Ep 39. Harry Uffindell on Scaling Partly, The ONE Thing and Lessons from the Climb

Welcome to Calling Operator, a podcast dialing into the stories of startup operators. Tune in as they share their incredible and often challenging journeys of building and scaling startups. Today I'm connecting with Harry Fondel, Chief People Officer at Partly. I first came across Harry actually via his investment syndicate on Aussie Angels. He's an active angel investor, ex co-founder, and also operator. And when I started calling operator last year, Ryan Walker, ex-Dutmate, put me in touch with Harry as a potential guest. So I've learnt so much about scaling up talent, culture, performance, accountability, and sheer focus that you need as an operator while recording this episode. I'm so excited to bring it to you today. So Harry's journey so far has seen him co-founder food subscription startup called Meetmail. Be a country manager for a US-based payment startup called Tilt, which was acquired by Airbnb. Following the acquisition, he worked with Airbnb as head of business and strategy out of the Sydney office before then doing some travel and then joining Partly in 2020 as their first non-technical hire. He's found his true calling in the people space, now serving as a Chief People Officer. Let me know what you think. Harry, welcome to calling operator. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you very much for having me. Great to be here. Let's start at the very beginning. Can you share where you grew up and your origin story? I grew up in Auckland, New Zealand. I went to school there and then I moved down to Dunedin. I went to University of Otago, studied law, economics, and finance. And I'm not sure why I studied law in the first place. I actually think my court process at the time was, commerce sounds OK. Law and commerce sounds better. Now that was probably the extent of my court process. Ended up doing that, I got an internship and worked as a graduate lawyer in Auckland at Balgully. But while I was a university and then my first year as a lawyer, I was sort of moonlighting I'd my startup on the side, which was called Meetmail. So that was my first, I guess, proper jump into the world of startups with me and my co-founder Dave Booth. And then I smothered my parents to Smay. I told them I was quitting law. I found out very quickly I wasn't going to be a good lawyer. I'd probably get found out eventually. So I moved back down to Dunedin. We built that company up, eventually, sold it, following that, Dave went to Angelo List and San Francisco. I went to Sydney, broke into the world of management and sold team, which was still not the most exciting part. I think it was getting closer to the business side. It wasn't quite the lawyer, Doddy and I, and crossing tees, ended the transaction. But it was working with businesses, but still not the level of execution that I really wanted to get my hands dirty with. I got very, very fortunate to be introduced to a guy called Mike DeBo, who was the head of growth at a company called Tilt, which is a US payment startup based out of San Francisco. He's now actually a general partner at Greylock, but they hired me as the first A-Pack hire for Tilt. That was kind of a wild entry into startups on a global scale. We were the clients that went through white combinator, raised 67 million from interest in horror wits and some of these really big names, they're one VCs in the US. They had an amazing team, and then eventually got acquired by Airbnb. I went over with that acquisition. So I was a country-margined Tilt, and then was head of business operations in Australia, the Airbnb across A-Pack, worked there for a few years before the IPO. It's probably getting a little bit too big for me at that point. I like the release of the Niddy Gritty stage. So I left my 500th time now, why I've probably traveled around the world for six months, went to the regular cup in Japan, and then we settled in Europe, and ultimately got four-some during COVID. So moved back here, I had my own ideas and startups I was working on, but at the same time, I met Levi, the CEO of Partly, about a month or two after Partly was founded, and ultimately joined in as their first nor technical hire. And yeah, it sort of blinked, and the last four years have gone by, but the company's gone from a, I guess, from an infant to a pretty big company of nearly 100 people all around the world. I've also gone from newly married to a couple of kids, so I've got two boys that came here equally busy when I'm at home. That's kind of like the end-to-end stories so far. And that, my friends, is what we're going to unpack today. What a incredible ride, so far. Can you take us through this journey and the lessons that you learned along the way that influenced the next path? Yeah, I think they're all different and unique experiences. At a really high level, Meet Mellwoods of Zero to One, Hilt was going from when I joined around 30 people to 150 people, which is pretty challenging to relax at each time. And then Airbnb was probably maybe a stage or two ahead in the years leading up to the IPO, but which had done some of those big funding rounds already. I guess looking around Otago, there actually was quite a lot of entrepreneurship on different scales. And so Meet Mellwoods really that, you know, identify a problem, we were paying what I consider an over-price to meet and veggies at the local supermarket many because people couldn't be bothered driving down to South Dunedin or further afield to some of these like better, more rural kind of butchers. Dunedin didn't have a mad butcher at that point, which was quite popular and open. So I remember the day I actually seen that like a mad butcher opening an advertisement in the Otago Daily Times and then taking it to my flat board specifically, Dave Bootman said, "Hey, we could take a business "where we like go out there by and bulk "and then resell it to students, you know, "like deliver it to their door." And this was before the world of Boobriebs and like getting used to Boobriein delivered but even things like, you know, hello fresh, my spoon, all those of Boobriebs subscription boxes. We got out with a clipboard and a piece of paper and Ken and would go around, you know, we're in a hundred different student flats asking, what are the biggest issues you find with like shopping and food, as a quality, as a price, how often do you buy, how many people do you cook for? And then ultimately, if we got this product together, delivered it to a door, would you buy it? Or would you strongly consider signing it up? We did that and then of the course of the next two or three weeks, we had a refrigerated truck where we would deliver it over a ton and meet around the campus, which