah Having done you know privacy trainings or security trainings, given them and received them. yeah How do you scale that up, though? and and And how do you think about getting that right across what really is a very diverse set of issues, right? i mean Totally. Aspen training, what you're referring to is quite different than how do we make sure you don't fall you know victim to a phishing scam.
00:09:37
Speaker
Totally. I think that's true, but I think there are also, like even your point around tech versus content, we think of them as incredibly related. so For example, if you have very bad tech, what you have to do if you're doing online learning is you send everybody the same 60 minutes because it's just too difficult to send a particular scenario to just your sales team because you're like, I don't know how to track this. and so like You know what? I don't really care that not all this information, whether it's code of conduct, privacy, doesn't really matter. I don't care if it's relevant to everybody.
00:10:05
Speaker
everyone's getting a gick because i just can't figure out how to deal there Whereas if you have really good tech, which like is what we built, you can do things that make the content really good. So it's around personalization, adaptive learning, but even just like the very basic thing is personalization. So you might think that like only a small group um at your company is likely interacting with government officials, if anybody.
00:10:26
Speaker
Those are the only people who probably need you know training on how to and sort of appropriately interact with government officials. and and I think it's like a bit of an internal company risk tolerance um perspective, but I think that and the best companies we work with who take just like such a thoughtful approach to designing the curriculum and realizing like Yeah, I guess technically like so and so in the HR department might accidentally someday stumble into like an interaction with a Malaysian ambassador, but like probably not, you know, instead, it's probably going to be like our enterprise sales team and in particular, the ones who sell the government. And so therefore, I'm just going to send this particular module just to them.
00:11:03
Speaker
And i think that that while it might seem not revolutionary what it does is it cuts down on training time for everybody else because you have to be realistic that everyone is incredibly busy and so if you say i'm going to train to the time as opposed to training to the standard people tune out like you know it's a i feel like the best tech companies say this like your competition isn't your competitors it's netflix.
00:11:24
Speaker
it's email you know It's like, I don't know, Instagram. like That's where your employees, when they're bored, are going to be. So we just try to think about how you can be as punchy and effective as possible in short periods of time and really marry the tech to that so it can be personalized. It can you know be really clever in terms of like when um employees are interacting with it.
00:11:44
Speaker
I'm sure you've talked to a lot of whether they're GCs or head of HR or learning and development folks, what what have you. Compliance officers who haven't adopted a tech solution, who are still sort of you know building their own decks or tracking these sorts of things in Excel. Outside of the advantages that come with tech, you know what are the things that you think companies are getting wrong when they're doing this in-house? What's the lowest hanging fruit for making effects besides a subscription? Totally. yeah and like I'll say I'm actually a huge fan of like live instructor-led training. like I think it's phenomenal. I think that our job is more to like augment and to make things scalable so like the companies you know that we tend to work with, they may still be doing some in-person training. I think it's the best way to do things like you know ah let let your employees ask questions. Right? Like that's, that's just like a really like, Hey, I saw this thing. And like, I don't know. Um, phenomenal use of in-person time. I think like there's a bunch of things that make it really hard to do in-house and it really depends on like how fleshed out your legal team is. One very basic one is just keeping up with all the new regulations. So like, I think July 1st was the first, was the training deadline for this new California workplace violence prevention training.
00:13:01
Speaker
If you have infinite resources, I guess, sure, like keep up with the laws and make the training and, you know, whatever. But usually what I hear is like, Hey, I think I'm really phenomenal at like, you know, certain parts of my job. And I don't, I don't want to be the, like, just a constant, like training, cranking out training, like um all types. And so we we try to say like, okay, then, you know, use us for the stuff that maybe the regulations change frequently.
00:13:26
Speaker
um or whatever, and and then you can spend your um you know sort of like time on more like high value activities, that might be one. That makes sense. How do you feel like if if you're an ah HR leader or you're a legal leader, you roll out training, how do you know if it's successful? right like like Are there metrics that you think the company should be tracking? What does success often look like besides, let's say, like not getting bribed by a government official? or lower, well, I don't know about reporting, right? Because that's a bit like lower rates of, let's say, like so but in the workplace or that sort of thing. Like what does success look like usually? Okay. I wish I had a snappy like it's these three metrics and watch them like a hawk. And that's how you, but I actually think even when you just said where you started to be like, well, wait, I guess if reporting went down, that could be like a problem. And you're like, yeah, like yeah as a company, like you might say, like we had no, and it's an example last year.
