#26: Maëlle Gavet, Techstars

Welcome to From Startup to Grownup, the podcast. My name is Alisa Cohn. I'm an executive coach, an angel investor, and the author of From Startup to Grownup. Each week I talk to founders, creators, advisors, investors, and builders of all kinds about their insights and experiences in going from startup to grownup. This is episode 26, and I'm thrilled to welcome Mael Gaveh to the podcast. Maelle is the CEO of Techstars. Techstars is one of the oldest and most well-known startup accelerators, and Maelle came in to replace the founders.

So we talk about what that was like in this conversation.

Prior to joining Techstars, Maelle was the CEO of Ozone, a large Russian e-commerce company, as well as an executive at the travel company Booking.com and the real estate giant Compass. She's also the author of Trampled by Unicorns, Big Tech's Empathy Problem and How to Fix It. As you'll hear, Mayel is an incredibly multifaceted executive with a breadth of experience, and she shares a ton of wisdom here. We discussed how she started her first business at age 16 and the lessons she learned about hiring and motivating people then, which she still uses today. We discussed how she developed her leadership style and the jarring moment when she saw herself as an autocratic leader and then what she did about it. And Maelle describes how she learned the power of feedback and what she got from that. We also discuss empathy, and Maelle gives one of the best definitions of empathy I've ever heard and the business case for why it's so important. Maelle has such a thirst for learning, and you're going to learn so much from her hard-won insights. So please enjoy my incredible conversation with Maëlle Gavey.

Maëlle, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you.

Thanks for having me.

I'm delighted you're here, and, and there's so much to cover. You've had so many experiences. I'd love to start by asking you, you know, you again, you've been an entrepreneur and you've been an executive, and now you're the CEO of Techstars. Did you have early experiences of entrepreneurship either in your family or by yourself that exposed you to entrepreneurship?

So I built my first business when I was 16, and I joke that this was out of necessity because I come from what you would call a low-middle-class family when it comes to my parents, and my grandparents were actually poor. And so there was not a lot of money beyond like the necessity, even though again, my parents were financially more stable than my grandparents were. And I really, really, really wanted dresses. And so I built my first business out of the necessity to want to buy dresses. But other than that, no, you, you could consider that my grandfather was an entrepreneur who didn't know he was one because he, he built a few small businesses just to keep his family afloat and make sure there would be bread on the table. I don't think that he ever thought of himself as an entrepreneur. I thought he thought of himself as just someone who is trying to provide for his family.

Yeah, and sort of scrape a living together. Did you— I mean, I have to ask you, what business did you start when you were 16 to get to spending money to buy the things you wanted in your life?

So I organized a business around birthday parties for children, um, and I started, uh, working for someone else. And then very quickly, uh, I realized that I probably could do the same thing, if not better. And so, I started organizing this birthday for children by myself. And then, the business grew and I ended up hiring a few people because I couldn't handle all the demand.

Wow. And so, you learned about hiring. You learned about managing people from those early experiences. I'm curious, are there any lessons that you have from those early experiences of hiring people and managing people when you were age 16 that are still true today?

Yes, absolutely. Um, it's just, it was my first experience and it's going to sound terrible when I say it that way, but it was my first experience discovering that somehow people are not robots. You know, people are not doing what you tell them to do. That doesn't work like that. Um, you need to get, get people excited, like they need to. See a reason why they're doing— they should do what you're asking them to do. And sometimes it's just money, and it's fine, by the way. Doing things for money is not always a bad thing, especially again, when it's out of necessity, not for dresses, for other stuff. But sometimes it's because, I don't know, you like, in that particular case, like, you really like spending time with children. You really, you're thinking about an acting career. And when you organize these birthday parties, usually you come in costumed and, and, and you have to tell a story to children. And so, for example, if you hire someone who is really focused on that, like one of the young ladies that I recruited back then, if I put her on a birthday party where she's not going to have to get costume and it's mostly about logistics rather than about creating a universe for the children, she would be less excited and she would be doing less of a good job. And so, I've learned. I really summarize it by saying just, I learned that people are not robots and that you can't just give them orders and wait for them to just make them happen.

Right. And to do your bidding because you tell them what to do.

Exactly.

I love that so much. You know, I had Scott Belsky on my podcast and he said, look, at the end of the day, management is not scalable because at the end of the day, it has to do with that person sitting in front of you, their motivations, their drivers, what's interesting to them. And it's, um, and you're saying, and I think it's powerful that you learned the lessons at 16. When you said, this is gonna sound terrible to say, I'm like, well, I think that there are plenty of founders and leaders who take a long time to learn that. So I think it's amazing that you learned at 16. So you went from 16-year-old entrepreneur to a lot of different experiences, including the CEO of, I guess, Ozone, which is a Russian company, and then an executive at Priceline and Compass. Could you briefly kind of like paint that career trajectory?

