New things are scary
We were sitting on a bench in Bluffton, SC when I said to Kylie, with a lump in my throat, “we are really doing this, aren’t we?” I was terrified. Sure, I had built product and engineering teams for over a decade, had led three company-side acquisitions, and could even boast a successful IPO. But the thought of taking on a startup as a co-founder? This was something entirely new. I felt sick. “We’re doing it,” said Kylie, exuding all the confidence I was lacking. “We’ve got this.” And that’s the thing about colleagues, co-founder, friends; they are in your life to help you take on new things. Because new things are scary.
After working together at two previous companies, I can tell you that Kylie is someone who lives life with her whole heart. She is always there to cheer you on, she hustles, and she always, always keeps her word. On top of that, she is a darn good designer. I knew that if I was going to make the jump, she was the person I was willing to jump with. So like any tenured product team, we kicked off a research effort to see if the problem space we wanted to tackle had legs. I put out a call on LinkedIn seeking interviews with people who had started or ended a job within the past six months, or helped onboard or offboard an employee in the past six months. We knew we struck a nerve when nearly forty people signed up over forty-eight hours. “I had to turn off my calendly link!” I slacked Kylie, “can you believe it?”
As we spent hours interviewing person after person, it became clear that our hypothesis was true. New employee onboarding (the kind employees got from their hiring managers, and sometimes the company) was lackluster at best, and cringeworthy most of the time. We learned that HR folks were aware of the problem, but didn’t have time to provide much help above and beyond their administrative duties. Hiring managers who still had all their day job responsibilities were doing the best they could, which seemed chaotic at best. We saw a big gap in the tooling space to provide an easier way to build and execute onboarding programs that HRIS and L&D tools were not addressing. We decided to continue our freefall into entrepreneurship.
Fast forward to today and we have a Google-approved app in production and people using it to solve the very problems we uncovered. We are building furiously with two additional co-founders, Chad and Mike, who also decided to leap with us, bringing their perspective, creativity and imagination to solving these problems. Every day we choose to join a Google Meet at noon eastern time to share progress we have made and hash though next steps. Because new things are scary, but also oh-so exciting when you are tackling them with other extraordinary people.
If it’s scary for you to start improving your employee onboarding, we’re here to help. Reach out though Beta Partners.