00:14:17
Speaker
And the GCs I talk with who are really smart say like, and that concerns me because I just don't think that's statistically likely. And so what I actually think might be happening is that either managers don't know, um they don't recognize that what they're seeing is is some sort of a problem, employees aren't comfortable reporting it, like whatever it is. um And so it is actually really messy. So when we talk to our customers, we talk about like a mix of the quantitative and the qualitative.
00:14:41
Speaker
So the quantitative is, you know, and in our training, for example, every five minutes, employees can rate the training. So like Yelp or something. And we surface those insights back to each particular customer. So, you know, company A knows like, here's what your employees thought of XYRC. That's one really helpful. data point is like what employees are saying. But another one is very much more the qualitative. um So it's like if you have HRBPs or compliance ambassadors, and they're out there just having conversations, they're surfacing those insights usually back to the team. And that might be something like I think of this example, because it was just really powerful. We had a customer a while ago who said, Hey, um I just want to thank you the training that you all had on the um like,
00:15:21
Speaker
and um and discrimination by third party by vendors, that training was really useful. And we're like, oh, amazing, how do you know it was useful? They said, oh, well, we actually had um someone on our team who was having issues with a vendor, but she didn't realize that we as a company are responsible, like that matters too. It's not just like, oh, because it's not your team member. It's sort of, don't bring it to legal. We can't really do anything about it. and But after she took her Athena training, she realized that like, yeah, this is this is inappropriate, even if it's a vendor.
00:15:49
Speaker
Um, or a client or someone like that. And so she brought the issue to us. And when we asked her why she brought the issue, you know, she said, I just took Athena training and here's, here's what I learned. And so I think it's like a bunch of those things. I am really excited that about a year ago, we rolled out a employee hotline. I'm going to say anonymous or attributed and employee can raise an issue.
00:16:08
Speaker
and then a case management tool where, for example, an HRPP might just say like, Oh, ah like whatever, Joe raised this issue and like, it's not an investigation yet. But like, I just want to keep an eye on it. Because if I hear a couple other things about this team or this manager, it might tell me there's something going on.
00:16:25
Speaker
And I think the real like exciting place is when you kind of marry the training data with a Hotline, the the feedback because training is kind of talking to a company, talking to your employees, but the the Hotline tool is listening to them. And I think it gets very interesting when you kind of have both directions going versus just working.
00:16:45
Speaker
It's interesting to me that this sort of training that it seems to get done or that it seems to be easy to get budget for internally often is the training that I think that people, unfortunately, they did that doesn't always resonate with them. right It's like the data security training, and then they go through it. And everyone's had that experience, which you've referred to, you know of like in around the water cooler, proverbial water cooler, let's say, in the startup kitchen.
00:17:09
Speaker
ah That was such a waste of time. I had my headphones running and I was like sending emails the whole time. Totally. through it As you talk to GCs, head of HR, etc., how do they get budget for going beyond that, let's say?
Innovations in Compliance and AI
00:17:24
Speaker
right like Is that ever a sort of objection? and how how Have you seen customers or clients deal with that when they say, you know like really actually we should be investing and in much higher quality stuff?
00:17:35
Speaker
this isn't just a check thebox exercise Yeah, I think it's certainly like, you know, budgets always um an issue, but I also have noticed a couple of things. So one is companies that tend to be like larger and therefore have more scrutiny. Like as soon as there has been some sort of regulatory issues, so like a consent decree or, you know, whatever it was, I think the conversation really flips and there's this recognition of like, ah Oh, that was a,
00:18:03
Speaker
x million dollar experience and even if they haven't bought into training as being like a proactive response to it and to like you know actually minimizing the likelihood of sort of data privacy issues for example. They recognize that just the benefit of loan to demonstrate to a regulator that they've taken something seriously that alone is like. yes you know the unlaw Another area where we've seen and like success at sort of getting budget is leaders hate when they feel like their teams are wasting their time. You talk to a sales leader or an engineering leader, that's being the best examples. And like, man, do they get fired up if they're like, why did you take my people sort of like off the line for you know hours and you wasted their time?
