YouSaid · the spoken record

Roxanne Petraeus

lines on the record: 46
first: 2021-03-25
most recent: 2021-03-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Nice that you mentioned Harvard and Oxford. I think I've been the beneficiary of tons of kindness, but one that comes to mind is Marty Feldstein, a titan in the economics world, was just very kind early on, took some classes with him, started doing some research, and ended up serving as a mentor, a thesis advisor, and kind of a lifelong mentor until he passed recently. I think about college as such a formative time was just so grateful that someone who is a luminary in their field is willing to explain. I remember once he got out of pen and paper and drew a supply and demand curve for me because he was trying to explain some nuance of the impact of government spending on GDP in wartime or something. And it just really struck me that someone who's very important and busy demonstrates that he cares about my development and learning and did that throughout his life. And so I think that things that happen in college because it's such a formative time.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gift of having a platform, but there's also, of course, a huge burden or responsibility that comes with it of trying to be thoughtful about things that can improve people's lives. And my peers are doctors and teachers, and I think they're just doing so much more for the world than I am, but still being reminded of that responsibility. It's just something I really treasure.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is such an incredible opportunity, and I was so grateful just to say what it is. 32 students a year from the US go to Oxford and get to learn with it international. And what I took from that is it was so neat to be with a really diverse and interdisciplinary group. It's not like a dorm where you have the science people are mixed in with the econ folks and you get to have these weird late night discussions. Now I'm in startup world and I interact with startup people investors, you know, our customers, et cetera. And they're all amazing, but within a certain group. And it was just really neat to be able to spend time with people who are wired very differently than I am and have these learning moments of, okay, you're starting to be a doctor like ethics. Let's talk about that. I think the other thing that was an amazing gift from the Rhodes is that I ended up getting a platform for better or worse, and I'm not sure if it's totally fair. But as a Rhodes Scholar, typically, I can open some doors and people will give me the benefit of the doubt and listening to me for a minute. And that's just incredible.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To like live their full life, whatever that may be, come to work. And if they need to have different setups in order to facilitate them being their best, I think a lot of cool stuff is hopefully going to come from that.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think I've been really excited by things that work from home has unlocked. Obviously, there's a bunch of things that are incredibly challenging about this era we live in. But seeing the fact that we have engineers up on Leaf to Colorado halfway through the year because that's where they want to be, I'm recognizing that me as a new mom can work and then go and hang out with my four-month-old in a break between calls. I think that this really rigid barrier between personal and professional has just been blown up by the pandemic. And while I certainly anticipate that things won't look exactly like they are now in terms of work from home being so prevalent, I feel like this idea of just building for flexibility in people's schedules and lives and recognizing that real life is happening, which sounds obvious, but I think sometimes companies can forget that like employees are people with a lot of things going on in their lives. And if as a company you can set up opportunities for that employee.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this idea that training should be temporally relevant to particular moments in either your calendar or your about to go into a block of hiring interviews, let's make sure that hiring biases and hiring within the law gets released just in time. These are some of the features and the spaces that we're thinking about in this long-term vision of how do we make it really easy for employees and companies to do the right thing.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But actually, what I really want you to do is go build a whistleblower hotline because actually this whole area just doesn't work. Or let's talk about all of the administrative tracking that's happening in the LMS space. This is just broken and your approach is so much better. Like how can we get you to build that? Another example there is moments that matter. So instead of our V1 of training, which is digestible over time, personalized and relevant, what if we could send training based on particular moments that we know you're about to have? So an example from anti-bribery comes from this idea of like, let's say the pandemic ends and you're about to go on a business trip to China and you need anti-bribery training based on some sort of factor of your job. Your company has said you need it. Wouldn't it be great if we could deliver the training on how bribery manifests itself in China a week before you take that trip?”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make that video cooler or better. We redesign it from the ground up. So again, digestible versus all at once, make content in real time so that it's relevant, meaning we're addressing the issues that are happening in February of 2020. And there's not a scenario where 60 people go to a bar because 60 people aren't going to a bar in this point in time. One size fits all doesn't work, so training relevant based on someone's work streaming a salesperson gets different training than an engineer because anti-money laundering looks really different based on what type of job you're doing and that delightful design is important because signaling matters. So getting that right is this like the one of our company and then the place that we're going is that we're really hypothesis driven. We're very comfortable being pulled by the market. So the example of enterprise customers kind of on a phone call saying like, okay, great, we fixed this particular issue I had.