is quite a lot. I think we've got an over our heads pretty quickly. That early stage, it was just a ton of learnings like the early product, like problem validation, incorporating and, you know, actually building a company in a brand from scratch. I'd do lots of door to door sales. Fortunately, I had a horrendous experience of the door to door sales person. But I say horrendous because it was a bit embarrassing and you got told, "Node's 75 times a day," but I was pretty good at getting those other five years. So I was pretty confident my ability to sell. I think that zero to one stage with me now, I didn't have any experience there, but I learned more than I had kind of whole time in university. Tellt was sort of seen what good looked like at scale with the brand names we had and the amount of money we raised, you know, we were managing to recruit exceptional operators. I remember at the time looking at their CVs going, "Well, I could get all these people from Harvard or Stanford graduate school business or coming from these well-known startups throughout the company." So the team there was really exceptional and my aspirations as an individual, but also what I thought of as quality work, that bar really got raised to me during my time at Tilt. And then Airbnb, I think, it gave me an insight into how bigger companies worked. I think at the time with any experience, you can often play down the learnings you get from it or the skills that you're acquiring in that moment. But on reflection, whether it's working at a lawyer or managing the consultant for at Airbnb, you pick up little things, right? Like Airbnb, they had a big shift to this Amazon type culture, writing really, really tight, such page memos, slide deck to basically band, feels a lot of learning just like how to communicate really clearly and written form how to articulate a strategy or the questions at these really, what I consider like networking regional directors or country managers or head of the FDNAs. But that was pretty good training for a lot of us if I'm going to partly be really attention to detail focus. So all different learnings. As Tilt's first beats on the ground, what did you learn about scaling global operations? There's one thing that sticks in my memory. So I was fortunate. I had probably the best mentor of my life was at Airbnb, I'm sorry, I Tilt Tim Ryan, who had a pretty interesting career. He founded himself as a company. He's gone on to do a lot of really interesting stuff. And I remember I put together this big 90-day plan. I got through what I can at the time, but was an incredibly arduous interview process. You know, it was the San Francisco staff. So there was H&D views, fluid San Francisco, finished with the two founders, super intimidating. And anyway, I got the job. And I remember one of these first weeks was producing a plan to eight back or for Australia. And Tim, he had a 101 and he's like, good be harrowing things. You know what, harrowing things like, this is a very good V1, a polite way of saying, it's a bit shit, or you've made a start. Yeah, but you've got a long way to go. And our team and our international team, I might have brought some of that more scrappy on the ground stuff and maybe toward the other people of few things, of just rolling up your sleeves, kind of mentality. But we also had people that had been five years at McKinsey and done MBAs and worked with some larger startups. I learned a lot from them of how they approach these problems, how they approach writing, annual plan, their region, how they thought about breaking it down and to really clear output metrics and input metrics. I think I was just learning Biro as Moses. The thing I'd sort of keep coming back to is just clarity of thought and communication. It's a lot harder to convey a plan or your ideas on one page of writing. It's a hell of a lot easier to write 10 pages. From those early days with Tim to really being a country manager, I would say it's still quite a unique role in Australia. What were the, I guess, mistakes or successes that then happen once you got to execution mode that you learn from? Sure. I guess some of the biggest learnings as a country manager in Australia, as you, you know, to the looted to, it's not a very common role. I guess it's becoming more common. I've seen like more country managers or events of those Uber types of operational regional leads first of operators and books on the ground. For me, I'll come to you as based in San Francisco, but we had an international team, we had a big London presence as well. The things that I think held me and then the Australian team in good stead was one over-communicating. You're very easily forgotten about, you know, you've got 80% of the team in San Francisco, you've got all the engineering and product team and they're kind of like, who's this weird guy in Australia, who's this person in the Nordic, who's this person in Ireland, and so I think just really over-communicating progress where that's presenting in the company organs or writing memos that are easily accessible to other people in the company. That was really important, just the communication piece. The second one which has semi-related is get on the plane, where possible, just get over and spend time with people at HQ especially, but also like out here to the international team in London, I spent a decent amount of time in San Francisco and I think every visit there, particularly when you're a alone-ranger or a sole operator in New Region, having those in-person connections, is just completely different. You know, like if you're spending a couple of weeks, you know, a few visits to HQ wherever that might be and then you've built really deep relationship with a product lead or one of the engineering leads or someone that's sort of running a lot of the marketing community efforts, it's a lot easier to go back to them and then ask their favours or ask the assistants rather than just be like, "Oh, is that Harry guy from Australia?" Like asking me to be playing on Slack again, I can kind of ignore them, it's not that critical. And also I think just being kind of unreasonably ambitious as well. We had our 90-day milestones, but in Tunnelett as a team and we didn't really tell the company, like we said our own ones, because we wanted everyone, when they saw them to go, "Holy shit, like Australia's on its care." So that was going to be approach we took. How did that journey then really lead up to the acquisition of Airbnb? It's an interesting story actually, so we got a lot of things right up till I think there was a bit of a missed opportunity as well. I think there was the ability to become a revolute type competitor or become the revolute of North America. And I think we just missed that and we were