The Exchanges

Q You mentioned the time at Amazon there being so impactful, and you worked with some incredible people from, you know, David Richardson, Jeff Wiener, some of the best. I have to ask while I can, like, what were some of your biggest lessons from your time at Amazon and from working with David and Jeff, maybe?

A I think one of the biggest learnings I had from Amazon was the way in which an organization can align around a set of core values. Well, Amazon calls them leadership principles to really permeate every aspect of the company's culture and decision making. So at Amazon, you're exposed to the leadership principles from the first second that you interview for the job, because the entire interview process is based around those 10 core principles. Two, every single decision you ultimately make, big and small, as well as, like, the day-to-day comportment of every employee. Like, everyone wants to live and breathe the values. And so when I left Amazon, I wanted to bring that learning with me to whatever I started next, and I had a series of conversations with someone who I consider a dear mentor of mine, who's David Richardson, the VP of Serverless at AWS, and, you know, he's a long-time Amazonian. He Invented many of the core services at AWS that people know and love today, and one of the things that he told me that was so eye-opening is he was like, I always saw Amazon's values as a way, a framework for disagreement. It enables employees to lean on the values to advocate for what they think is right, even when it is counter to what their leadership may think. And I never thought about values as being a mechanism to kind of level the playing field between an employee and a C-level exe…

AI assessment note: “one of the biggest learnings I had from Amazon was the way in which an organization can align”

Q I'm totally with you there. The challenge is, though, with these profiles, it's really hard to hire them. And I spoke, I spoke to Chris at Index before the show, and he said, you've got to talk to Linda about the long poach. So what is the long poach? And I guess, how have you used it as a talent acquisition strategy?

A Yeah, so maybe this gets to how my co-founders and I got together. So similar to how I got my job at Madrona by reaching out cold on LinkedIn, I met my co-founders on Tinder for Enterprise on LinkedIn. Um, they, Francis and Viraj were both just cold messages that I reached out because I saw their profile and thought they had superpowers that I didn't have and a really interesting background, and The long poach story here is that I reached out to Francis and Baraj on LinkedIn, and they ignored me. I didn't hear back from them at all. It wasn't out of malice. Francis and his wife Lisa had just had their first kid, and he had just left Facebook to be a full-time dad, and Baraj was kind of in the throes of a very busy and important job as the technical advisor to the CEO of the last company he was at, and they didn't respond, and so a couple weeks or months Past. And I continued to kind of make progress on my own, talking to customers, doing tons of customer discovery. And when I felt like I had a new level of insight, or I had reached kind of a plateau in terms of progress, I reached back out to them, and I would update them, right? I would say, hey, would love to catch up again. Here's all the things that I've learned since the last time I messaged you, not knowing at all if they were even seeing my message. And I think persistence here, Pays off over time, but also showing that …

AI assessment note: “The long poach story here is that I reached out to Francis and Baraj”

Q You mentioned the time at Amazon there being so impactful, and you worked with some incredible people from, you know, David Richardson, Jeff Wiener, some of the best. I have to ask while I can, like, what were some of your biggest lessons from your time at Amazon and from working with David and Jeff, maybe?

A I think one of the biggest learnings I had from Amazon was the way in which an organization can align around a set of core values. Well, Amazon calls them leadership principles to really permeate every aspect of the company's culture and decision making. So at Amazon, you're exposed to the leadership principles from the first second that you interview for the job, because the entire interview process is based around those 10 core principles. Two, every single decision you ultimately make, big and small, as well as, like, the day-to-day comportment of every employee. Like, everyone wants to live and breathe the values. And so when I left Amazon, I wanted to bring that learning with me to whatever I started next, and I had a series of conversations with someone who I consider a dear mentor of mine, who's David Richardson, the VP of Serverless at AWS, and, you know, he's a long-time Amazonian. He Invented many of the core services at AWS that people know and love today, and one of the things that he told me that was so eye-opening is he was like, I always saw Amazon's values as a way, a framework for disagreement. It enables employees to lean on the values to advocate for what they think is right, even when it is counter to what their leadership may think. And I never thought about values as being a mechanism to kind of level the playing field between an employee and a C-level exe…

AI assessment note: “one of the biggest learnings I had from Amazon was the way in which”

Q I'm totally with you there. The challenge is, though, with these profiles, it's really hard to hire them. And I spoke, I spoke to Chris at Index before the show, and he said, you've got to talk to Linda about the long poach. So what is the long poach? And I guess, how have you used it as a talent acquisition strategy?