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think where we're at is this first layer. It was really the low hanging fruit, which is let's make great compliance training. But the space that we're really solving is there's so many parts of the ethics and compliance landscape that are broken and dated and that there's just so much green field. The future of the company looks like giving employees and administrators tools that help employees to do the right thing. That's the space that we exist in. And how we get there is first through training because it's the most common touch point that an employee has with these sorts of issues that happens yearly, regulations mean it's increasingly common in a bunch of different areas. Our hypothesis for V2, if we take V1 as let's just fundamentally redesign the training landscape suite of compliance training. And quickly on that, I want to call out that the approach we've taken isn't like let's just make it 10% better, meaning, okay, you have to take a video once a year.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Founder who gets a defensive question tends to be put on their back foot is just more likely to be cautious, scared, et cetera, and therefore not give these really bold answers. Whereas if you allow”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What kind of blows my mind about this is there's data on what the problem is, and there are actually actionable steps that folks could take. So one study that's coming to mind, I think was a researcher at Harvard Business School who did a study on the types of questions that women founders get, she had a better framing, but I'm going to remember, but it was something like defensive questions versus opportunistic questions. So defensive question being something like how are you going to deal with competition, questions on moat, what are good arguments for me not to invest in you? versus the opportunity type questions, which are how does this become a billion dollar business? What's the secret sauce asking those types of questions that allow a founder to have the dream with me moment? And she found that women founders who are pitching get asked majority defensive questions, whereas men founders who are pitching get the majority opportunistic type questions. And the reason that matters is there's a mirroring effect.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, that's great. And I've noticed an interesting phenomenon, and then I'm caning with a very broad brush. We have incredible investors who've been with us since the beginning. And for them, none of this holds, but certainly as a group, again, that 2.2 stat just speaks for itself, that there's a desire to have funded women, but not to fund women, meaning as soon as there's a breakout success story, suddenly we see a lot of interest because we think investors recognize that they're being called to task for the lack of diversity in their portfolio. So it's just been fascinating to see that evolution as our company has grown from it being a liability to in some ways it being an asset while still recognizing that there's just folks like that investor who are out there who will continue to have questions about my ability to lead or to be bold or ambitious based on gender.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are certainly things that are getting better about it, but I think in particular at the early stages, what's tricky is venture is so ripe for bias because what you're asking is do I think somebody can do something amazing based on very little data? That's just the question you're asking at pre seed and seed. There's no like, could I see your financials to evaluate whether or not, yeah, like there's nothing there. You're just making a bet on the person. We know that that can be flawed in so many ways. Women is just one example. People of color, the stats are atrocious and the stories you hear are totally unacceptable as to seem sort of issues around biases and evaluating their companies. I certainly see it less as we grow because now I get to just show this traction of less than a year. We close massive enterprises. We have something like 22,000 employees on the platform. Our growth has been phenomenal and suddenly people are like,”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relationship with if they're pregnant for the purposes of essentially evaluating whatever it is you think that that evaluates. So he knew that this was wrong, but he did it anyway. And the best I can understand was some sort of ambition check. If I'm going to give you money, I want to make sure you're really dedicated to this. And therefore, if you're pregnant somehow, that indicates that you have competing priorities. I joke that if I had been a really passionate rock climber, nobody would look at me as a founder and say, like, I'm worried about your dedication to this company because you really like rock climbing. But somehow if it's a child, that's an issue. And talking to my husband, he has not received those types of questions in any of his professional experience. It's one anecdote, and if it weren't coupled with data, I would say it's exactly that, but a prevalence of these sorts of issues in venture is just unfortunately still very common.