still on the precipice, but we saw good traction and we were going into Ray's L series C. And at the same time, Airbnb was struggling with some issues around basically group travel, right? People have been out to combine funds, split payment, and that sounds simple, but when you're talking multiple different people from different countries, different currencies, tilt heads built all of that structure and done a lot of that engineering work. And then we also had a e-money life and then they used a team of 80 to 100 people at the time of which they probably wanted to hire about 80% of them. So a tendency of like an echo hire with Airbnb, I was in the malbra sounds at the time and got a call from my boss Tim and they were sent there as notoriously bad and it was cutting in and out and you sort of hear like acquisitions. And then was that Airbnb and then like, it's kind of the extent of the call. And sorry, I remember going to backup stairs and I think we got acquired by Airbnb. I think it's a good thing. I'm not sure. I think I have a job. I'm not sure. So anyway, it all got figured out and I think you're going to be acquired by any company. Airbnb was definitely the top of my list that there was a pretty interesting change. And what was that integration into the Airbnb company like? I'll be really candid and honest here. When I arrived at the Airbnb office and Sydney, there were some great people there. I think they built an outstanding culture. To me, it didn't feel like people were working that hard. I was working very long days, like 12 hours a day for the Monday through Friday working Saturday, maybe a bit of Sunday. And it wasn't because I necessarily had to. It's just because I really wanted to. And that was just kind of like the feeling or the stage of the company. Airbnb most definitely had done that. But I feel like that sort of got to a point where this wasn't true. But it almost felt like people could stop showing up to work and kind of carry on. I was in there at 7am. And then I remember the first few weeks and people walking the door at like 9 o'clock or 9.30, leaving at 5. I don't know. It wasn't sort of what I wanted. It's still today, not how I like to operate. That was a little bit of a surprise. But on the flip side, I think there were some incredible people, genuinely world class, top of their game, either had been at Airbnb from the early days or had come across from companies like Amazon and things like that. So a lot of good friends and people I still keep in contact with today. What do you reckon that one impact project was that you're really proud of still today? There's a few that jumped to mind. I did ANZ in 2020 plans that was going from 2017 to 2020. Like a pretty broad three-year plan. And there was a ton of work that went into that. But ultimately Australia was already doing very well as a three-year Airbnb. But this was making it the most penetrated market in the world. I left partway through, but we'd executed on a lot of that. And that was really successful. I led Al Ponte's partnership. We drove a lot of demand. And even on the flip side, drove a bunch of new hosts through that on critical markets. The same thing I don't talk about as much now because I've gone more focus on homes. But I played a bit of a role in launching experiences in Australia. I ran my own Airbnb experience, which is like a tour of the Sydney startup hub. That gave me my piece of scrappy zero-to-one company building that I needed to, like, get me through that period. That was a ton of fun. Because country managers asked us a unique position in ANZ. Do you have any advice for our listeners based on how you might pitch yourself to a global company for one of those roles or how these roles even come about? In terms of positioning yourself for a country manager role, you know, it could be country manager, it could be type of staff role, could be growth lead or launcher, whatever it might be. The single most impactful thing I did, and I think people will look for this often for those roles, is people that have actually started something themselves. It doesn't need to be a breakout success, but it's someone with a bit of entrepreneurial flair that was a serious enough. They can prove that they're resourceful. Someone that has started and failed through startups and Moonlight and Homicide doing X or started a podcast, whatever it might be, all of a sudden that will jump off the page. If I was interviewing someone, I wouldn't ask about any of those experiences at university or law or consulting or those early jobs. I'd go straight to the, tell me about the startup. What made you to start that? How did you do it? What were the problems? How did you do this? How did you do that? So I think that's the single impactful thing you can do is just start something, even if it's a complete failure. That's fine. The second piece in terms of identifying those roles is a fuel waiting to find on a job board. It's probably too late and be with startups at that stage. A lot of times it's just not published right. It'll come through referrals or people they know are kind of good, but they're not sure what role they'll be. So I'm pretty meticulous. I actually don't kind of like a sales process when I've approached these things in the past and I advise other people. Don't try to find out what can I role with so you're then go search the internet for that. Instead, I would do the things that will make you exciting for a role like that and then create your list of companies. It could be sector dependent, it could be size dependent, it could be off the back of a recent fundraiser, just you know, that'll be hiring. Then create like an Excel or Google Sheet List and just be meticulous with, okay, these are all the companies. Here's a mutual connection or maybe here are the three people that will put a shared connection and I can do an introduction and sort of be constantly just trying to get in front of people and also just being shameless about reaching out on LinkedIn or wherever it might be or calling emailing people. New Zealand and probably Australia are not as good as it is as we should be. There's still this fair of rejection, but you know, go to door to door sales for a summer and they'll not bad out of you. I think the best approach is something to try to add a little bit of value and it might be the smallest thing of hey, I saw you hiring for this show that you've done research. Hey, love what you doing in this company. I thought this was really interesting. This new product release. I saw you hiring for this role. I'm not a fifth route, but I went through my connections. I found these three people, let me know if you'd like an introduction or I went through your website. I actually found these few errors or I