A Yeah, so maybe this gets to how my co-founders and I got together. So similar to how I got my job at Madrona by reaching out cold on LinkedIn, I met my co-founders on Tinder for Enterprise on LinkedIn. Um, they, Francis and Viraj were both just cold messages that I reached out because I saw their profile and thought they had superpowers that I didn't have and a really interesting background, and The long poach story here is that I reached out to Francis and Baraj on LinkedIn, and they ignored me. I didn't hear back from them at all. It wasn't out of malice. Francis and his wife Lisa had just had their first kid, and he had just left Facebook to be a full-time dad, and Baraj was kind of in the throes of a very busy and important job as the technical advisor to the CEO of the last company he was at, and they didn't respond, and so a couple weeks or months Past. And I continued to kind of make progress on my own, talking to customers, doing tons of customer discovery. And when I felt like I had a new level of insight, or I had reached kind of a plateau in terms of progress, I reached back out to them, and I would update them, right? I would say, hey, would love to catch up again. Here's all the things that I've learned since the last time I messaged you, not knowing at all if they were even seeing my message. And I think persistence here, Pays off over time, but also showing that …

AI assessment note: “The long poach story here is that I reached out to Francis and Baraj”

Q I do want to start, though, with a little bit of context. So over fifty million dollars in funding, some of the best in the business behind you, and coming out of stealth now. So tell me, what was the founding moment for you with Common Room, and what was that, like, aha unlock?

A I think one of the biggest things for me is when I was starting out as a founder, I started Scoured podcasts and articles, reading stories about aha moments, and kind of now being on the other side of it a little bit, I've realized that aha moments aren't really a moment, and for me, I think there were really three ingredients to my aha moment in building common room that happened over the course of probably years. So the first one was after a stint at a late stage startup in San Francisco, I moved back to Seattle, didn't know what I was supposed to be doing, cold messaged someone on LinkedIn, his name was David Rosenthal. He's now the co-host of a popular tech podcast called Acquired, but at the time, he was a principal investor at Madrona Venture Group, so one thing led to another, and I ended up as an early stage investor, which was something I never planned for, and I think one of the great aspects of early stage investing, and I was bad at many other parts of it, so I have deep admiration for investors, is that you could really take time to dive deep into any topic that you thought was interesting, and so I took a lot of time to To learn about open source and open core in the developer space, really just like inspired by kind of the stories of open and collaborative software development, the models that were pioneered by companies like Red Hat and Zensource and Cloudera an…

AI assessment note: “aha moments aren't really a moment, and for me, I think there were really three ingredients”

Q Okay, very serious one here, but I, I spoke to Francis, and he asked about, bluntly, bananas and cheese. So why the hatred of bananas and cheese?

A I don't like bananas because of the way that they sound when they're being chewed, and I don't like who I am in that situation because I hate the person who's Doing the chewing, and I don't like that. On cheese, you know, when I first moved to America, I thought it was really weird to have dairy on your meat, and dairy on your raw leafed vegetables, and dairy all over the place, and dairy on your cake. Like, the way it was used was very, very controversial for me. I used to pick, like, cheese off of my pizza, which, you know, I don't do anymore, but I've now accepted cheese. I've come to a new, I don't know, acceptance that cheese is, like, a big thing.

AI assessment note: “I don't like bananas because of the way that they sound when they're being chewed”

Q as you said there, kind of the dogged persistence in terms of doing the customer discovery, updating them, when you're not getting responses, when you're not getting the way that you want it to go, what do you think, like, honestly, personally, gives you the motivation to just continuously keep going for it in such a positive way? Like, what gives you that when most people would just give up?

A This kind of goes way back. I'm an immigrant. I moved to America from China when I was five. I'm an only child. You know, I grew up with pretty much my two parents, hardworking, and I think they taught me the value of persistence, and as a result of my persistence and my kind of determination to achieve my goals, I've gotten the reps in. I've seen how being persistent and not giving up has led me to achieve things that I didn't think were possible, including Changing careers, going to a school I never thought I'd get into. It's almost like sports, right? You practice, and then you lose. You practice, and one day you win, and now you know that hard work and practice leads to sometimes winning outcomes, and so when you lose, you're okay with that because you know that all you have to do is practice more. So to me, persistence is as much about that kind of mentality of practice where I could get a hundred no's, and I'm good because I know that I learned from each and every one of them, and Those a hundred no's are going to get me to the yes. So I don't have a scarcity concept here. The world is large, and to me, I optimize for learning along the way, which means that you will fail. Like, there is no winning without losing.