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only silver lining is it can't go below zero, but this is just not good. If you recognize that that's the current status, then you have to wonder like what's happening. I had a story I wrote about in medium about when I was fundraising for our, I believe it was our preseed round, I just had an investor ask me if I was pregnant and it was over the phone there was nothing I had said before that would in any way indicate that that would have been an appropriate question. We weren't talking about my family or anything like that. It was apropos of nothing and it quickly said no and then pointed out because of the space that I exist in that is not an appropriate question and can actually be illegal depending on the context. And he said well it's not a job interview so it's not illegal which indicated that this wasn't a knowledge problem. He knew that it is inappropriate to ask an employee or someone you're having a financial”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, certainly happy to talk about it. I think the most recent survey of venture capital going to all women founders, it is down from a whopping high of something like 2.9% down to 2.2% of all venture capital, I think, from this past year has gone to all women founding teams. So I'm totally with you that I want to be optimistic and think the best in people, but I can't look at that stat and think that the entire VC market is fairly evaluating women. Otherwise, you would just have to think that women have way worse ideas. There's just sort of no way to square that stat with an efficient market. And I'm sure some people will have thoughts on that, but”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Optional. We don't require it from employees, but we actually see that about 30% of learners on our platform are willing to give us feedback. And we think what's happening there is we're just being really honest and saying, look, our whole intent is to make content that resonates. That is really tricky because you know your workplace best. So tell us if we've got it right. And that's where the thumbs up, thumbs down, and then more nuanced feedback that we ask for at the end of each nudge. And that's things like”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or so a month nudges that are designed to be consumed over the course of the year typically, so either monthly or quarterly, just depending on how much stuff you need for any given course, a course being something like anti-bribery or code of conduct, et cetera. So the way that we make great content is that learners either tell us it's great or tell us it's not great, and then we quickly fix it. For us, we have over 150,000 pieces of learner feedback at this point. And the way that we get it is that in app, we just put it right after any nudge. And you can also at any point in a nudge rate something thumbs up, thumbs down, or question mark, question mark meaning I don't get this particular reference. And then our content team weekly is looking at all that data and seeing like interesting. We had one on inclusivity and pregnant colleagues. And if I'm remembering correctly, that nudge was performing less well than other nudges. So then they dig into the free text feedback that is”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, really similar in the schlep thing of early on, I think, when we were talking to investors, they're like, you just be a platform, you connect content creators to companies. And we're like, I don't know. That seems like you lose a lot of control. And for compliance, that's not a great idea. Figuring out the muscle memory of how to build great content in-house was a lot of work, but I'm really glad we did it because now it becomes much easier for us to expand into another vertical or push the envelope on content, meaning experiment with a different type of short-form video or whatever it is. What we learned is that we should approach content like product people. That feedback loop that you mentioned is crucial. We're not poets here. We aren't making art for art's sake. And instead, we are making content such that our end learners can understand these complex issues better. And I should back up and say the way we deliver content is via five minutes.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One line of code that suddenly we've solved this problem. Instead, it's just a lot of messy work understanding both what are the regulations, what are the intents behind these regulations, and then how do we, through content and through the admin experience, exceed them.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the regulatory environment was built. Of course, for us, if we can do the work to solve this problem that companies have, well, of course I have employees in multiple states and I don't want to have multiple vendors or a complex system of assigning different training based on different states. If we can figure out the regulations and kind of a smart approach enabled, of course, by a seamless admin experience, then we take all of that mess and it becomes an advantage for us. because we're able to say like you know this pain point you know it's very difficult we've solved it it's not a hardened explanation but pretty tricky in execution if working with law firms so we worked with latham and watkins to demonstrate in excruciating detail like 25 page memo how we meet these different state requirements how we train the way the eoc in a 2016 report says you're supposed to train it is not a silver bullet”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I definitely think a lot about that when we think about regulatory spaces. And I also remember an interview with the checker CEO or founder saying, if I had known all the details of the space before I entered it, like maybe I wouldn't have. I think there's a real benefit when entering a space that's complicated to come at it with fresh eyes and think there are different ways that we could address this. Regulatory spaces just have a lot of schlep of like how do we figure out what these regulations are taking sexual harassment as an example there are six states that regulate the training and I'm kind of convinced that the e-learning lobby had a hand in these regulations because they're just different enough that you can't use the same training from New York to California to Connecticut. There's no reason that's silly sexual harassment is not like there's nothing in the state water or air system that means that it is different in that state, but it's just the way”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll get a weird 2 a.m. email from an admin thinking about this space and saying, hey, have you looked into this other feature because I'm dealing with a CSV right now and it's really upsetting me because I have to use a legacy player for this. So I think those conversations are crucial. For us, we have tried not to build things until we're confident that it's right and instead simulate with things that are held together with duct tape, in particular early on so that V0 being an example, we weren't sure if we should send notifications weekly or monthly, just as one example. And so we wanted to keep as much flexibility in our system until we had had enough users go through this training and then we saw, okay, got it. People get annoyed if you contact them too frequently. So let's have a dial where admins can turn it up or down, but as a default, we go to monthly, just as an example. And if we had built all of this complicated infrastructure around a hypothesis that turned out to be.