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A podcast about fascinating professionals, how they got to where they are and where they’re going from the lens HR, Recruitment and People Operations hosted by Martin Hauck.
Martin Hauck (01:39)
All right, cool. All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of From a People Perspective. I'm your host, Martin Haag, and today we've got Rebecca Price from Primary Ventures. Thanks for joining us today.
Rebecca Price (01:51)
Thank you for inviting me.
Martin Hauck (01:53)
You're ⁓ the you've had a super interesting career. I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and obviously I want to hear it hear it from from you first and we're going to dive into that but it's somewhat of a strange tradition but ⁓ I like to do some icebreakers first. So as you can tell from behind me I'm a big music guy and my first question for you is if you were
Only able to listen to one musical artist or album for the rest of time. What are you what are you listening to?
Rebecca Price (02:29)
I'd say that's a good one. ⁓ I would have to say, and this may go, this may be controversial, but I absolutely love Taylor Swift and maybe that's me having young daughters. ⁓ But I absolutely think like she's just such a modern poet. She keeps reinventing herself. Her music is...
Martin Hauck (02:40)
You
Rebecca Price (02:52)
You can connect with whatever emotion you're feeling. If you want to bop, if you want to feel sad, if you want to feel angry. So right now, I think in our house and what I'm leaning towards is Taylor Swift. She actually has a new album coming out next weekend. So everyone in our house is looking forward to that.
Martin Hauck (03:06)
Nice.
This is, this is your show, Rebecca. You're supposed to be plugging yourself, not Taylor. Come on. That's that's awesome. See my girls haven't gotten into Swifty yet. They're huge into K-pop demon hunter and like all those songs. but I imagine there's going to be a swift. They're there. I I'm singing them out loud these days. ⁓ it's, imagine that Swifty era for them is, is going to happen at some point.
Rebecca Price (03:21)
Yeah, those are very catchy.
Yeah. ⁓
Martin Hauck (03:34)
because she's kind of timeless now. Like there's, can't do that much work without capturing the generations that follow, so to speak. So that's a good answer. That's probably my favorite answer so far because her work's pretty diverse. When you
Rebecca Price (03:44)
Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, and let's not
forget she's an amazing businesswoman, entrepreneur, right? She's a role model too, I think, for a lot of people, like women in business or just people in business. ⁓
Martin Hauck (03:56)
There you go.
When you
said modern poet, I was like, haven't given her enough of a chance as like a musician. So I'm like, I might, I'm going to turn on some, some sweats. ⁓
Rebecca Price (04:10)
Read her lyrics
because when I've spoken with men who maybe don't vibe with the music, I encourage them like start listening to the lyrics. I could really jam out on making some recommendations, but we can do that after the podcast.
Martin Hauck (04:19)
Okay.
Yeah, no,
no, cool. All right. ⁓ And in the next, ⁓ I'll be in New York next week. And you're you're in New York, you've been in New York for quite some time your whole life.
Rebecca Price (04:39)
No, I grew up in the Midwest and have been on the East Coast since college.
Martin Hauck (04:42)
Gotcha. Okay. So, ⁓ yeah, you've you imagine like, I'll be there next week. What's what's a place I've got to go check out food wise. That isn't like full blown touristy but like this is the spot it's kind of hidden like what's what's your go to recommendation for for hipsters like me.
Rebecca Price (05:03)
Yeah, I would say to try out like some sort of like market either like a Chelsea market or like a Union Square market where you could kind of go booth by booth. If you could hit the Union Square farmers market, it actually has a lot of like local from like upstate New York or Pennsylvania, ⁓ like honey, fruits, vegetables, produce, you know, things that like are from local farms and then because I also love to cook and so you can kind of
procure those local ingredients or like munch your way, snack your way through the market. It's a really fun new art experience.
Martin Hauck (05:36)
Nice.
Nice. Nice. Thank you. Perfect. All right. So I'm set and I've got a stat that gives me so many options as opposed to just one. So you've given me optionality. Thank you. ⁓ all right. I would love. So you, you started life started in the Midwest and you moved your way to the city. ⁓ how, how did you, you know, it looks like you started off in
the people and culture side of things. So when you move to Johnson and Johnson and you started your career in health care, but give us a high level overview of your career and help us get to where you are now.
Rebecca Price (06:13)
Yeah, actually, I had a slight chapter before J &J. So growing up, I always played sports. played athletics in high school and in college. And I actually was always interested in teams and how teams perform. And particularly, I thought I was going to be a psychologist or a sports psychologist. So I studied psychology and nutrition at Penn. So was in Philadelphia.
And I actually had a mentor at that time to say, like, rather than going from undergraduate to getting a PhD in psychology, I recommend you just get some work experience, kind of learn a little about yourself because it's kind of a big leap to going into getting a PhD. so kind of threw my hat in the ring and got a job offer from the advisory board, which is in Washington, D.C. It's a
healthcare consulting company. And it was at the advisory board where we were doing research for hospitals and health systems that I started to really see how psychology and leadership can impact the performance of business and systems. And it was a mentor from the advisory board who recommended.
studying organizational psychology. So rather than the psychology of individual humans, organizational psychology was the psychology of like how people come together and perform. It was a field that I didn't know about at that time until I was introduced to it. So what brought me to New York was getting my master's at Columbia in organizational psychology, which was absolutely like the best two years. I loved every single class. I really didn't know it was going to take me into the HR field, but I knew it was a degree that
I was excited about going to each class and learning about what was being taught, which is my recommendation to a lot of young people when they're like, should I get a master's degree in X, Y, or Z? And I always say like, the world will keep changing, business will keep changing, technology will keep evolving. But if you follow and study the things that you love and are passionate about, you'll always be able to find a job that you enjoy. ⁓ And so that was true for me. I studied organizational psychology and it was from there that I...