AI assessment note: “they taught me the value of persistence, and as a result”

Q Who was the first angel in common room, and how did that check come about?

A I think the first angel was Dylan Field at Figma. It came about because he He obviously is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, which is one of the greatest community first product-led growth stories of recent years, and he has such a conviction and passion around building community as not only, like, a way to enable adoption of Figma, but also to provide a platform on which people in developing countries or people who are just starting their career can build a set of Expertise and skills that will enable them to take it with them in their career, and so I think he was really passionate about the space, and he had done some investing in sort of adjacent companies that may not have necessarily worked out, and he thought that we could be one of the companies that could kind of take it further, and so I think Dylan was our first angel.

AI assessment note: “I think the first angel was Dylan Field at Figma.”

Q to touch on the compassion element, though, Because you can be compassionate, but then honestly, my trouble is, I'm so freaking compassionate that I'm, like, fluffy. I'm like a Brit that's like, you know, Linda, you're brilliant, you're brilliant, you're brilliant, but this is terrible, this is terrible, this is terrible. Like, how do you think about delivering feedback, commentary in a compassionate way that's also effective and directing candor?

A Yeah, I'm still working on that myself, but one of the things that I'm not a huge fan of is the shit sandwich. Which is this notion that you want to say something nice, and then, you know, give a direct piece of feedback, and then say something nice again. That's not really how I want to communicate, and so we kind of have this rule on the team that, like, we're not going to give feedback as a shit sandwich. We're just gonna give feedback directly and transparently and honestly. You know, we'll celebrate our wins as a team, and we'll celebrate the things that we mess up on as a team. So that's kind of how I think about it. I don't think it's antithetical to To compassion. In fact, to me, it's just a more efficient way of communicating.

AI assessment note: “We're just gonna give feedback directly and transparently and honestly.”

Q Can I ask a weird one, but it's like, what makes a good value? Like, strive for excellence, as you said. Sounds great, I love it, but like, it's quite, General. Like, how do you think about, like, what makes great values in terms of the construction?

A Yeah, so you can get into some wordsmithing here, but I think it's about a core fundamental point that you can all as a team and as leadership align on as being, like, a primitive. So strive for simplicity. I think that there's a huge urge for really smart driven people to oftentimes overcomplicate a problem. It's easier to kind of start going down the path of how is this problem so complex versus taking a step back and thinking, why can the answer be so simple? And so for that value, it's generic, but we use it very specifically, right? We use it in situations where we feel like we're overcomplicating a problem, where five people are in a room, we've talked for an hour about something, no decision has been made, and why? If you take a step back, It's really not that hard to make a decision. It may not be the right one, it might not be the best one, but it's really not that hard to make one, and so I think that value is really about, like, can we strip out all the intellectual sort of massaging that we do day to day about all the complexities in the world, and just focus on making it simple.

AI assessment note: “a core fundamental point that you can all as a team and as leadership align on”

Q spoke to Viraj before the show, and he said that you're incredible, and one of your superpowers is your ability to change your mind at such speed when presented with maybe reason and data. I'd love to hear, how do you think about, like, one's ability to change one's mind, and what does it require for you? Because you also don't want to be too flippant in changing your mind.

A So, I... Process data in this way where everything that I receive as inputs, I file away. Like, I organize them, and I file them away into my brain bank. Maybe I take action on it at some point, but maybe I don't, and they kind of just sit there latent. And so, while it may seem like to my team that I am such a rational person who thought we were doing one thing, and then when presented with a piece of data, I'm now like, okay, yes, that's the path. In reality, it's because Because that new piece of data has been filed with all its little data friends into a file folder that has gotten so fat over time that it's almost impossible for me to not ignore it, and now I know with confidence that this is the path. So that's kind of how I process things, and I would say no decision I've ever made, as potentially in the moment surprising as they have been, have been surprises to me, if that makes sense.