was using your product and this is broken and his aluminum of it. People overestimate how long that takes. Instead of emailing a hundred companies, you could email Ken and just by doing like one little bit of value add, you'll jump to the top of that list. You'll certainly be in the 0.1% or 0.1% so yeah, it's taking that extra little step and it's good reaction. I love that so much and I know that's true to your angel investment thesis and we'll get to that shortly, but I can't believe we've not even spoken about partly yet. Tell us about your time there. You've grown with the company from the PPOV ops and I think you said in the first handful of employees to about a hundred and you've grown through a few different roles. I'll let you share some more on that journey and what that experience has been like. Rewinding the clock just for a moment, I was working on my own startup. I had a ton of personal conviction that I couldn't convince investors to give me any money and I was slowly running out of my own money through my funds and a friends and family round and then I was kind of losing conviction beginning progressively better at talking to investors and then at the exact point where I think I applied three times or maybe two times to start made. I finally got accepted, got offered investments and at that point the lines crossed each other and I've lost personal conviction while I was doing. I had just become good enough to convince other people to back me and that's a very strange position to be in. I think the only right thing to do on that point is either be up front and completely change your idea or go, "Hey, well if you back me as an individual, I'm going to do something but it's probably not this" or you turn down the money and so that coincided with a weird sliding doors moment. Then Christchurch, I had a person that I'd met online and she was doing a bit of product work for me and she'd moved to Christchurch into this co-working space and it just happened to be where Levi and the partly team was just after. after founding the company, it was very fortunate and just random meeting that once I've lost conviction of what I was doing, it was the same time I met Levi and I remember just being sort of blown away with him and just the size of ambition. It's very rare to hear and use the own founder talk like a founder and temperance is going to say, you know, we're going to maybe not change the world, but you know, often like changing the entire industry had this huge impact on a world scale and success, you know, after all that might be listed on the NASDAQ one day. And I was sort of just blown away by Levi's or the Roman ambition that I loved the fact that problem space was enormous, but also pretty unsexy, right? It was kind of like accounting before zero, you know, and it wasn't the next hot thing finding means, which I've always seen as a very good thing. Levi and I were only two in there, we're at hours like 5.30 in the morning, grabbing our coffee across the road from McDonald's and got chatting and I joined as VP of operations. I remember sort of bound up and up in the kitchen one morning saying, hey, I'm not going to do my startup, but I think I want to join partly. Just not what he was expecting at a high level worked across our marketing sales, early subcustomance success functions. A lot of these things were just in their infancy, so going from like zero to one and then we started needing to hire people, so sort of started to move into that space. As the company grew, you know, we'd have someone that came in that was hopefully better at me than marketing or someone would start taking over sales or customers success and I just kept trying to move towards what's the biggest fire? What's the biggest thing keeping the team, keeping Levi up at night and sort of pivoting towards that and where that lead was a huge early focus on culture and building that initial team. I think people underestimate the impact of just being very intentional early on about the type of company that you want to build, the values that you want everybody to share in their company, the types of people that you want to hire, so like go out and hopefully change the world with. We spend a time at time here, so I sort of balance both my operations and the people side, so on the opposite it was kind of the taking some of the learnings from Airbnb and tilts, but you know watering it down or making it simplified for our initial annual planning and budgets and our quarterly OKRs and then how we held folks accountable and to put that on a quarterly or what we call seasons, our sort of season by season basis. On the people side it was OK, we're still relatively unknown, but how can we begin to like create this company brand and narrative and how can we start attracting some of the best talent in New Zealand and the world to join us on our mission. If I look back at my time on Carly over the last four years, I think that's probably what I'm most proud of, like my role has changed a lot. If I look at the team that we've got around us today and some of the people that were convinced to join us and the culture we've built and then the ruthless kind of intensity, you know, clearly it's not a person good-steaded for the next season, the next 12 months, next few years. When I spoke to Levi ahead of this conversation, he did describe your early days as fighting fires, we scoping goals and navigating those big pivots. Can you walk us through any of those zero to one moments that helped you as a company sharpen your focus? Our goals and like how we go about doing it, our go to market, all of those things have changed a lot, but the underlying vision and the core things we need to get right, we're actually still pretty spot on from the beginning. There's been a few things that have helped us over time, which has been, you know, continuing to like just approach everything with a beginner's mind, not being too stuck in kind of, no, like this is the direction, this is what we told the board, this is what we need to do. I feel like for a couple of years, every board meeting was a bit of a refreshment update and wasn't just, hey, here are the metrics, it was like, hey, this is our approach, this is what's changed. That ultimately was a good thing, that's led us to a place where like we're constantly questioning assumptions, constantly questioning how we thought about the world and a lot that relied on speaking to people that were deep in the industry and just continuing to like data on mental models. One of the lessons and saying that we try to drill home to the team is that people can fight change with a startup, not knowing what they're doing. It's actually not that. A change shows your ability to be really adaptable to be able to identify