00:18:42
Speaker
And so like another and pitch that's been really effective is like actually you can kind of like dramatically reduce seat time while actually driving up effectiveness if you do all of these things. So like test out options, adaptive learning, or even just role-based training. And so like you know when you think about like how expensive it is to make a whole company go through four hours a year of training. like you know it It does add up. So that's another way I've seen people kind of make the budget case to leadership. And often um it's actually leadership centers coming to ah HR compliance and just saying like, this is absurd. like We've got so much training. It is a very variable quality. It's coming out all through the year. No one is clear what they are and aren't supposed to do.
00:19:25
Speaker
It feels really repetitive. like Didn't we just take cyber training and now we're doing it again? um like I don't get it. and like How many times do you have to tell me not to click something? and so For example, we like released a phishing simulator. and so Instead, it's like you are getting trained because you clicked the thing. and Then people get a little less like fired up about it. um yeah that's That's another that sort of like quantity quality trade-off.
00:19:52
Speaker
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00:20:13
Speaker
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00:21:01
Speaker
Someone described to me that DOJ guidance on training is like someone trying to read you know like the Oracle, like what's the Oracle saying? And so you know the recent updates, I think a lot of our customers really care about that. But you know that really comes down to like um you know ah training that's effective, training that's role-based, training that's very specific to scenarios that have happened at your company. um And so one of the things that we see a lot of interest in is customizing training. So we support a company taking our data privacy training and making it your data privacy training. And it doesn't have to be um a very elaborate ah endeavor. It could just be like your you know privacy counsel gets ah three scenarios that are like anonymized based on stuff that actually happened at your company and they put that into the training. And that's so much more effective than just generic like, be thoughtful about user data, which everyone is like, I'm never
00:21:49
Speaker
intending to be not thoughtful about it. But what I haven't put two and two together with is like, oh, screen sharing with like someone who doesn't need to see this like user dashboard, like, okay, like I hadn't, I hadn't realized like why that might be a problem. So that's one. Then on topics I've seen two recently, one is that surprisingly like AI and compliance. So and what I'm really hearing is that our legal and customers in particular,
00:22:13
Speaker
They're in no way trying to like inhibit the use of AI, like actually quite the opposite. like They really want to make sure they're supporting overall business schools. They just want to and almost give employees like comfort as to like, hey, you're totally cool if you're doing stuff over here. Just please be careful of these very specific things versus training that might make it appear to be like, AI is very dangerous and it's ah you know it's a concern for like all data privacy issues. Therefore, like don't use it unless you've got approval or something.
00:22:43
Speaker
That's not what they want to do. um And then the last one is and actually just very specific manager training. So I've ah've seen a lot of interest in like how to get managers to recognize when something is an issue. I think this became much more common with and Moving to like a remote and hybrid. It's just like managers don't totally know like ah if someone is kind of flagging like a reasonable accommodation But they're not exactly using those words um Or you have new managers who don't even maybe realize that they have certain responsibilities. That's the last bucket
00:23:16
Speaker
On the AI tools piece, or or that's actually I think a really interesting area we put out last year, which we did in concert with some AGCs for privacy and GCs they helped us with it. We put out a sort of template and and playbook around AI use policies. yeah what What are you seeing on that front? Is it a lot of education about These are the tools. These are the risks. Is there even sort of like, this is what's happening with the EU AI act. And like, here's some background on that. Like, what what are you seeing actually in market in terms of training today? And I'm going to look different in six months. Totally. Yeah. I think but I'm actually seeing this more like a desire for just a ton of specificity. So like at our company, you're okay to use and like literally saying the tools that are like, you know, you have some sort of enterprise license or for whatever reason your company is like, I'm a marketer. Like which AI tools can I use? Which ones do you know? How do I request a new one? Like those types of things. yeah I'm seeing less and it could just be like the conversations I'm having, not not totally sure. I'm seeing less desire for like very general, like, you know, Here's what AI is in its you know sort of like regulatory landscape and just much more like, I'm a salesperson, am I cool to like put you know whatever our transcripts here, here, and here? um like that That kind of stuff. That makes a lot of sense to me. I'd imagine that you're probably thinking about AI too as totally the founder of a tech company. What are ways that you're leveraging AI today either personally or that you know are fitting into Athena's product roadmap?