AI assessment note: “into a file folder that has gotten so fat over time that it's almost impossible”

Q terms of, like, you know, values being efficient and effective, transparency across the org has got to be really prominent, actually, for it to To distill down through the org. You've said to me before about the courage to speak transparently being a core value. You know, I love that, and I'm a big proponent of it. How do you feel about that, I guess, kind of vulnerability within leadership?

A Yes, so naturally, by my personality, I'm a very transparent and direct person, and I think that transparency and directness are often poised as an antithetical to, like, Empathy or compassion, which my investor and advisor Jeff Wiener defines as being empathy plus action, but I think that they're actually two parts of the same whole in that one of the most compassionate things you can do in life or in work is to speak the truth and to speak it transparently. Even when it's as difficult as letting someone go, one of the most compassionate things you can do is let someone go who's Not going to succeed in the current role that they're in. But I think that while speaking directly and transparently is the what, being compassionate is the how, and that's something that's incredibly difficult, much harder than simply speaking directly. It's something that I work on every day. I mean, I'll give you a tangible example. Like last week on the team, some stuff slipped, and I spoke very directly to one of my awesome teammates, and I wasn't wrong, but I definitely spoke in an intense and direct way, and so in that moment, I failed on compassion, and so, you know, I think they're two parts of the same whole, but in practice, they can often be at odds, and yeah, it's tough, but you can't have the what without the how, right? At the end of the day, it's how we do things that really matters.

AI assessment note: “while speaking directly and transparently is the what, being compassionate is the how”

Q raise funding from, A, the incredible people it has done, but also in quite quick succession in terms of the funding rounds? We obviously spoke in your first funding round, and then luckily for me it was Much quicker for your second. But like, what do you think allowed you to be so effective in terms of that process? And I have to give credit for Chris for that one.

A I think that it comes down to our relentless focus on the customer pain point that we're looking to solve, and spending almost a hundred percent of our time and resources on that. You may not know this, but we didn't have a website. We hadn't updated our LinkedIns. We had done zero marketing up until we announced Our Series B. And it's not because we were sitting there not doing anything. We existed, but we were having very focused relationship building conversations with innovative organizations and companies that wanted to seek a better world for what community engagement looked like at their companies. And so by doing that, what we ended up doing was we ended up, I think, building a better product for Faster. That our customers could get hands-on quickly and start seeing real value out of common room. So building features is one thing. Getting value out of a piece of software is a completely different thing, and we focused on that maniacally. So I think with respect to funding, we just wanted to, first of all, both of our rounds have been opportunistic, and we're working with investors who had a deep, deep experience and thesis in the space, so it was very, very easy to kind of Say yes to the dress. But secondarily, we have some incredible customers that we're working with today who are going to be running their kind of community critical operations on top of common room, an…

AI assessment note: “I think that it comes down to our relentless focus on the customer pain point”

Q I mean, if you only need a therapist to help you with books, you're doing pretty well. I mean, tell me, what's the right way to view competition?

A Okay, I don't think people are gonna like this answer, but I genuinely don't think for what we're trying to do, any company at all is the competition. I really see our competition as inertia, as the way that companies are already doing things, as human nature. That's a terrible answer, but That's what we're up against. We're up against organizational change. We're up against challenging companies to think about servicing their customers, building their product innovation in a totally different way, which is around being community first. And that, to me, is the competition. And if there's other companies in the space who share this same mission with us, then I don't necessarily think of them as our competitors. I think of them as, I guess, frenemies. Yeah. Okay, don't say that. That's how I think about it, and if we all succeed, then this was a big enough market and a big enough need where we can all exist. I think it's far too early for me to be worried about any competitor, large or small, so I just don't spend too much time thinking about it.

AI assessment note: “I really see our competition as inertia, as the way that companies are already doing”

Q Can I ask a weird one, but it's like, what makes a good value? Like, strive for excellence, as you said. Sounds great, I love it, but like, it's quite, General. Like, how do you think about, like, what makes great values in terms of the construction?

A Yeah, so you can get into some wordsmithing here, but I think it's about a core fundamental point that you can all as a team and as leadership align on as being, like, a primitive. So strive for simplicity. I think that there's a huge urge for really smart driven people to oftentimes overcomplicate a problem. It's easier to kind of start going down the path of how is this problem so complex versus taking a step back and thinking, why can the answer be so simple? And so for that value, it's generic, but we use it very specifically, right? We use it in situations where we feel like we're overcomplicating a problem, where five people are in a room, we've talked for an hour about something, no decision has been made, and why? If you take a step back, It's really not that hard to make a decision. It may not be the right one, it might not be the best one, but it's really not that hard to make one, and so I think that value is really about, like, can we strip out all the intellectual sort of massaging that we do day to day about all the complexities in the world, and just focus on making it simple.