the most critical problems, the out of no when something was a priority but now it isn't a priority. And then being nimble enough to very quickly change your approach to completely real org that the company to put people in different teams, we try to mark that as like a real positive sign that we should celebrate. So I think a lot of companies trying to shy away from that. They almost embarrassed like, oh, the team's changing again. I was like, no, like this was a good thing, this was one of our super strengths, like we're changing again for a reason. I feel like you've got lots of value to offer in the people in culture space and how you've built that function. On the people in culture space, the folks at an early stage with their company, you want to be really intentional about this and for us that means getting, I think it was the first 10 of us in a room. And I remember this very clearly, like we're doing this live on a narrow board, like no little sections and just writing the types of values that we hold personally, what kind of people would we want to work with. And ultimately what we try to get to is we want to be able to define the values such that in 10 years time, we get up and we're just as excited to come in and work with each other and work with a growing team as we are today. I remember reading, I think it was delivering happiness or one of the early zappos books and one of their co-founders, maybe it was the prior company, they had worked really hard, the business had done well, but 10 years in, there was the last thing you wanted to do each morning was go to work and it was a zone company, right? And that's going to terrifying. And so, at the very early stage, it's been very intentional about the company that you want to build, the values that you want to share with your fellow teammates. And then one of those behavioral traits, right? How should people behave when no one's looking? And what sort of things are we going to celebrate? A lot of that has faded into how we approach problems and how we work today, but it's also a filter for our hiring, right? And then we're going to be able to do a lot of things, right? And then we're going to be able to work with before. They're given really big problems, hard problems to solve. And then they're given a ton of freedom and responsibility to do what they do best, right? They're great. They're great. And then they've got the freedom to go out and do it. And a lot of that means stripping back things. It means getting rid of bureaucracy, getting rid of process, getting rid of meetings. We've taken a lot of inspiration from Netflix. Our expense policy is the red face, right? You can basically spend whatever you like without getting rid of the face and blushing, right? Airbnb, counter example, and most companies will do this, like I think the accommodation budget is 250 a night, or whatever it was. So what do people do? They do the search results on Airbnb and they go to 30 to 250 per night, right? And so I'm trying to find the best place. Wherever possible, we've just continued to try to raise that bar of talent density. We've just really tried to treat people like adults, which sounds like obviously companies do that, but most don't. That's why your policies and process and rules in place would try to give people more autonomy, more freedom and responsibility, and then continue to remove rules and process where we can. I think the industry has kind of like a bit of a flywheel. That's helped us retain the team we have, and I think operate as effectively as we have. How are you playing into your strengths or your genius zone and your role? What would you say your number one superpowers? My personal superpowers? Don't ask me that. What I've learned over time is one of the single most impactful changes or skills that you can develop is the ability to focus. I mean, there are two ways. One is particularly in a startup environment. There's always a lot of distraction. There's always a lot of new shiny objects in the room. You know, things that you can go to. I think people can flake being busy with being affected. That's one of my internal muscles that I've built over time is two things. One is consistently asking myself, is what I'm working on the single most impactful thing I can do to the company? It's a little bit that eyes and hour matrix of like urgent versus important. There will be things that are like not important and urgent. Like you need to get that oscillator out or you need to do this or you need to like get this US entity established. Whatever, some things you just have to do. But then I think people often get distracted by like the urgent, not important. And their days look like buzzing around slack. And you know, into the week, I've definitely had those weeks where you feel like you're busy and your mind's very loud. But you haven't achieved those one or two really important things. And so I think one of my student powers is that you're not really good at it. has been to really, there's like a, what are the one or two key things that I can do at the company, like the most impactful things? And that's changed over time. It's probably going from really scrappy to now, it's what's the leverage I can have across all our leadership or our people leads or what we call managers, things I can do that impact me entire company. On a more just like technical day to day basis, it's little things like catching myself and knowing when I've been distracted by the dopamine distraction, right? Am I being responsive and slack? I'm super responsive, that's normally not a good sign. So really prioritizing that deep work for me that means planning my day the night before. And sometimes even finding ways to be accountable and public of what I'm doing when I don't even need to be. So I turn my team, hey, these are the two things I'm gonna get done this week. And then I know back in my mind, I've got to do this, right? So it's funny, like a little hacks to hold myself accountable. If I had to add to that, it seemed related to the first point, but I've never seen my role as boxing to one thing for another. I am constantly thinking, particularly as we get bigger, what's the biggest thing keeping me alive at night? What's the biggest fire in a company level which I can impact? And so I think that's been good after once in a power, but hopefully that's all kind of one related thing around prioritization and focus and impact. The last thing, the second thing of that's one group. The ability just to ruthlessly execute and get shit done. I'm pretty good at once, I know what I'm doing. Just being sort of like headphones on very resourceful, like holding people to account and being relentless to like phone something into end and not getting blocked. Like