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah. So, um, you know, I talked a lot about like, uh, role-based training, customization, all of that. But if you think about, for example, for almost all of our customers, they want some sort of language translation for all of that and the more variables you introduce. So if you have sales specific data privacy training, which is different than your ah HR specific data privacy training, like it gets very complicated. And so, um, we have been, uh, leveraging AI to do a lot of the like, um, speeding up language translations. You know, what is it? Um,
00:25:17
Speaker
uh, dubbing versus the sub, like the those sorts of things. Yeah. Because when you, I think train correctly, it does mean that you have a lot of permutations of training. You might have swappable scenarios based on again, roles, seniority or whatever. Um, and so the, um, in particular in like content creation, we're seeing a lot of opportunities to really speed up or to make like, yeah um, hyper personalization. So, you know,
00:25:41
Speaker
you call it HR, someone else calls them people partners, someone else calls them whatever, like great, you know, we can we can kind of flow all that into someone's training. without um you know all of the cost and and time that would historically have been associated with that. Interesting. I'm curious. i mean and There's sort of a a general question here too, which is, you know I talk to a lot of general counsels, a lot of in-house counsel, legal operations folks too, who are thinking about when they're going to buy a tool that has an AI component. How do they make sure that that
00:26:13
Speaker
works well and they can trust the outputs and there's maybe an element of human review, et cetera. I think the other sort of broad question here is, is you spun up on selling to legal and selling to HR. I think with those functions, there's a really important element of trust that's required for them to be willing to commit to a tech solution. I can tell you agree. Yeah, I think it's like- Yeah, it's not been both of those. How have you learned to sell to legal in HR and today with AI too? What does that look like? Yeah, I think of a very specific customer call. I was on, or a customer was going to, they had our training and they were buying our hotline and case management tool. And they had their legal team on and they had their HR team. And I think the HR team asked some version of like,
00:27:00
Speaker
do you all can we have ai and categorize our issues, right? So like an employee maybe submit something or an HRVP submit something and it's like, you know, whatever, like Roxanne used her personal device inappropriately. um And our AI would flag that as like a code of conduct or something. And I was sitting on a call because I honestly like, you know, if I'm being totally honest, it is challenging when you hear ah You hear you understand that your buyer really is being told they need to lean into AI, but like you and your team have done a really thoughtful review and you're like, I don't think this is a good use case of AI. So in this particular example, there is a low volume of employee submitted issues and even at a large company ah HR or internal compliance related issues like
00:27:44
Speaker
you know it's it's not something that is like, um if it is something that is such a high volume that you can't manually categorize it, that's usually like a separate issue of like, holy smokes, like, you know, and like right like what's going on. And so I like pause for a minute because I was like, I never want to tell somebody that we have this feature that we don't and I was just kind of curious and the legal and person jumped in and was like, I do not want AI to be categorizing, ah you know, our issues, both for like accuracy, but even concerns of like privilege and like,
00:28:14
Speaker
Thank you. And I felt very grateful to be like, excellent. Okay, good. Because that's what we do. Like, you know, like you categorize them like it is a manual like you you know, pick from a drop down because we have heard that and both like accuracy and, um and ah the sort of legal considerations are such that like this is not an area that is a great use of AI and we're maybe as hard as it can be when there's like a trend. We're just going to make a stance that like this is not something that we have embedded AI into because we don't see the need for it, but we do see the risk of it and like that's the answer. So anyway, a very long way of saying that like yeah like I think it's actually
00:28:51
Speaker
been helpful for us in building credibility, in particular with legal, both really all of our buyers, to be honest, about like where we don't have any plans right now to put AI into the
Tailoring Training for Businesses
00:29:01
Speaker
product. Sure. have you that That sort of sparks a separate idea for me, which is, um well, a couple of my friends, Julia Shulman and Andy Dale, who have both been prior podcast guests or advisors, you know they work in more of like the VC-backed, small to medium-sized businesses, growing, right maybe you're going to go public someday or get acquired. or Have you seen really sort of distinct differences in the compliance needs or the compliance issues that are arising at that sort of size business as opposed to what I'll call like the true enterprise level, right like 5,000, 10,000 plus employees? Totally. Because they have clients across both. Yeah.