Martin Hauck (07:59)
Hmm.
Rebecca Price (08:14)
got the opportunity to join the Johnson & Johnson HR rotational program. I never had a job in HR. There's actually, as you know, and the listeners to the show knows, multiple functions that fall under the umbrella of HR. And this rotational program gave me the opportunity to work across all the functions and go really deep in these short pockets of time to learn about all the different aspects of the function.
Martin Hauck (08:19)
Right.
And what
would you say that's what would you say has carried true like you're you've you've taken organizational psychology, I imagine at the time, it could probably feel pretty broad. And like, what is this? And what's this going to get me out of school to a certain extent? And if I'm wrong there, by all means, correct me on that. But I guess my question is, what like remains to hold true like still to this day in terms of what you learned back then?
Rebecca Price (09:06)
Yeah, I think that everyone can be great in some context and it is about finding that context for everyone. So what job, what role, what team, what company, what culture. And if I ever see someone who's not operating at their peak potential, I don't actually think there's something wrong with that person. I actually think there's something wrong with the context. And I always felt that way, you know, whether it was when I was playing sports.
Martin Hauck (09:16)
Yeah.
Rebecca Price (09:34)
or whether I was thinking about what college to go to, right? I think there's a lot of good schools we have to find a fit. And whether I'm coaching people or working with teams, you know, it's about finding the right role for you, where you can be like your best version of yourself.
Martin Hauck (09:46)
Mm-hmm.
Gotcha. ⁓ And so you come out of you come out of there and you're in Johnson and Johnson through the rotational program, which I imagine is pretty comprehensive and thorough and gives you what are what are you thinking? And how do get into the the sort of ecosystem and get into the like the senior people leader roles that you've gotten?
Rebecca Price (10:13)
Yeah, you know, in each chapter of my career, like when I was in it, like I was in it. There was never this master roadmap of like, and then I'm going to do whatever next. And actually I started at Johnson and Johnson, the tech ecosystem was very young, particularly on the East coast. Tech in New York didn't exist like it does today. Like on the West coast, it was starting to emerge. ⁓ But actually there was this moment where I was on parental leave with my younger daughter.
Right before I went out on leave, I was in a total rewards role where Johnson and Johnson had just acquired a company. And part of my job into this &A integration was to create a proposal to take the employees in the acquiring company and map them to the Johnson and Johnson compensation framework. ⁓ I don't know those of you who understand compensation, you have to like map jobs based on role.
Martin Hauck (10:59)
Hmm.
Rebecca Price (11:05)
And then each role would have like a compensation band and we would have to do some analytics around like, they higher or lower coming from this other company into the J and J framework? And then what would be a proposal to transition? So it was like 10,000 employees. It was a big project. I learned a lot about total rewards, have a massive appreciation for that function. But the story goes that like I was pregnant. I went out on leave and I came back four months later and my team was still working on this same.
project still in the same spreadsheet, still doing pivot tables, still making power points and presentations to the comp committee of J And I get it, it's a massive project and a massive organization. But for me, I had this light bulb moment. I had a three-year-old, I had a newborn, I was commuting pretty far for work. And I was just thinking like, you know, I knew I wanted to keep working, but I also felt like if I'm going to leave my two children.
at home and go to work, I wanted to really feel more impact. And that's no disrespect to, I think, the people in large companies. Like, I think that the work that I did there and the impact that I had and the mentors that I had were absolutely foundational to the success I had. But I just wanted more pace and more speed. And I didn't want a project to take four months. I'd rather it take four weeks. And at that time, my husband was in the tech sector. He was an entrepreneur in residence at a venture firm in New York.
Martin Hauck (12:14)
Hmm.
Rebecca Price (12:29)
he was starting to see companies that his firm had invested in have this head of people job. So this was back in 2013. Now it's like, well, of course that job exists. But if you think like 10, 15 years ago, like it was just a role that was emerging. More HR tech was coming onto the scene, which meant a head of people wasn't about kind of the admin operational parts of the job, but it was really about being like the strategic kind of designer of who are the best people, how do we align them to get the
perform. More founders were really appreciating and hiring for that role from kind of sitting at the strategic table. And when I heard about that role from my husband, was like, partly like, that sounds awesome. Wow, like how cool, you know, to go in at a company super small and be able to like shape it from the beginning. And at the same time, I was like, holy crap, like, I'm not equipped to do that. Like, I've been at J &J for the last eight years.
Martin Hauck (13:11)
You
Hmm.