I'm gonna keep putting things, keep pushing people into a deliver. As a company when you're growing this fast, your skills don't necessarily mean you're gonna be as good as you need to be for the next challenge, right? So you need to be growing as fast as not fast as a company or you should be replaced, right? Like if I'm not the best person at that next stage, like Levi should find me. You should replace me as someone else. It's on all of us in these positions to keep driving our own growth and to keep doing ready for that next stage. - Plus one on all of that when I spoke to Levi and David actually before this interview. In terms of your operating style, they're just webduers, methodical, gritty, pragmatic and highly action orientated. And actually I really love that your super power filters down to your team and your goal setting. From the research I've done, you use the one thing, goal setting method. So I love that you bring the team on that journey too. - That's important. Saying that we've done recently with Partly, I'm just making sure that we've got these big company goals on an annual basis, on a quarterly basis. We've got some group and team outputs. It's a good sense check. And it's something that we ask people that people are pretty prepared to answer. You should know what the one key thing you're doing at the company is, or one impact you're trying to have. If you don't, it means we need to fix that, right? We need to make sure we get clarity, make sure people are focused on the right thing. - Actually, I had a therapy session at the beginning of the year because I found myself procrastinating. Now it's like, I just don't understand. I love what I'm, it was actually in all areas of my life. I was like, I love what I'm doing. Nothing is scary here. Well, actually, it is scary but in a good way. And I just have this inaction. Yeah, it was simple advice. It was just like the thing that you're chasing is too big. Break it down into many parts and I've been flying since. So, yeah. - And on that, I had that same issue. And when I'm doing my plan the night before, what I'll often do is, let's say there's three things I want to work on tomorrow. I use Trello, had for a long time. I have an update that's still very simple, but I will have a card and then with them that I have my checklist. And I even get to the point of making it so easy to start momentum that it sounds comical. It's like the first step might be start notion doc. (laughs) And then second step is like researchness. And so, it's like winning by making your bed in the morning, right? It's just that what's the smallest little thing you can do to fall for and create momentum. So, I find this having that's easy and then I'm away. The other thing, which is a bit of a weird one, but again, I hack that I've used pre-successfully is if I don't want to do something, there's a website or a tool that I use as a egg timer. And I give myself a mission to not keep working on something. I go, look, I don't want to do this. I'm missing a five minute timer and then I can quit. I can stop at the end of five minutes. And you know what happens like nine times L10? You get five minutes in and then you're kind of like, oh, this is interesting. And now I'll go as well. I kind of know what I'm doing to myself when I do it, but it's surprisingly still worked. - We're gonna look ahead to the future now. From your vantage point as chief people officer, what trends do you see shaping the roles of operators? - If I just zoom out a little bit in terms of like, how do I think about operators? At a company, at a company that's growing fast, I think there's two things. One is there's an expectation of operators to be sort of force multipliers across the company, right? You might be an IC, but you should be able to have, if you're a great operator, like this multiplier impact. You should be able to, if there's different things people working on, like maybe you're working across various teams, the ability to help the entire company move faster simultaneously. The second thing is I think just this increased productivity as a person, right? Carout team, I don't want everyone to be 10% more effective than yeah, like I want our enablement or our operations team to be finding ways to be two, three, 10, more effective over the next couple of years. And some of that sure is using AI tools and makes to make yourself more productive. But one of the changes we'll see or already are seeing is that companies have been founded and they're getting to product market first and their raise in these big rounds with really, really small teams, three to five people. People could talk about when we see the first one person unicorn, but I think the relevant of truth carries over to operators and establish startups as well, which is yeah, like the company might grow their revenues like 10, 20, 50, eggs. Maybe the engineering team's getting more effective, which if you can deliver these products to more customers, you'll get a bigger return. I actually don't think the engineering time will slow down. I think people as a result of the higher turn, higher more engineers and more product people. But I think the operations and for operators, the way you should be thinking about it and how we're thinking about it for our team, and partly is as this company is scaled from 100 to 500 people, I don't want our team to grow. I don't want this huge team. I want this crazy efficient team, friend of mine, Dan Gord, had a company and she said their goal is to automate themselves out of their own role. And like maybe you don't want to go to that extent where you like you actually not needed, but gain to the point where the systems and the things you're putting in place, like you're not having to do this manual repetitive work, you're finding ways like whether it's AI agents or it's just automated way of doing things that allow you to then focus on higher impact things and then again and again, so we can be a team of, I think about six or seven an hour enablement team and then we've got a large rock team. But how can we stay the same size? But you know, be serving 10, 50, eggs, number of customers, 10, 50 eggs, the number of internal employees as well. - What's your vision for the future? - As a leader or as a leader or as a human being? - I'll tackle the like operator/sachelator one first. Partly is the number one focus and the challenge is it get it going to be aggressive. And for me, I need to keep scaling with the company. So my sort of professional mission is to become the best startup CPU on the world. Intentionally ambitious of any, whether it's an investor, a founder, a CEO, a day of things, we need some advice or we need help with this problem. I'm sort of the go to do right. I've learned