00:29:39
Speaker
Yeah, i mean I think it's like really different. like We might be someone's first tool and all you have is an HR person. right You don't have in-house legal, let alone in-house compliance. And then we serve you know huge public companies. And and they're really different um in in terms of what they care about. The nice thing is like the product. So we've tried to think about like a product suite that scales with you. So for like if you're kind of saying that yeah like the Andy Julia types companies,
00:30:06
Speaker
quick growing, but they're not necessarily public yet. I think some of the concerns we hear are actually things like we don't want to, we don't want to make legal compliance ops like and in any way like and a hindrance to growth. And so how do we make sure that this training program doesn't feel like we just took something that's designed for like the army you know and put it into like you know a fast-growing company because like we, legal, are going to just like really never hear the end of it if we suddenly have six hours of training and it feels like, why are we talking about you know expert controls? like you know What is even a flat? Are you sure that's relevant to us? and so It's actually much more about like being really targeted and almost like parsimonious um and feeling very lightweight. and Then as a company scales like along their compliance maturity journey,
00:30:50
Speaker
um and they're maybe going public or something that we hear things like hey we have customer contracts and it turns out that they want us to have an employee hotline and so like how do you help us like sort of make sure that our compliance program is really up to like um up to snuff with all of the obligations that we have.
00:31:07
Speaker
And then at the like public company, when there's a compliance person involved, a what we're seeing is then more of a focus on like audit committees, regulators, like, hey, how do we really demonstrate to these folks that we have a really thoughtful program that we can show year-over-year progress, that the audit logs are really like fast, clean, easy to pull. But of course, again, like going back to your 50-person company, there would be like, what's an audit committee? you know like That's not where we're concerned.
00:31:36
Speaker
you know where they are on the compliance maturity journey. And we always try to like meet someone where they're at versus take something that's appropriate for the 50,000 employee company and and you know throw that into a 75% fast-growing.
00:31:48
Speaker
tech company Before I ask you a few fun questions and then I have a traditional sort of closing question that I like to ask all guests, I'm curious you know what the next few years look like for for you and look like for Athena and and what you're most excited about as you continue to build and and grow the business.
00:32:05
Speaker
totally um I mentioned this product that like is very near and dear to my heart, the hotline in case management suite. While it's like our kind of new addition to the to the team, I'm really excited about like and that product interacting with our training product in terms of like the data and the richness that we can give a company. right like There's just only so much if for your training tool. We can give you a really holistic piece of what your training program looks like. But when um we also are supporting you in tracking like a variety of issues, whether again, they're more HR or they're sort of code of conduct or whatever, I think we're able to do a lot of really neat things. So for example, like, oh, it seems like there's a lot of questions and concerns and issues around expense policy.
00:32:46
Speaker
Okay, we're seeing that here. How could we like surface to you something like, hey, we've got this short three-minute training. you know When we see that people give it to their team, you know it reduces the questions, the concerns, the issues around this. um I think that's really exciting. I think the other thing that's going getting me very excited is just getting to work with um larger companies, like really sophisticated compliance teams. who I find that you know corny as it sounds, like we end up just learning so much from them, but then also being able to serve as a thought partner when a large company says like hey, we're trying to like revamp this whole thing based on X, Y, and Z concern. like Have you seen anyone do this well before? And now we get to be a little bit of a thought partner in saying, like okay, here's like a menu of five things that I've seen and you know our customers pull from in terms of ah test out or you know adaptive learning or like whatever it is. like um Having better governance um in terms of like what even gets to be considered mandatory training. um Which of these are you interested in? And then I can like even potentially connect you with customers. like that That has been really fun.
00:33:44
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think enterprise clients might get a little bit of a bad rap because sometimes it's like, well. They're my favorite because they're so needy, but they're like in a good way, you know? Then they like make you be better.
Customer Feedback and Product Development
00:33:57
Speaker
Yeah. yeah and From a compliance perspective, i mean they're the ones who are going to be reporting up to the board, like you mentioned, and have ah you know might have a committee that's totally focused on this, even besides audit committee. yeah Super interesting. Okay. Some fun questions for you. Hopefully fun as we start to...