Rebecca Price (13:26)
J &J has 5,000 HR professionals, like just the HR function. there was, it was a lot. there was always someone, HR is never like inventing the wheel, right? There was always someone who you could call who kind of done it before. Like you always had like a phone, a friend or someone down the hall or best practice to pull from a deck that you could modify. So was like, my God, going into a company from scratch, how exciting and how scary. But I just knew it was like one of those life moments.
Martin Hauck (13:30)
Just a lot.
Rebecca Price (13:55)
One of my favorite books is called The Crossroads of Should and Must. And it was just like one of those moments where I was like, it's not that I should do this. I like must do this. I must do for myself. I must do this for my children. I must do this just for my own like enjoyment and satisfaction. So through my hat and ring for head of people job and the team over at Sail Through, which was a B2B MarTech firm back in the day, took a chance on me.
Martin Hauck (14:04)
Hmm
Were there any signs that you took, so to speak, from the universe to be like that helped you determine whether or not it was a should or a must decision? Or was it just more an instinct?
Rebecca Price (14:33)
I think I felt like, what do I have to lose? know, like, what, you know, if I just applying to these roles, like what's the worst that'll happen is I won't get them. And, but if I do have the opportunity and then I think that's the reason to leave. I also was very supported by my mentors and managers and the leaders at J &J who also felt like, yeah, go do this. Like they called it an externship.
Martin Hauck (14:36)
Hmm.
Rebecca Price (14:58)
Go do an explanation for the news and you'll come back. So I felt supported, it felt low risk in the sense of like I wasn't torpedoing anything. ⁓ It just felt like something like when a door opens, you walk through and ⁓ it was a two way door in the sense I knew I could turn around a lot.
Martin Hauck (15:17)
which creates some safety in the decision making process. ⁓
Rebecca Price (15:19)
Yeah. We're sure. you
have two young kids and you're trying to be a working mom and my husband's an entrepreneur. And so like you have to take all that into consideration.
Martin Hauck (15:28)
100%. You've mentioned ⁓ mentors a couple of times, which I love because I wouldn't be where I am today without them and I'm sure you feel the same. Can you kind of illustrate how mentorship played a role in you moving from the startup space and getting into the VC world and just kind of like
showing the shape of what getting into the VC world looks like as well.
Rebecca Price (16:01)
Yes. So I am ⁓ on this People Perspective podcast because I am like a people person. I do try to cultivate like strong, deep relationships across my life and that includes work. And ⁓ every job that I've had since that Sail Through job has been through my network. None of them were like a cold application.
I do think that there is so much power in your network. ⁓ and so that someone that I met at Sailthrough took me to Enigma, someone that I met with through my kind of just networking took me to Capsule and the woman who pulled me into primary, Cassie Young, she's a general partner at primary. She was on the executive team at Sailthrough. So she gave me a call in spring of 2020, like, Hey, what are you?
doing, just started at primary, this venture firm. We're a small firm. believe we can be bigger and reinvent seed, particularly in New York. And the way that the founders of primary view the world differently is that they believe that if we have a strong operating team, we can help really accelerate our hedge that our seed stage companies can raise their series. And it was an opportunity to build out.
the people in talent space at primary, knowing that every early stage company needs three things. You need access to downstream capital. You need your first customers. You need your first team. So kind of giving me the opportunity to own that piece of kind of what does that mean to not just hire your first team, but to align them to ultimately perform really well. And so having had three tours of duty at startups, which is God bless the people leaders of startups. That is a tough job.
Martin Hauck (17:51)
You
Rebecca Price (17:53)
⁓ It is relentless. It is ⁓ emotional. is hard work. I was ready for something different and I didn't know what different was. I never had venture on my vision board or life roadmap ⁓ for two reasons. admittedly the venture firms that I had experienced ⁓ through working with while I think they did good work, I always felt like they weren't like my people. They weren't necessarily builders and operators.
Martin Hauck (18:21)
Hmm.
Rebecca Price (18:22)
And second, most of the talent people in venture are recruiters and I've been an HR business partner and organizational psychologist by training. So I also just thought like it wasn't, I wasn't qualified or I wasn't the right archetype for what a venture firm would consider.
Martin Hauck (18:39)
And what was it? mean, there's an interesting like for the listeners and the members of the community that are listening, right? Predominantly HR and recruitment and operations folks. Some of them have that aspiration to move on to the VC side. And it would be really interesting to hear sort of like, there's a certain level of like, okay, most people are recruiters or like, I'm, I'm, you're not the obvious choice. What
What did that feel like and how did you operate in the first, you know, six months to really say, okay, I'm going to feel comfortable here. I'm going to level myself up in order to, stick around because you enjoy it, et cetera. Like, what did that look like?