enough, I've developed these skills. I've seen enough, I've experienced enough, you know, through partly and maybe companies have invested them as well. So really have an enormous impact. On a personal level, again, this sort of speaks partly and so my view that the work by balance is BS is that I fully believe that to create outside of results to do truly exceptional things, you need periods of imbalance. Those imbalance can be on the work side. They can also be on the professional side. Personally, I, this is a time my life where I'm leaning to the work side. I'm a piece of that in bite design, like, imbalance on that side. I use the good thing of partly is, while we work extremely hard, we're also very, very flexible, right? So I will work strange hours, I will be up at 5 a.m. I might work very late, but then I will be taking four, five hours off just to spend time and pick up my way from daycare and spend time with my kids. Personally, for me, I think, continuing to life and imbalance and then hopefully on the other side, it'll be an imbalance on the family side, but I think as soon as you've got the startup bug, it's pretty hard to let that go. There's always going to be that nagging to the question of what else could we be doing. So we'll see how that turns out. Yeah, nice. I love that you've got that flexibility to hang out with the family. You're trying to be the best CBO in the world. Is there a leader that you're aspiring to be like or who has walked the path before? Yeah, I think on the people on cold-tough side, the two that would jump to my hands, for me would be Penny McCord and Red Hastings from Netflix. I think there has been some changes written about recently on the culture of Netflix. I think all the journey that I've been on, the culture I mentioned, I think that scale was really impressive. From a pure execution point and just clarity of thought, I love reading anything by Patrick Colis and then the stri-brothers, they've strived, you know, learn more about them and hear more about them as they go public probably this year, but they're probably the two to three that I look to most. You mentioned about your portfolio companies. Do you have any advice for any operators looking to start making their first Andrew investments? Second part of that question would be like, how can you pitch how you'd add value to those companies and their journey? The best way to get started is find ways to add value to founders. There's lots of money in the ecosystem. There's huge buzz and intel of capital around anything that's got AI and a pitch spec. So it looked money is there for people that can get their those foundational pieces, right? Money's helpful, like startups, you know, particularly founders in the early stages, sometimes even before they've got an idea or like before they've got any sort of product market fit, be now to just write a check and give them cash. Like that is useful, gets less useful as they get further on. But I think in those early stages, it's figuring out how can I add value and similar to when you're looking for a company to join as I mentioned before, I think it's just that really scrappy stuff that you can do for a founder, right? Stuff that they would be doing. have found it in their day to day and might be, hey, I know you need to hire that first engineer or designer. I've gone away and I've populated this Google sheet with 20 great people, here's like, their LinkedIn, I can introduce to these ones like blah blah blah, just doing stuff like that where I found all the holy shit, this is helpful. For me, I'll obviously help people hiring, I'll help people with the early operations stuff, early cultures of thinking through that. And also with my experience at Meetmail and Tilt, a lot of that was in the growth area. So just helping those like initial growth levers or thinking through that approach and fundraising, right? You might have a superpower and design, great, like lean into design and just give your time, just like lean into what you can help with. Now if it's not clear, like there's always stuff you can do, like starts always need a hire, they always need to speak to customers, you can always add a very basic level, like build with and do things that will help or find a way to introduce them to useful people. For me, I found that approach of, I think there's a book here which is like, dig your well before you drink from it. A lot of the deals that I've got is just because I've been helpful, like free check, pre-investment, just trying to add some value. And then once you are investing the company, hopefully there's even more motivation, but if you keep trying to help that company, then they will refer you to others. Another thing to keep in mind is, a lot of the efforts don't get fruit today or even tomorrow. It might be meeting with people, it might be helping someone, it might not be for this business, maybe it's like being out on this in the next business. So, I think over time, like the more effort you put in, it compounds on itself. If you don't get a huge return out of it, maybe turns out you're not a great investor, turns out it's better investing in the S&P 500. I think there's still value in investing in a few companies, just like get that insight into how they operate, the challenges that they have, maybe it even provides your job opportunity down the track, like lots of VCs, you'll see doing that, they'll put the best portfolio company and jump into it. And maybe it'll help you stay in your own company one day. The best thing you can do is start a company, think the second best thing you can do is invest in a founder and help them start a company. Or join an early stage company, there's probably number three, number two or three. I have a nads for that, I feel like if you want to learn alongside other people, syndicate are a great way to learn how to diligence a company, learn how to get to get to conviction on a company because the syndicate league will be taking you along on that journey. Yeah, absolutely, syndicate is a great way, let's say you don't even have the money. You know, syndicate is a dollar, so you normally do a thousand dollars, so you can spread that across 10 companies. There's also just a ton of resources online, right? Like Harry Stevens with 20 BC by that super interesting, there's a ton of podcasts in content out there. If you just want to learn about the world from 15 and those early stuff, stories. Are there any resources, frameworks or people in the industry that have been your knock stars? Yeah, I'm kind of like a like art dish of the day kind of person, right? I used to read a lot of books which weren't net timely, you know, they would just recommend it and they're great books, but find what's a lot more valuable is what