00:34:16
Speaker
wrap up The first one, I'm curious what you know your favorite part of your day-to-day is as a founder or as a CEO and and maybe tied to that that. Is that what you expected when you got into it too? Yeah. I mean, I think my favorite parts of my day are either whether it's customer facing or internal. I really love getting challenged. so like I think about on our team in particular who are really good at it. They may be the most junior person in the meeting and they're just like, I'm going to be honest, this seems dumb. And like here's why. and I always just think that's so cool, you know, like to be able to keep like that maybe because in the army, that was me like, you know, I was like a general officer, you know, like two days into my role. um But I think that that's just like a really fun, exciting thing to kind of try to keep fostering a culture where there's like a healthy debate of ideas and it's not like,
00:35:05
Speaker
um I don't know. It doesn't feel like stuffy and corporate and political in a way of it. like That's just not the type of company I want to be at, let alone that I want to leave. I think that I would have found that quite predictable. um Do you have a professional pet peeve? sir I do.
00:35:21
Speaker
Um, I'm very guilty about this is a small one. Maybe it's fun, but like, man, some corporate isms are just a little bit absurd, you know, like boots on the ground. We're sort of like, are we like, you know, are we in a holding pattern or some stuff that in particular is from the military that I just, so yeah, I can't bring myself to say, but then others that I'm so guilty of, you know, maybe I say circle back 12 times a day and, you know, I'll have to live with that.
00:35:47
Speaker
That's funny. That's a good answer. A couple more for you. Is there a good book that you've read recently? I mean, this could be professional. It could just be for fun. Otherwise, that you might want to recommend to to the audience.
00:35:59
Speaker
Yeah, I was thinking about this and I try to read like um a variety, like a nonfiction fiction, um all of this, but you know, that's about Afghanistan. And so this is a real throwback. Like I read it a while ago and it is an old book, but there's this book, The Best and the Brightest that is about Vietnam that I actually think is just like a phenomenal book. It kind of talks about like all of these and like wonder kids who were young in government sort of like Kennedy era type and thing and how despite having these like phenomenal pedigrees and just like really being the quote like best and the brightest of American society they just presided over like in a mitigated disaster um and it's just like a really fascinating read it's like phenomenal journalist and while it is like very much the definition of an oldie I think it's it's just a really like phenomenal book.
00:36:49
Speaker
That's a great recommendation. As we start to wrap up a last question for you, I like to ask the sort of thing of of ah pretty much all of our guests. And that's, you know if you could look back, maybe when you were first launching Athena, getting started as a founder, ah something that you know now that you wish that you'd known back then.
00:37:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's hard because there's like a million product things that we've changed based on... like you know But I think it's almost not fair right because you have to go through the learnings to to like get better. um I actually think maybe the um the thing that we did a good job at, but I would still like encourage previous needs to just be even better, is to really fast like launch and iterate and listen to customers ah type things. so ah For some reason, I was actually just looking at this today. we launched our first product like I think maybe three weeks after my co-founder and I had gotten together. It was very early because New York had just rolled out these new training requirements. And I'm so glad we had an approach like that because the training was bad. And yet, we got such valuable feedback from both HR leaders, from legal leaders, and from employees.
00:37:59
Speaker
And I think like every time we have um really tried to just get something very quickly in front of our customers to get their feedback, and that that's just like always gotten us so much closer to the answer than really trying to like pontificate and and and sort of internally come up with it. And so I would sort of yeah encourage Passmee to keep that approach recognizing that the later you know the larger company, you have to be really thoughtful about how you how you do that. because of course the the companies we're supporting today, it's it's really important to to get things right and have really high quality. But I still think that going back to the enterprise customers, getting a bad rap, I mean i think like I'll just get on a call with them and sometimes in 10 minutes, they've like blown my mind with like, here's why you should go build this thing and like you know all the other competitors here, they're doing it wrong. And I'm like, Like that was just the most you know golden and piece of insight i I could have gotten and I never would have gotten there if I had just sort of um talked internally with with my team because no matter how smart they are, it's it's not the same as talking to people who really are really are doing it dayto day to day.
00:39:02
Speaker
Great advice for founders everywhere. and this has been You have such a unique sort of journey and and career arc. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for for joining me. Thanks for having me. And to all of our listeners, thanks for tuning in and we hope to see you next time.