Rebecca Price (19:23)
Yeah. So there are so many VC firms and at the end of the day, VC firms get their money from LPs, limited partners, and they use that money to invest in startups, ultimately to drive returns. And so that is the business of startups. So being an investor and investing in startups is always going to be like the core product or the core business. Everything else is really adjacent and that's like,
Martin Hauck (19:43)
Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Price (19:47)
like the talent space, or if you have a go-to-market team. And so all these venture firms figure out or decide a business plan, like where do we want to invest? Do we want to invest in other areas of the firm? And why is that like our strategy or our differentiation? And so if you actually talk to a bunch of people in these roles, you'll actually see that the roles are all very different because each of the general partners who run the firm are going to have a different appreciation, respect.
or value the function very differently. I know people who like their teams of one, I know people that their teams of like dozens. ⁓ And so first I would say like anyone considering one of these roles or thinking about it is to really understand from the people hiring you, like why do they have this role? Do they value it? What are the outcomes expected? So for me, when I first started talking to primary, I think they also were trying to figure out
What do we want? Do we want someone with a kind of chief people officer, HR business partner background? Do we want someone from the like recruiting space? And I know that as they went through their interview process, they talked to a lot of different archetypes. I also was at a place, was spring of 2020, height of COVID. I had two little kids in Zoom school. I also wasn't like rushing to like leave my job ⁓ and start something different or new. So I was very, and Cassie was my friend also.
Martin Hauck (20:46)
Hmm.
Rebecca Price (21:14)
So was like, you should meet lots of people. Let me introduce you to lots of people. You should really hire the best person. And so while my first conversation with Primary was in April, I actually didn't start till January and my interview process didn't conclude until October. They weren't in a rush. I wasn't in a rush. And I think they went on a journey to figure it out too. Ultimately coming back to being like, we.
Martin Hauck (21:19)
Hmm.
Rebecca Price (21:41)
we believe and value the role of a chief people officer as a partner to CEOs and founders. I had had experience over the last 10 years building and managing talent acquisition and recruiting teams. So I can do that and have built that muscle. at primary, we now have a team of about 10 recruiters who report into me led by a head of talent. ⁓
So it's still part of the job, but it is just a piece of the story where being kind of an advisor and helping the founders on their journey from founder to CEO and helping them design the right organization and manage tough people problems and scale the organization, think primary saw that as important, as important as the just putting buttons in seats and hiring the right people.
Martin Hauck (22:20)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I mean, I have a pretty I mean, that's a I haven't seen a team that big, but I also don't pay a ton of attention to VCs. So maybe this is like more popular. I think the VCs that I've looked at are more Canadian. And typically, they've only got like one or two people there. So that's really interesting. But in retrospect, or just like
laying all the cards on the table makes complete sense. And because first off, just like the costs of using contingency recruitment agencies and whatnot for a startup are pretty prohibitive or expensive versus working with your VC. If they've got a strong team, that's fantastic. Right. And to me, that would be like, as a founder, I'd be excited about that. Like, wow, we don't have to spend, you know,
$500,000 million to ⁓ hire our first team because we don't know recruiting and we've never done it before. And then on top of that, there's, this was always the thing. Cause I'd worked on the agency side as a recruiter. That's how I got into it. And then when I went internal, it was just like, yes, there are some good recruiters out there that like care and whatnot, but at the end of the day, the, the economics and the incentives are just aligned to place people. Right. And it's not for the long-term fit versus like,
Absolutely. The, the VC firms has a vested interest to make sure that people that they help hire succeed. So that's, that's really cool. Did what, I don't like, was that obvious? Is that like a really popular thing in the VC space or am I just like gushing over something that everybody does? Yeah.
Rebecca Price (24:12)
Yeah, I think the things you're noting are exactly what I saw when I came into the organization. And I had had the experience of being an operator too, having investors who had talent partners, but we weren't quite aligned. So what I mean by that is we would have, when I was operating, we would have talent partners from investors send us candidates, like kind of drop us in or parachute in resumes.
Martin Hauck (24:33)
Hmm.
Rebecca Price (24:36)
But because they were spread across so many companies, they were removed from what our business was, what our culture was, and what our roles were. So my perspective going into primary was like, how do we scuba dive instead of snorkel, right? Like how can we go deep into companies to really understand what they need in these early days? And the way that I came up with an idea was like,
Martin Hauck (24:50)
you
Rebecca Price (25:02)
we actually need more people who can go deep and embed themselves inside these companies and spend a lot of time with them. But there's a constraint because the way venture firms work is your operating capital, the capital that you have to run the firm is limited. It's not like a company where you just can have revenue. You can only have 2 % of the management fees of the fund. So every fund you raise,
you use 2 % of that fund a year to run the firm. That has to cover rent, that has to cover salaries, that has to cover everyone's laptop, right? So you are constrained in terms of your headcount. So the way that we were able to unlock adding headcount into the primary team, and this was actually an idea from one of our general partners and founders, Ben Sun, was as a pass-through cost. So actually, we hire recruiters, we manage them, we train them, they come with a primary email address.
But when a portfolio company wants a recruiter full time, they just pay their salary for that month. So it is a, it actually becomes a win-win for everyone because it is less expensive than agency or contingency. It is kind of equal to like what the market would be if you hired them in, but you, it's an on-off switch, right? Like you want someone for three months. Great. You have three months, turn it on, turn it off.