AI assessment note: “a core fundamental point that you can all as a team and as leadership align on”

Q terms of the feedback, the way you deliver it, that's a little bit in part down to the composition of the team and the types of people that you hire. I'm really intrigued. In terms of, like, the hiring decisions, you decided to only bring on senior and it's Experienced people. It's a little bit unusual of a strategic decision to make so early. Why did you decide this first?

A Yeah, so it's definitely not a perpetual plan. It is our near-term plan and our plan so far, so probably until the end of this year we'll be looking to bring on board folks who are experienced, and we did this because I think a couple reasons. The first is we are very much And also us not being able to ever be in the same room, right? Because when you are starting out your career, so much of what you learn is through osmosis. You know, I think of the most critical moments in my early career were just being there like a fly on the wall when my VP of finance was having a conversation with the CFO at the desk next to me. And we realized early on that that just wasn't going to be possible because of COVID. And so we did not want to put a super ambitious, Person who's just starting out their career into an isolated room and put the onus of reaching out to folks on the team and getting help on them. I think the second piece of it is there's this myth around startups that you need to be a college dropout, or you're this kind of natural born savant, and you know, you're just a team of incredible 20 year olds who have a dream. In reality, you know, I think it's more about can you solve customer problems? Can you build amazing software? Can you provide educational marketing? Can you go to market in a way that is good for your customers, but also good for your business? And to me, all of …

AI assessment note: “we did this because I think a couple reasons.”

Q spoke to Viraj before the show, and he said that you're incredible, and one of your superpowers is your ability to change your mind at such speed when presented with maybe reason and data. I'd love to hear, how do you think about, like, one's ability to change one's mind, and what does it require for you? Because you also don't want to be too flippant in changing your mind.

A So, I... Process data in this way where everything that I receive as inputs, I file away. Like, I organize them, and I file them away into my brain bank. Maybe I take action on it at some point, but maybe I don't, and they kind of just sit there latent. And so, while it may seem like to my team that I am such a rational person who thought we were doing one thing, and then when presented with a piece of data, I'm now like, okay, yes, that's the path. In reality, it's because Because that new piece of data has been filed with all its little data friends into a file folder that has gotten so fat over time that it's almost impossible for me to not ignore it, and now I know with confidence that this is the path. So that's kind of how I process things, and I would say no decision I've ever made, as potentially in the moment surprising as they have been, have been surprises to me, if that makes sense.

AI assessment note: “In reality, it's because Because that new piece of data has been filed”

Q enter it knowing the importance of it, But when it comes to structuring questions and really extracting insight and value from it, bluntly it's a little bit too generalized. So how do you think about, like, the right questions to ask and the right way to ask them in the right tone? What does that look like in terms of structure for you to extract the most value and data?

A Yeah, so this is the tough part, right? Like, everyone knows writing surveys are really, really hard because you have to kind of wordsmith and get it just right. I don't index on that piece of it at all. I focus on two main things. Who is my customer? Like as a person, what do they want for their team and their work? And then secondarily, like, what are their pain points and what's getting in the way of the things that they want to do? And I think when you focus on those two things, then you're asking about problems. You're not asking your customers to give feature requests. You're not asking them to propose solutions because that's our job. We want to listen to the problems and then we need to go and innovate on behalf of our customers to figure out and propose a plausible solution. Sometimes that can look like, Product features, and sometimes it can look like sharing knowledge across a set of organizations that all have the same question, right? It can look like a lot of different things, but we never ask our customers for features. We ask them to tell us their problems, and that's how we always start.

AI assessment note: “I focus on two main things. Who is my customer?... what are their pain points”

Q get no's or you fail at something, say, you know, Harry on compliance, are not a great match. But my point is like, If you fail at something, how do you determine whether you should be persistent and keep going until you get it, or be like, you know what? I'm never gonna be very good at this. I'm gonna delegate. How do you think about that? Delegate versus not.

