An Inside Look at the Investor-Founder Partnership

In this episode of Redefining Work, I’m joined by Ethena CEO Roxanne Bras Petraeus and Homebrew partner Hunter Walk , whose firm is an investor in Ethena. We discuss how Ethena is modernizing compliance training, the importance of the investor-founder relationship, and much more.

This is a special episode of Redefining Work — the first to feature a co-founder and investor together. Roxanne is a U.S. Army veteran and former McKinsey consultant who founded Ethena to modernize compliance training in a way that supports culture building.

Hunter’s background includes many years in product development at Google and YouTube. He’s also a co-founder of Screendoor and a co-founder and partner at Homebrew, a venture capital firm that aims to be a force multiplier for entrepreneurs.

A Modern Approach to Compliance Training

Compliance training is so often viewed as a chore — something companies want to get done as quickly as possible. Roxanne founded Ethena to provide training and compliance tools that are different. “We do it in a way that's really about culture building, helping employees figure out how to do the right thing, instead of just check a box,” she says.

That “check a box” mentality is all too common, and it prevents training from being what it should be — a two-way process of communication that explains and reinforces the organization’s values.?

“When you actually build culture, it's about communication, right?” Roxanne says. “It's about a company communicating to employees, ‘Here's what right looks like. Here's the values of our company. Here's what we expect from you.’”

Good compliance training also reduces the legal and regulatory risk for employers and prevents disagreements and breaches of trust within the workforce. The return-to-work (RTO) push illustrates the importance of this training and the growing demand for compliance guidance.

Many employees went remote or hybrid during the pandemic and are resisting RTO policies, often citing the need for accommodations. Many managers and even HR teams aren’t necessarily prepared for these types of legal and compliance questions.?

Not only do companies need better training, but they’re also asking Roxanne for customized assistance. “‘We love your courses for off-the-shelf stuff,’” she says companies tell her. “‘But the way we do it at Company X, we need to have like some really specific five-minute training on leaves of absence.’”

Growth in HR and Work Tech?

More than $22 billion of venture capital has flowed to HR and work tech startups in the past two years, showing how important people technology is to business success.

"Whether you believe in remote, hybrid, in-office, people are now much more comfortable with the adoption of high-quality software tools to aid or replace what used to be less effective, less customizable sort of services models," Hunter says.

Businesses are increasingly investing in HR tech in two ways, Hunter says. One is the back office — things like payroll, that you need to have just to function or meet the law’s requirements. The other is the front office. “Those usually involve culture feedback, training, management, one-on-ones, team building,” Hunter says. Your company can ignore these responsibilities, but you probably won’t fare well.

What excites Hunter about Ethena is that it not only delivers training but helps companies match their compliance training needs to where they are in their life cycle. “It's actually looking at the efficacy of preventing these issues … how we deliver it when we deliver this so that it's individual-appropriate, company-appropriate,-stage appropriate,” he says.

The Value of the Investor-Founder Relationship

Homebrew’s mission has always been to “find founders who were working on problems that were large, urgent and valuable, and of personal importance to them, and then supply them with some capital.”

This is something that he found in working with Roxanne and her co-founder and chief technology officer, Anne Solmssen.?

“She’s excellent at … understanding when the buck stops with you as a CEO, but also when you have to trust that you’ve hired great people and they can make the decision,” Hunter says.

Roxanne and Hunter’s working relationship has flourished because they recognize and respect each other’s perspectives. Roxanne appreciates how Hunter leads with questions, not solutions. “I think that [investors] can do best when they're really like partnering with a company to figure out the solution versus just sort of saying, like, ‘I've got pattern recognition, I've seen this, here's the answer,’” Roxanne says.

Hunter also praises Roxanne for being able to adjust her leadership as Ethena grows. “She’s not just building a company that is going to be valuable,” Hunter says, “but a company that’s going to be valuable that she’s going to be the leader of for the foreseeable future.”

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