Martin Hauck (26:06)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Rebecca Price (26:22)
but the quality is really there and you don't have to manage them. You don't have to recruit them. You don't have to onboard them. You don't have to offboard them. And so these companies, these startups are given capital to hire people. So they have the capital and we're not, just trying to be at market. We break, this team breaks even, but the way that we were able to scale this team is that we have our portfolio companies cover the salaries of these recruiters and it ends up hugely being successful because
Not only do we make the first hires during the, from C to series A, but they often, when they raise their series A call us back. as you're doing a massive scale up from A to B, we know that company, we know the pitch and we've ended up saving companies like over a million dollars of agency fee. actually is, it's a metric we track of all the hires we made. And if it was a 20 % fee, what would you have paid otherwise versus what did you pay us and then ends up.
being like companies were hiring 30, 40 jobs, 40 roles as they're scaling up to their B and it's saving them massive time. And the third plug I'll make for it is like, we just have the pattern recognition to know what's every role or what are the typical roles that get hired for from C to series A and not only what is the function, but what is kind of the qualities to fit in the context of that stage, like resiliency.
flexibility, agility, right? Like that kind of kind of mindset of the people who do really well at that early stage. We do that again and again and again. So when we're supporting CEOs in their first hires, we just bring that pattern recognition.
Martin Hauck (28:02)
Yeah, that's brilliant. And cool to see like how the machine works that you're leading the team that does all of that, I guess I have a million questions on that front. ⁓
Rebecca Price (28:03)
Thank
Martin Hauck (28:21)
Is this this is something that ⁓ your firm does that's unique in comparison to other companies on the market? Like part of me is like, this is do can we even air this? This sounds like the secret sauce behind like what what makes like primary so like such an attractive like company to partner with like from an investment perspective or like where did where to get your money?
Rebecca Price (28:44)
Yeah,
look, it's not a secret. We also do it on the go-to-market side. So just like I run our people and talent team, my partner, Jason Gelman, who ran RevOps at Compass, he runs a go-to-market team. So he does strategic advisory for the whole go-to-market process. He manages a large team of like BDRs or market development associates that's doing top of funnel work for companies similarly. Like I think it's like, you know, it's not just about the strategy. It's that.
primary invest in having so many humans, like human beings who work for the firm. The firm when I started was about 10 or 12 people. Now we're almost 60. And so there is just kind of overhead, not just financial overhead, but just like kind of structural overhead to have a team that large that not all VCs are like excited about, right? It takes management. takes, like we also, we talk it like that. We're like a series B, series C company in terms of scaling communication.
Martin Hauck (29:13)
Mm.
Yeah.
Rebecca Price (29:39)
org design, cadences of like talent rhythms, onboarding, off-boarding. Most venture firms can find a lot of efficiency by being a group of individual contributors who are investing and just focused on being investors. We have an investment team that's very much like that, but two thirds of the firm are not investors because we were very heavily invested in this impact team, this operating team, which is the primary strategy and differentiator. is like the kind of our...
strategy in the market of why a founder should choose primary at the seed stage because we are purpose-built for seed. We have a go-to-market team, a finance team, a people team that again and again and again can embed and be on your team and help you raise your series A. So that's our strategy that not all venture firms choose to pursue.
Martin Hauck (30:28)
No, no, thank you for for for double clicking on that. I listened to a recent podcast that you did. It's really good. And one of the things that you talked about was sort of like the early career impacts of remote work. And it sort of like hurts, you know, their career because they miss out on opportunities to sort of like shadow.
get proper mentorship or like quality, the quality of mentorship goes down in those environments. And I was just curious if you could, so like, was, I was wanting to double click on, like while I was listening to it, I wanted to double click on more. like, can you go a bit deeper into that? Like, what do you think that like companies can practically do to sort of like close that gap if they're in that remote environment or hybrid?
Rebecca Price (31:18)
Yes. So there are a lot of early in career people who work at primary and in my other like companies I've worked at. And when you walk into the door and where you're all together, like you can sort of, you see people, you see the people who are arriving early, working at their desks. You can see the people who are, might be struggling or might be kind of pulling out of the group. Like you have those like visual cues to kind of be like, Hey, does that person need help? Or Hey, that person might be like super high potential.
Martin Hauck (31:42)
Hmm.
Rebecca Price (31:47)
⁓ And what I believe I was talking about that podcast was when you're in remote work, people are alone in their homes. so leaders, managers, VPs, executives, like may not be able to have those like cues around what might be happening to this person. And then if you don't have many opportunities to show up on Zoom or collaborate like visually with people, you could get like lost, lost if you're struggling, but also lost in the sense of like, Hey, Martin, like
Martin Hauck (32:00)
Yeah
Rebecca Price (32:16)
I like I see a spark in you. Do you want to step up and help me with this project? Do you want an opportunity to shadow me here? Because I think that's a lot of people will say, I got a break. Some executives saw me and gave me an opportunity to break. And they saw something in me. They took a chance on me for some reason. And so I think if you are leading a team or managing a company where you have distributed work, I think there's just an opportunity to be paying attention to those younger workers and intentionally designing.
mentorship, kind of coaching circles, opportunities for people to speak up, checking in on one-on-one, professional development plans. I don't just like live in a drawer, but maybe there's other executives who are sponsoring younger people to pay attention to those development plans. And I think like succession planning is really important too, of when you think about your future org design, this is where your people person can help. Who do you think from younger ranks in 12, 18, 24 months could get there?
and really start thinking ahead of like grooming people through experience, exposure, education to get them kind of smaller nuggets along the way so that they could possibly be ready for a job, an upcoming job. But it takes so much more intentionality when you're remote.