problems I have today and what is the specific resource or book or person I can speak to? And you I think spending a lot of time figuring out like the number one person who speak to about a problem is better than speaking to like the five kind of average people that will have like silly different ideas. I would say there's one fallback in particular, in terms of frameworks, me personally, I've used the Eisenhower matrix just in terms of prioritizing what we should focus on as a company as a team. The radical-candered framework is the thing that we use a lot internally, partly of just caring personally enough to challenge people really directly and give them that feedback they need to have. Books and like things I've gone back to, there's the one thing which we mentioned before, there's the Netflix file book that is powerful, which was an early one and then No Rules Rules, which is a recent one from left field, but I do a little yearly rate of how to win friends and influence people. It's an old book and like some of the examples are outdated, but I find it just like a good refresher of kind of how to get what you want or like how to work with people and I don't know it's kind of become a yearly ritual now, but I find it there's always two or three things in the age here that I'll take and go okay when you come into the situation or you find yourself with someone that maybe you don't agree with or you're trying to get this result, it's been helped with my approach to things. Yeah, I really love it, especially when you're in a situation where you need to influence a cross-nordion organisation, but not everybody will be your direct report. This podcast is all about lifting other operators up, so if you had to name an operator who's doing great things, who would they be? I could cheat and list a bunch of people at party, but I won't do that. I'll take a bit of a people still on it, so in terms of like operators in the people space or leadership space, firstly from aura, I've been pretty relentless in just asking her feedback on things from time to time and Penny from Crimson Global Academy, she's very aggressive, she's a great operator, unfortunately we just interviewed Jamie, Pleadon and our recent season of the week at party, which was pretty inspirational. Yeah, they're probably like the keywees that initially jumped in mind particularly with the slight people lens on it. Love it, so last question, do you have any advice on staying grounded amid the chaos? I'll happily embarrass myself here, I've always loved this constant experimentation with what worked for me, what doesn't, what leads to more productive weeks. I'm probably not quite like the Tim Ferriss, but I think there's like elements of that for our work week or even Michael Bacco as like a whole productivity substatic, so there'll be bits that I take from there. For me personally what I've found most impactful is I meditate every day and I find that's the single most profound change, I made just the ability to not be as reactionary, I think it's very helpful in a work environment or just being out of be productive but also at home, right? At the start of the year I started thinking about what things I want to do, I looked at what are the highest leverage things, what's like a change that doesn't just impact one part of my life, it has like this silver effect to work and relationships and whatever else. One of those annoying early morning people, so I climbed getting up about 430 or 5 in my standard that's self-induced but it's also hardly due to having two young boys. I start early, I exercise pretty much every day, I've avoided, I don't eat breakfast anymore, so I got into some intermittent fasting that also kind of just like it's a way of simple find my morning, it's a very calm slow start, it's not very distracted, I sound my morning early, focus on the most important things. This all seemed counter intuitive for a startup like partly but any startup so I don't have slack on my phone, I don't have email on my phone, I even block Safari so I can get to it but it's just very annoying and cumbersome. I've got a brand new iPhone and then I've proceeded to try and make it a dumb phone. So I. Yeah, I know I've got back to the old 3315. I find all of this really just grounded in like how do I remove distraction from my life and maintain focus. Even little things like when I go home, there's a place in my house for my laptop and phone right, because my personality, give me the chance and I'll be back on slack, I'll be back on email, I'll be doing something. The lesson there is try to be great at work and be 100% at work when you're there and then when you're with family or with friends, be 100% there, don't be doing a half written reply or not be on reply because you need to access something and it's now distracting you from a dinner out with your friends, be 100% one or better. The last thing I do, which I think helps ground me and keep the payoffs that they as I do a monthly personal review session, I go out, choose a different location and I look back at what are the things I wanted to do this year personally and professionally and my cracking against what I said I was going to do, I did a little tweaks to my schedule or my life that I want to change. It used to be an annual review, then you get to the end of the year and you go, "Oh well, okay, this went well, but these different, having just a light half an hour an hour, have a whiner of what you're doing at and kind of reflect, it's kind of just a good recurring thing to have in my calendar, so that's been pretty helpful." That's one to that, I call it my temperature check each month. Yeah, that's great. Awesome. Okay, so where can our listeners connect with you? One of the things I want to do this year is actually starting to write down some of these learnings, they're a bit more public and share these things. It's a bit of a leap of faith there, but I'll direct people to harriesnewsletter.com. That's where I'm going to be staying to write more lessons and sharing more resources over next year. That's one of the big things I'm doing. On LinkedIn, you just find me Harry Affendale and then harriotpartly.com. I encourage anyone to reach out directly, always happy to chat or help in any way I can. If you're an operator, if you're looking for your next career role, if you're looking to found a company or anything you think I might be able to offer some advice on, feel free to reach out. Oh, that's so great. Harry, thank you so much. Thanks Laura. Really enjoyed it. And that's a wrap. Today's episode was recorded and edited by me, your host Laura Nichol, with original music composed by Steven Shelton. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a follow and we'll see you next time.