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three lessons are coming to mind. One is have a great co founder. For me, at least that was really crucial. My co founder, Anne, is the CTO. And I think having complementary skill sets for us has worked out really well. So she is just such a product-oriented builder and being able to turn her loose to these sorts of problems and let her noodle on them and make sure she has time and space to do it has been probably the biggest advantage we've had. The second is still like having a lot of conversations with the end user. So for us, again, legal, they've just pointed out all these sorts of things that don't make sense. For us, the software has to be intuitive, ideally fun, which in a compliance basis is mindfuling, but having a ton of conversations with users is really important. And I've learned that not everyone likes to talk to customers, but I really, really like it. So making our team feel really accessible such that sometimes”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or even sometimes it's against the values that the company claims they have, that employee is going to complain to the administrator. And so when we make content that's inclusive, thoughtful, brings in great research instead of receiving complaints, that administrator gets to feel like a hero might be a bit hyperbolic, but they get to feel like, hey, I brought something really thoughtful and put it in front of employees. I think for us, what we've tried to think about is where is the win-win or where are these things linked? You're absolutely right that we have to pick which problems are more important and prioritize them. And to that extent, we've actually spent a lot more time thinking about solving our admins problems because we just recognize that getting those right allows us to think about the employee experience. So ideally they are linked and you can focus on things that improve both buyers experience.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's probably similar to healthcare or something, who's the payer versus who's the end user. For us, when we train a company, we train all of their employees because usually things like code of conduct, harassment prevention are required by the whole company. And that's really neat because it means we're training a 6,000 person company. We train 6,000 people, not just a subset. But our user and who we think a lot about and the problems that we're trying to solve are truly those of the administrator, which is usually legal, sometimes shared between legal and people ops. What's nice is that the issues aren't antipathetical.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was working, which was people liked to digestible and good content, and what wasn't working, which is we didn't really have any of the back end functionality for admins built out and took that into our V1.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was really quick, but we thought we should be able to demonstrate if what we're seeing is that the space is so bad, we should be able to demonstrate value really quickly. And the classic launch such that you're embarrassed by your first product kind of lessen, like I would definitely say, I don't enjoy looking at that first product now, but what I'm really glad we did is launched it early enough such that we started to refine our hypothesis. So our hypothesis was digestible training is better than all at once because people have really short attention spans. The training also needs to be really good because these topics are inherently fascinating. So let's give them, do them justice by addressing them as such. And around that time, the Harvey Weinstein case was going on. And so we used that in one of our nudges and said, there's no reason we can't explain quid pro quo harassment with something that's in the news, something that people are already paying attention to. And we saw that people really liked that. And we took this feedback on what”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Requirements. It went from, I believe, no requirements to actually requiring every company with one or more employees to train annually. And so that's a huge shift. It means that every company needs to train. And the people off leader was smart and said, hey, this definitely impacts our portfolio companies. And so I want to make sure that they have gotten the memo and that they have a good tool to use to solve this pain point, which is they need to get compliant by October of 2019. So what we did is just conducted a pilot where we offered V0 is an excellent way to describe it because it had very little functionality to these portfolio companies and said basically the exchange of value was we'll get you compliant in a way that we think is much better than any of your other options. And in exchange, we would just love to know how bad our approach was. So we launched, I think this was about three or four weeks after my co-founder and I had actually gotten together.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stay consistent for us is we thought there's no reason training has to be this bad. Our V0 was we actually got together with a BC firm in New York primary ventures. They had a really thoughtful people ops leader and one of the, I guess, lessons of thinking about early stage building that I found useful is how conversations with smart people who really know the space. I was talking with someone recently and they said, have conversations until the marginal value goes to zero, meaning you just keep hearing the same problem statements over and over. I thought that was just a great way to think about it. Like just go talk to smart people and say like I have this idea and are all saying the same thing and you're not learning anything else, cool. Maybe it's time to try something out. So what we did is talk to this people ops leader. So we have this idea for training and we'd like to roll it out. And it happened to be around the time that New York was changing its sexual harassment training.