Martin Hauck (33:29)
Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's on hard mode for sure.
Rebecca Price (33:35)
Can say one more thing on that? I do think on the employees too. So if there's any like young listeners here, I think it is on the young people to build their network, build their community and build relationships. ⁓ actually yesterday I spoke with a college senior daughter of a friend who asked me to take the call and she was just trying to like ask for advice about like, do I get a job and what should I do? And I was kind of trying to teach her the power of like networking.
Martin Hauck (33:36)
Yeah.
Rebecca Price (34:05)
⁓ And how, I mentioned earlier, like every one of my jobs over the last 15 years has come from my network. I wasn't actively on the job market, but someone I knew reached out to me. I think so much of opportunity comes from who we know. And particularly if you're ⁓ near a city, cities now have so many events, young people, communities, meetups, that would just get out there and meet people and be super curious rather than kind of
Martin Hauck (34:26)
Yeah.
Rebecca Price (34:33)
Hey, can you help me? Be really curious of like, what is your role? How did you end up there? What do you wish you knew? What advice do you have for young people? ⁓ Who do you, like, do you know anyone I could talk to in this space? Like, that building those relationships and building that community, I really think is an accelerant. And if you're working in a remote job and you have ambition and aspiration to kind of accelerate your career, you just got to get out of the house and find events.
Martin Hauck (34:35)
Mm.
Hahaha
Rebecca Price (35:03)
on nights and weekends to professional, young professional events. And I think there's a lot, I think there's a lot of events out there.
Martin Hauck (35:08)
Yeah. Yeah.
No, I mean, I've having seen that I get the same question from, you know, people still sort of see me as a recruiter on LinkedIn, and I still get the, know, five or six people reaching out every day saying like, I saw your recruiter, like, and every once in a while, somebody will have like a really intentional, thoughtful message, and I'll make time for them and say, like, Hey, let's jump on a call. Happy to chat. Most of the time, and like, kind of this is
speaking to that audience of people that you were just speaking to. It's like, most of the time people have this like really canned message. They haven't put much thought into it. And it's like, they're doing the right thing, but the right thing isn't nuanced enough to actually like, you can't just ask and expect that it's going to happen because everybody's asking or not everybody, small chunk of people are asking, but they're not asking in a way that's like, Hey, can, can we sit down? Like have a reason be
Be specific. If this isn't something you can just do a canned message with like 100 people and it's all the same message. You need to have intentionality behind it in any hopes of somebody responding for sure. So.
Rebecca Price (36:15)
Absolutely, absolutely. I think there are a lot of people who share that sentiment, which is if you people will respond to a cold inbound message on email or LinkedIn, if you are thoughtful and intentional. And I know people I work with pretty, you know, successful investors who will probably, how did you meet them? Like, they sent me a really thoughtful email. So I think there is people respond.
Martin Hauck (36:44)
Yeah.
Rebecca Price (36:44)
You know,
you know, shoot your shot, but I agree. Like, you know, don't be generic, be super thoughtful. The other thing I want to say is, ⁓ and maybe this is a hot take, but I think it is really hard to have everything all at once. And so I work with a lot of younger people who equally say like, I'm very ambitious. I want more responsibility. I want more compensation. I want to grow my career and I don't want to work too hard.
Martin Hauck (37:06)
Hmm.
Rebecca Price (37:11)
I want to kind of clock in, I want to come in at 10, I want to leave at five, I really care about my work-life balance. And, you know, it is hard to give people all of that because oftentimes, the majority of time, think, to get an opportunity to go above and beyond for someone more senior than you is an opportunity to be able to be seen by someone who could give you the opportunity.
like see you in a different way to put you up for a promotion or a new job or recommend you to their friend. And so I'll give a very specific example. I was working with someone who very much wants, has been very vocal, very much wants the opportunity to be promoted, earn more money and potentially move to a different function. And there was a kind of this special project that came up. It was going to be like 60 or 90 days, maybe like five hours of extra work a week. And I was like, great.
here's an opportunity, you get to work with different people, you get to learn a different skill set, you get kind of exposure to like very senior people. And the response was, what are you gonna take off my plate? Or I expect more money for this. I, you know, I could be empathetic with that ask, right? Like, you kind of want to know like, hey, like, how am gonna be able to juggle everything? Am I gonna compensate for that? But I also think that
Martin Hauck (38:23)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Rebecca Price (38:36)
That kind of mentality, which is a very fixed mindset versus like growth mindset is not the thing that in a competitive world where it's harder to get jobs, it's harder to get promoted, it's going to be like an accelerant to more opportunity because what's happening now, so she did not get the opportunity. There's someone else now who has that opportunity, a couple hours a week, extra work for a couple months, but getting so much exposure, not just to executives, to kind of other people being like, Hey, like she's pretty.
Martin Hauck (38:49)
Yeah.
Rebecca Price (39:06)
Like maybe we should consider her for XYZ, but also building experiences for herself that she can take with her forever. think like work experiences is like a balance sheet. Like you're building and collecting assets that you will have forever with you. So just the opportunity to gain more skills, even if immediately you're not going to earn like a little more money, you will over time that those relationships and those skills and experiences will end up kind of.
building your wealth because it will contribute to your ability to earn more compensation over time.