A This is something I'm definitely still working on, but I also realize that one of the biggest parts about growing as a human is realizing what you're good at and what you're not good at, and being okay with the things that you're not good at. They don't make you Less valuable. They don't make you a worse person. I am horrible at administrative tasks and logistics and everything there. I've missed four flights in my life just because I got confused about the time. I've booked hotel rooms on the wrong dates. I've lost my luggage multiple times. I make my own life very, very difficult. Now, I realize that I'm bad at those things, And I'm okay delegating. Like, I just got a business administrator who's going to be my executive assistant, and I always hesitated to have an EA. Like, it felt like, to me, like, who am I? Who am I to think that I should have an EA? But now, meeting the right person who loves to organize and handle a list of tasks with the utmost authority, I'm like, yes, you are who I've been looking for my whole life. And that's just one simple example of just being okay with the things that you're not good at and Leaning into the things that you are good at, and knowing that that's enough.

AI assessment note: “I realize that I'm bad at those things, And I'm okay delegating.”

Q terms of, like, you know, values being efficient and effective, transparency across the org has got to be really prominent, actually, for it to To distill down through the org. You've said to me before about the courage to speak transparently being a core value. You know, I love that, and I'm a big proponent of it. How do you feel about that, I guess, kind of vulnerability within leadership?

A Yes, so naturally, by my personality, I'm a very transparent and direct person, and I think that transparency and directness are often poised as an antithetical to, like, Empathy or compassion, which my investor and advisor Jeff Wiener defines as being empathy plus action, but I think that they're actually two parts of the same whole in that one of the most compassionate things you can do in life or in work is to speak the truth and to speak it transparently. Even when it's as difficult as letting someone go, one of the most compassionate things you can do is let someone go who's Not going to succeed in the current role that they're in. But I think that while speaking directly and transparently is the what, being compassionate is the how, and that's something that's incredibly difficult, much harder than simply speaking directly. It's something that I work on every day. I mean, I'll give you a tangible example. Like last week on the team, some stuff slipped, and I spoke very directly to one of my awesome teammates, and I wasn't wrong, but I definitely spoke in an intense and direct way, and so in that moment, I failed on compassion, and so, you know, I think they're two parts of the same whole, but in practice, they can often be at odds, and yeah, it's tough, but you can't have the what without the how, right? At the end of the day, it's how we do things that really matters.

AI assessment note: “while speaking directly and transparently is the what, being compassionate is the how”

Q raise funding from, A, the incredible people it has done, but also in quite quick succession in terms of the funding rounds? We obviously spoke in your first funding round, and then luckily for me it was Much quicker for your second. But like, what do you think allowed you to be so effective in terms of that process? And I have to give credit for Chris for that one.

A I think that it comes down to our relentless focus on the customer pain point that we're looking to solve, and spending almost a hundred percent of our time and resources on that. You may not know this, but we didn't have a website. We hadn't updated our LinkedIns. We had done zero marketing up until we announced Our Series B. And it's not because we were sitting there not doing anything. We existed, but we were having very focused relationship building conversations with innovative organizations and companies that wanted to seek a better world for what community engagement looked like at their companies. And so by doing that, what we ended up doing was we ended up, I think, building a better product for Faster. That our customers could get hands-on quickly and start seeing real value out of common room. So building features is one thing. Getting value out of a piece of software is a completely different thing, and we focused on that maniacally. So I think with respect to funding, we just wanted to, first of all, both of our rounds have been opportunistic, and we're working with investors who had a deep, deep experience and thesis in the space, so it was very, very easy to kind of Say yes to the dress. But secondarily, we have some incredible customers that we're working with today who are going to be running their kind of community critical operations on top of common room, an…

AI assessment note: “both of our rounds have been opportunistic, and we're working with investors who had a deep”

Q I mean, truly unique. I love it, and, uh, I've gotta be honest, I'm a massive cheese fan. Cheese and red wine is totally my game, straight down the fairway. Tell me, what's the most challenging element of your role today with Common Room?

A The most challenging element is the space between the greatness that I know that we can achieve and the work that it's gonna take for To get there, both from a team perspective, but also from, like, a personal perspective. I have to transition and learn how to go from, you know, someone who was an only child who always got straight A's and, like, did everything on my own, to someone who can teach and coach and inspire and lead, and it's a tough transition. I probably need a therapist. Maybe I'll get one after this conversation, but I think it requires, like, everyone on the team to, like, dig deep and kind of Learn more about themselves and challenge themselves to, like, reach something that they may not have ever reached before, but also, like, we need to grow quickly. Like, we are more than doubling our team this year, and so how can we do all of that while still growing and, like, never dropping the ball on our customers? I think above, like, all else, the trust of our customers is the most important thing.