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Practices Act issue, or something, it can be taken really seriously, meaning instead of feeling like it was swept under the rug, there was a proper investigation in which the goal is really to figure out what structurally went wrong, not just Hanks went out to dry. But if you think about the training that's available for her to say, hey, everyone at this company, we care about this, and therefore we're going to take it seriously by doing good training. That's where it breaks down because, again, employees are smart. They recognize that if you say that I care about our code of conduct, but then I give you code of conduct training that feels like it was made in the 90s, that is really hard to access. I can't do it on mobile. It looks so much worse than, for example, the sales training that we do that employee gets that what's important is sales and what is not important is code of conduct. So just thinking about what signals that leadership actually cares about this is actually incredibly important.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaning that the troops under that person thought that if there was harassment incident, it would be taken seriously, that it was a serious leadership priority, those sorts of things. It seems maybe obvious or simple that the solution is just that leadership has to care. Where I think it gets a little bit tricky is, one, of course, if leadership is actively part of the problem, that's the whole bucket of issues. Let's say that you have a leader, CEO or something, and she does actually care about these sorts of things. What tools are available to allow her to demonstrate that this is an important priority, say that she runs like a fintech startup. And if you then think about what can she do to show that code of conduct style issues acting ethically is important to her fintech company, there aren't a lot of great tools right now to allow her to do that so she could at all hands say, hey, I care about this. Of course, when there are incidents that happen, so maybe there is a foreign corrupt”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't solved the problem of why power corrupt or things like that, but I've certainly thought a lot about it and we have some great researchers we work with who provide us with incredible peer-reviewed research that tries to get at these sorts of things. One of the biggest lessons that comes through in looking through that research is that it really is all about leadership buy-in. Employees are incredibly smart and they understand what types of behaviors get someone promoted and what behaviors get someone fired. A lot of this research actually comes from the military because of data availability. And there is a study again on sexual harassment because that's one of the biggest buckets of compliance training that took a military unit and I think surveyed it over a year. And the biggest determinant of the prevalence of harassment in military units was whether the leader of that particular unit was perceived as actively caring.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had joked to me that it was like you think you're eating kale and you're actually jeweling, which I think is probably an apt description of what's going on here. The underlying kernel or issue here is that there's a lot of stuff in the workplace that's happening that isn't ethical. And this was the attempt to address that.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's just really an interesting thing to pause on to recognize that there's just a ton of issues in the workplace that have really severe business consequences and of course also have very severe personal consequences. These impact the lives, the health, and all of it of employees who have to deal with this type of behavior. That's fundamentally what compliance training is attempting to do. The point isn't that you have a certificate saying you sat through sexual harassment prevention training. The point is that it is preventing sexual harassment as an example, but there's actually no evidence to show that compliance training does that. Unfortunately, there are studies that show that it's not just that it's ineffective, but it actually produces a backlash. There's a study in sexual harassment, prevention training showing that participants have more unconscious gender bias after training than before, meaning it's actively making people worth”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that the Whatsocks framework makes a ton of sense. The core problem that this training is attempting to solve is obvious if you open up the New York Times basically on any given day. Some leader is being removed for any sort of personal indiscretion, whether it's harassment, discrimination, bullying, financial issues. Not everyone is doing the right thing. not especially hot take, but it's just important to remember that these are not solved problems and a lot of them are actually quite tricky. So an example of what this sort of training is attempting to address is the fact that in 2019 more CEOs were removed for personal indiscretions and in that bucket falls all the things that I listed versus financial shortcomings, meaning people are being removed because of their code of conduct style issues, not because they didn't need their earnings report or something like that.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Folks, just because the job market is so different than in uniform, where of course you actually cannot leave a particular posting or duty assignment without a lot of paperwork.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aspects of military leadership, which are about hierarchy, and there's certainly a place for it. But I think whenever someone's relying on their rank or the inherent power they have from a certain title or position, there are very few instances where that's a good idea. And the few instances might be if it's time sensitive, there's something very dangerous, and it's just important to listen to the leader. But in startup world, everyone has just incredible optionality. One of our engineers yesterday sent me his inbox of a bunch of poaching emails. All of these competitors are always sending or all these other startups are always looking for great engineering talent. And if I led Athena like a very stereotypical military leader where it was my way or the highway and I came in and expected people to stand up when I walked into a room, I think I would have very few talent.