Martin Hauck (39:39)
this is this is interesting because like, to your point, right, you said immediately, like, I empathize with that person's like, the reason they're saying it, right, there's an aspect of like, they've got good boundaries, right? They've got good boundaries for themselves, they believe in themselves enough to sort of like know their self worth. And like, yes, you have the right as an individual to do that. But if you're looking for those opportunities, like, that's, I don't think that's how things work, right? It's almost like as if like going back to sort of like, not
going back to it necessarily, but you were interested in like sports psychology and whatnot, like the, the aspect of like, if you're playing a basketball game, and you get past the ball, and you're like, I'm not going to take this shot unless you guys, you know, I'm not gonna I don't shoot three pointers, this is not my job. I'm not going to take this shot unless you guys pay me more or something like that. That's, that's not how basketball works, right? When you get the opportunity, you take the shot, if you do well at the shot.
then great, then you'll be rewarded for it later. And this sort of like, kind of, I don't know. And it's, it's, guess the part that's funny for me is like, then there's situations where that sort of environment is sort of flipped and people get kind of taken advantage of. And maybe that was that person's experience. Like, I don't know, how do you, how do you balance that from, from your perspective? Cause there is a little bit of
Like you can, to your point, you saw where that person was coming from. Like how do you balance that?
Rebecca Price (41:09)
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I think there's also the way you go about asking these questions. I think my feedback to this person was, I really wish the response was, thank you so much. Like, this sounds like an incredible opportunity. I'm really excited. I'm leaning in. ⁓ Sign me up. I also want to make sure that like, that this doesn't bleed into being forever or that this doesn't kind of
Martin Hauck (41:15)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Rebecca Price (41:39)
⁓ like something about like expressing the boundaries. Like I want to make sure, like, I just want to be cautious that I know you say this is only going to be like two months. Can we revisit this again in two months to make sure that we're still kind of on the same page in terms of expectations and boundaries? Like, I think there's ways to have come at it from curiosity and openness and eagerness than, ⁓ what felt so absolute of like, I am not taking this unless you take something off my plate.
Martin Hauck (41:59)
Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Price (42:08)
or you pay me more money. ⁓ If you're gonna step up to do a project for two months, that's a couple hours, extra a week, ⁓ you sometimes just have to put in the extra hours ⁓ to just gain that experience. You do have to step up a bit. And I also think it's reasonable to ask the person, can we check in in a couple months? Or even after a couple months, hey, can we check in on that? I know you said it was only gonna be a couple months. ⁓
So, there's just the way people go about asking these questions. And sometimes I find the entitlement is not landing well, it's not working for, not working for people. And so a lot of young people ask me for advice and I'm trying to help like get them what they want, which is like boundaries and opportunities, but also knowing that you have to know your audience, right?
Martin Hauck (42:42)
for sure.
No, no.
Yeah.
Rebecca Price (43:06)
coming across as entitled is not going, if your goal is to accelerate your career promotion or more compensation, entitlement is not the path. And I'm not saying like people don't have to act that way. Like you can act however you want, but it's kind like sometimes I see people working against their own best interest.
Martin Hauck (43:13)
Yeah.
100 % Yeah, and there's the level of self awareness that is probably missing, especially at the early stages of a career. ⁓
Rebecca Price (43:32)
I will say
I did come home that day and talk to my daughters and say, when you were given an opportunity, say yes, always say yes. You never know where things are going to lead. And it is really short sighted to start from a place of no and expectations. ⁓ I too would never want my own daughters to get taken advantage of. But I also know so much in life is about starting from a place of yes, curiosity, leaning in, going above and beyond, especially in the competitive.
Martin Hauck (43:39)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Price (44:01)
economy like we have right now where it's hard to stand out. It's hard to differentiate. you know, that basketball player may have to like be shooting three throws on nights and weekends, may have to stay after practice. Like, you know, you do have to go above and beyond and work hard to get the chief like the chief out.
Martin Hauck (44:19)
100 % yeah,
no, the the best players on any team aren't doing that without having put in a ton of hours behind the scenes that nobody saw kind of deal, right? Yeah, I coming coming to your close here, I guess the one one thing that I wanted to kind of like double click on before we go is
You know, just sort of thinking of the future and what you're working on right now, you've got this interesting vantage point of supporting lots of companies as opposed to being like a CPO who are traditionally talking to that's just supporting one company and a bunch of employees. What sort of keeping you up at night in terms of the challenges that your port goes dealing with and, and, and your team as well.
Rebecca Price (45:06)
Yeah, I think the pace and rate of the change of technology is just wild. It is faster than anything any of us have ever seen. And what I'm seeing a lot in CEOs is like an anxiety or like a FOMO of like, we're not doing enough. We're not adopting new technologies enough. ⁓ Like everyone's moving faster. And so kind of this like frenetic energy of trying to adopt a lot of
AI tools into an organization without with kind of losing sight of like, what are the outcomes we're looking for? So do I think all companies should be familiar and staying up to pace with what are the AI tools? Yes. Should across all your functions, you'd be incorporating new AI tools. Yes. Your finance team, your go-to-market team, your people and tell you they're excellent AI tools available. Tabs is great for finance team.