AI assessment note: “The most challenging element is the space between the greatness that I know”

Q get no's or you fail at something, say, you know, Harry on compliance, are not a great match. But my point is like, If you fail at something, how do you determine whether you should be persistent and keep going until you get it, or be like, you know what? I'm never gonna be very good at this. I'm gonna delegate. How do you think about that? Delegate versus not.

A This is something I'm definitely still working on, but I also realize that one of the biggest parts about growing as a human is realizing what you're good at and what you're not good at, and being okay with the things that you're not good at. They don't make you Less valuable. They don't make you a worse person. I am horrible at administrative tasks and logistics and everything there. I've missed four flights in my life just because I got confused about the time. I've booked hotel rooms on the wrong dates. I've lost my luggage multiple times. I make my own life very, very difficult. Now, I realize that I'm bad at those things, And I'm okay delegating. Like, I just got a business administrator who's going to be my executive assistant, and I always hesitated to have an EA. Like, it felt like, to me, like, who am I? Who am I to think that I should have an EA? But now, meeting the right person who loves to organize and handle a list of tasks with the utmost authority, I'm like, yes, you are who I've been looking for my whole life. And that's just one simple example of just being okay with the things that you're not good at and Leaning into the things that you are good at, and knowing that that's enough.

AI assessment note: “realizing what you're good at and what you're not good at, and being okay”

Q I do want to start, though, with a little bit of context. So over fifty million dollars in funding, some of the best in the business behind you, and coming out of stealth now. So tell me, what was the founding moment for you with Common Room, and what was that, like, aha unlock?

A I think one of the biggest things for me is when I was starting out as a founder, I started Scoured podcasts and articles, reading stories about aha moments, and kind of now being on the other side of it a little bit, I've realized that aha moments aren't really a moment, and for me, I think there were really three ingredients to my aha moment in building common room that happened over the course of probably years. So the first one was after a stint at a late stage startup in San Francisco, I moved back to Seattle, didn't know what I was supposed to be doing, cold messaged someone on LinkedIn, his name was David Rosenthal. He's now the co-host of a popular tech podcast called Acquired, but at the time, he was a principal investor at Madrona Venture Group, so one thing led to another, and I ended up as an early stage investor, which was something I never planned for, and I think one of the great aspects of early stage investing, and I was bad at many other parts of it, so I have deep admiration for investors, is that you could really take time to dive deep into any topic that you thought was interesting, and so I took a lot of time to To learn about open source and open core in the developer space, really just like inspired by kind of the stories of open and collaborative software development, the models that were pioneered by companies like Red Hat and Zensource and Cloudera an…

AI assessment note: “aha moments aren't really a moment, and for me, I think there were really three ingredients”

Q Yeah, no, I, I totally agree with you, and I like that about the happy hour stories of tomorrow. It makes the shit that you're in now seem a lot better. Tell me, final one, how do you think about the next five years for you and for Common Room? Paint that picture for me.

A I think in the next five years, we'd love to inspire, encourage, challenge more organizations, not just the amazing ones today that we work with and, you know, who are already bought into kind of this community first ethos to become more community driven, to think about how they can organize their customer facing interactions to be authentic and build relationships with people, not accounts, to view their practitioners as their biggest advocates and their biggest evangelists and the ones that need to be enabled. And if we can do that and service, you know, the amazing companies that are doing that already today and struggling to do so with existing tooling, but also expand and help other companies think that way that aren't doing that today, I think that would be success for us.

AI assessment note: “in the next five years, we'd love to inspire, encourage, challenge more organizations”

Q Tell me, the favorite book and why I need to read more, what do you recommend?

A Oh man, this is hard. I was a literature major, so I feel an allergy reaction when I'm asked what my favorite book is, because a couple different things here. The first is I have way too many favorite books, and I don't always have reasons for why I like them. Because books are such, like, your love of a book is also a function of, like, who you were when you read it and all this stuff. But secondly, I hate reading books now. I don't really read, because for most of my childhood, and all through college, and even beyond, I read, like, five books a week, and I'm, it's just a place I don't actually want to return to all that often.

AI assessment note: “I feel an allergy reaction when I'm asked what my favorite book is”