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feel like sometimes in the private sector military experiences kind of lauded, which I think is right in some perspectives. There's a lot of great things you can learn. I certainly wouldn't take what worked in uniform and just bring it over to startup and be like, this is going to work and be incredibly effective because they're just completely different environments. I think one of the biggest lessons that I have taken from the military is that great leaders care. And I know that that sounds incredibly simple because it is in theory, but where it's hard is in practice. I just remember being surprised when I was in uniform about this idea of servant leadership and that leaders actually exist in order to make sure that the people that they have the privilege of leading are taken care of and there's a lot of corny phrases in the military, but they get at something real about things like leaders eat last, the focus on really leadership being a privilege. I think the things that I don't take are sort of the worst”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Training really good training that signals that the military takes this thing seriously versus check the box training, which just signals to everybody that it's exactly what you think it is, which is this sort of a cover the commander kind of exercise and not impactful. And that distinction, I was just surprised to see that when I exited the military that check the box training actually existed in the private sector too.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of that, and then I found it really strange that the other bucket of training that's common in the military is what we used to call check the box training. And that was how the military would train on things like sexual harassment, because unfortunately harassment is a huge issue within the military. It's how a lot of security type training would happen, suicide prevention. And that actually looks really similar to what I'm sure you're familiar with from experience in finance of the kind of PowerPoints that you click through or everyone would pack into a hot auditorium and just be talked up by someone who is volunteer maybe that morning to conduct a certain type of training and there was no expectation that anything would change this wasn't a learning experience like airborne school where we would measure outcomes and see if you were actually good at it instead check the box training was just all about digit sit there did you get your certificate at the end so i found that dichotomy between effective”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In an active duty Army officer for about seven years deployed to Afghanistan, worked in Cambodia and Mongolia, got to do some foreign military training experiences. One of the things that directly Caused me to think about this space and to eventually found Athena was the military spends a ton of time on training. I think that often from movies or something, military looks very action oriented, but for every hour of cool stuff, there's usually 10 plus hours of training to do that thing and the ratio might even be less good. So in my time in military service,”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Annoying to even log in. If you have to leave halfway through doesn't save your progress, all of that. Signal that this is important with really nice design and then make the content fascinating. We think of consumer grade. There's no reason that training has to be a PowerPoint. It could be a podcast, it could be a comic, it could be a short form video. So essentially what we do as compliance training, but the way we do it is training in order to learn, to change behavior, to make a better workplace.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In particular, in finance, if someone told me that they added up all of the required training that they need to do, and it was just an astronomical 10 hours or something quarterly, it's just pretty significant. And when you think about the value of that time, it is large. And the other thing that is strange is that these topics are actually incredibly important. They aren't solved problems. So the space we exist in is these topics are in the news all the time. Sexual harassment, privacy issues, all of it. And what we wanted to do is reimagine training such that it would be effective, that it would actually give people tools to navigate these tricky, complicated, ever-changing issues. And the way we do it differently is digestible training over time. So think about five minutes a month, delivered via Slack or email because we want to remove all of the barriers to doing this training. So one barrier might be it's so”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Program will let you, and then at the end you get a certificate, some PDF that lives somewhere for a year or so until you have to do it all over again.”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you so much for having me. What we do is compliance training, and I would understand if anyone's reaction is, no, thank you, that sounds very boring. But what we've done is completely reimagined it, asking the guiding question, how would you train if you actually designed it to be effective versus just check a box or provide legal cover, these sorts of things? Anyone who's been in the workforce for some time has had this experience of getting an all-caps email telling you that your sexual harassment training or cybersecurity or anti-bribery, your training is about to expire and you need to go sit through an hour of just an incredibly painful experience where the slides seem dated and from the 1990s, the scenarios make no sense, the best case scenario, and sometimes they're just downright offensive or insulting. And you click through as fast as the”
2021-03-25 · Invest Like the Best · Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source