Clay is great for your go-to-market team. Juicebox is great for your people team. Those are our three favorite tools. ⁓ Not all primary companies, by the way. ⁓ So you do need to stay up to date, but you can't lose sight of what are we doing as a business and what outcomes are we trying to generate and keep people focused on that.
Martin Hauck (46:05)
You
Yeah, yeah. Is there a sweet spot that you've seen in terms of or it's a problem like to your point, right? That's it's not just your the companies in your portcodes, everyone, everybody like I made a cringy face for those of you listening, like, I'm I'm like, which note taker do I use now? Do I use granola? Do I use zoom? Do I use Google? It's just nuts, right? And and there is this like FOMO there's like, I want to be using the best tool because the
pace of changes. there, guess, have from because this isn't just like last week, it isn't the last couple of months, it's been like a couple years now of this. And it's hasn't let down and the things are actually getting better and better. From from like an organizational design perspective. Like, is there how much time like is there a number like how much time should companies set aside or how should they approach like incorporating AI?
Rebecca Price (46:57)
Bye.
Martin Hauck (47:17)
without breaking their business or getting themselves too distracted from what you've seen as like a best practice.
Rebecca Price (47:23)
Yeah, I think it's like, you know, I think there's a few things that executives need to be like great executives. You know, being great at your function is the ticket to a price to admission. But like every executive has to be understand the P and L every executive has to understand the concept of first team. Every executive needs to have a strong network of like the backfill of like, who do they call? And then the last thing is you, every executive has to stay up with like the macro trends happening. And that's where I think this comes in. I don't necessarily have like a number.
But I do have to say, you do have to be staying on top of the news and on top of the technologies that are coming out, just to be aware of them and maybe demoing. ⁓ But that doesn't mean you're investing tons and tons of time on ⁓ implementing and adopting tools. I think every team can own their workstream, and it should be a part of everyone's job. Sometimes have a culture of experimentation where
Martin Hauck (48:17)
Yeah
Rebecca Price (48:21)
employees on the front lines can like swipe their credit card up to like $99 a month or something like reasonable to like experiment with tools and like surface ideas up. But obviously you're not going to be doing like massive change management all the time. But staying on top of the macro trends, staying on top of the news, understanding what tools are out there. think that's a part of everyone's job. think it was a part of everyone's job. Like, you know, since the beginning of the tax
Martin Hauck (48:49)
That's
a good point, yeah.
Rebecca Price (48:50)
It's just,
it's just the rate and pace feels like it's increasing right now. But if you probably think of like the, like the tech bubble in like the early 2000s, it probably felt that way then too. I wasn't around then, but like, you know, like, my gosh, like now there's new web browsers and now there's new websites. Like, now you can, these e-commerce sites or these word processing tools. Like I, I imagine like we've been through tech revolution before and
Martin Hauck (48:54)
Yeah, that's fair.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Rebecca Price (49:17)
to be successful, you have to be on top of technology trends.
Martin Hauck (49:21)
Yeah. If Rebecca's bringing the executive like a new website to use in that.com bubble, like every week, they're going to be like, this is cool. Great. But like we need to pick one and focusing on that, choose the best one and then commit to it for a period of time, as opposed to like, there's this, there's another one. Let's use that. There's another one. that.
Rebecca Price (49:41)
Right.
just keep focus on the results, right? Like keep measuring results.
Martin Hauck (49:44)
Yeah.
Yeah, fair, fair. Any any last words for the listeners? Is there you know, when people are shooting their shot? ⁓ Any you know, how do want people to reach out to you or find you or find primary if in one?
Rebecca Price (49:59)
Yeah. So my, my parting advice to any like people leader is remember that you work for the business, not for your function. Right. So I think sometimes a trap for HR leaders as they try to build the best HR function, but it ends up being really disconnected from what the business is trying to achieve. one, take your CFO out to lunch, really understand the ins and outs of your business. Understand the P and L understand what's on the minds of the CFO, because if you understand what the CFO.
Martin Hauck (50:16)
you
Rebecca Price (50:29)
things about and what's keeping the CFO up at night. Most of your dollar spent is on people and compensation. So if you know, I'm worried about cause, I'm worried about customer churn, right? I'm worried about pace of R &D. ⁓ great, as the people person, I can go figure out what's going on in the engineering team, figure out what's going on the customer success team, figure out what's going on in the product team, right? So take your CFO out to lunch, really understand what's keeping them up at night ⁓ and make sure that everything you deliver out of the people function can serve the bottom line.
business strategy. Your CFO isn't, your CEO isn't really caring about your performance management process as much as he is about driving revenue and acquiring. Um, I can, LinkedIn is probably the best way to find me. Um, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn and have a, um, you know, articles and try to kind of put out some ideas there. So I think that's probably the best way for people to get in touch.
Martin Hauck (51:00)
Amazing.
Awesome. No, again, this was such an awesome conversation. Thanks so much for the time, Rebecca. And, ⁓ yeah, yeah. I hope we can chat again. Awesome. Cheers.
Rebecca Price (51:26)
Yeah.
Thank you. Thanks for having
me. Bye.