Yeah, and I assure you it makes sense when you look at it afterwards, but I think at the time people were, my family in particular was a little puzzled. So, built my first business at 16, did a second one a few years later. I learned English, German, and Russian in high school. Uh, and the second business I did, uh, was in Russia. Then I left. I joined the Boston Consulting Group, mostly because as an entrepreneur, I felt like I had reached my limits somehow. I feel like I couldn't grow my business further, uh, without getting additional skills. And, and I hadn't spent a lot of time, uh, at school after high school, um, because I was busy running a business. And so I was coming to class, but not really paying a lot of attention and, and, and, you know, skipping as many as I was, I was, uh, allowed. By the school, skipping as many classes as I could. So then I went to the Boston Consulting Group with this idea that that would be, that would be a great MBA without having to be out of the workforce for 2 years. And I just couldn't afford to pay for an MBA. And my parents certainly could not. So for me, the, for me, BCG was that, and I was supposed to be there for 2 years and I ended up staying 6 and I worked all around the world. Thanks to BCG, and I really consider them as my first business family and the people who really taught me how to think and analyze a problem and manage the people who are part of a project. And then I started getting the bug of entrepreneurship again, and I love, love my job at BCG, but I just, I felt like I wanted to do rather than advising people to do. And so, I started working on a By then I had done a third business. I was in the process of doing a fourth. And then it just happened that my last client at BCG was this small e-commerce company. At the time I was in Russia and they were one of a dozen e-commerce players in Russia. And I had this aha moment. When I realized that I like being an entrepreneur, I love being an entrepreneur, but I don't like the 0 to 1, which is a bit weird because most of the time when you talk to an entrepreneur, what they love is the 0 to 1 and what they don't like is scaling after that.

That's so true. You're like the opposite. That's so true.

I'm the opposite. I love building, but what I'm super excited about is the 1 to 100 and then the 100 to whatever, a billion or whatever number you want to put out there. The zero to one, meh, yeah, kind of like a necessity. And I came across that client of BCG called Ozone, which you mentioned before. And I was like, great. I think I can be an entrepreneur without having to go through the zero to one. And so I joined the company, I left BCG, I joined the company, I became the CEO, we became the largest e-commerce company in Russia. We were basically labeled the Amazon of Russia. And then after that, I wanted to learn what I would call the American way of doing business because I felt like there was a lot of best practices that I had seen or heard or been taught when I was at BCG that I had never experienced like directly. And so I joined the Priceline Group, which owns, uh, which is now called Booking Holdings, but at the time it was called the Priceline Group, which owns Booking, uh, Priceline, obviously, OpenTable, Kayak, everything, uh, and, and a bunch of other brands. And, and was already at the time a $70, $80 billion market cap company. And I joined them, um, to oversee all the operations of the entire group, which I think at the time had like 16,000 employees or something. And I learned a ton. And to me, that was that phase. So I give up my CEO title. Uh, I became, uh, I became the, uh, I became the EVP of operations. So basically a CEO role. And I did that because I wanted to learn how to do things at a massive scale. So I learned that and then, and then I joined Compass, which is a real estate company, which, uh, is now publicly listed. And, uh, if I'm not mistaken, the largest, uh, the largest, um, residential com— um, residential real estate company in America. I joined them as a COO, uh, with this idea of helping them scale and, and apply what I had learned both at Ozone and at Priceline. And, and we grew, we grew tremendously. And then I took some time off to write a book because I felt like I had all this idea. I hit my 40s and, and, um, and I had all these ideas in my head that, that I really wanted to put on paper. And so I wrote the book. And then Techstars came knocking on my door and it was one of this, another one of these aha moment when I realized that, that Techstars was everything that I had ever wanted in a job. Uh, what the Japanese people called ikigai, the concept of finding a job that is what, uh, you love doing, what you're good at doing. What the world needs you to do and what people are ready to pay you for. And, and, and that was it. Like, Techstars— Techstars was my ikigai.

That's so beautiful. I love that story. And there's so much there about, you're like, you're learning, you're building blocks of learning. Like, it feels like visceral to me. We're definitely gonna talk about the book. We're definitely gonna talk about Techstars. And before we get into that, with all your different experiences on those different journeys. And what you talked about is you learned a lot, you learned a lot, you learned a lot. Could you talk about a few of the key leadership lessons you learned and maybe some lessons you learned about yourself as you were experiencing those different leadership moments?

I've learned a lot and I'm still learning a lot. When I was younger, I had this illusion that somehow there was like the perfect leadership playbook and I just needed to learn. And then, once I learned it, that was it. Like, I'd be good and I could focus on something else. And one of the very first lessons I learned and relearned and re-relearned is that there's always room for improvement. There's always mistakes that you can make, even sometimes things that you kind of know, but like, I mean, you actually not kind of know, you actually know, but then because of circumstances in, in, at work or sometimes even personal circumstances, for whatever reason you forget, and then you look back and you're like, Oh God, like, how is it possible that I did that stupid thing? I know it's stupid and yet I did it. So one of the first things I learned is you never stop learning as a leader, as a, as a, as someone who leads people. Um, there's always something better, something you can learn. The second, the second big lesson for me is something that I learned with my second company, uh, which is the importance of every single person in the company. And what I mean by that is, in my early 20s, I think I had, I had a very top-down vision of how to run a company, which is a very nice and political, politically correct way of saying, I think I was a, an autocrat, a tyrant, and I was like, and I run this company and I funded it and I'm the one dealing and making every decision. And I realized, uh, basically the cleaning crew, we were running an event business and we had a facility and the cleaning crew went on strike and I suddenly the business stopped working because when you run a huge facility and you have no one to clean after every event, You basically very quickly, you, you come to a stop because you can't host people in something that doesn't look great. And, and it was like one of the most necessary lesson that I got in my entire life because it put me back down on earth, which was learning that everybody has a role to play in the business and these people that I had And I'm ashamed of saying it that way. I mean, of remembering how I was back then, but like these people who I had never said a word to beyond like, hi, how you doing?

Right.

I realized that I could not operate my business without them. And it was just like a massive cold shower about how pretentious and arrogant I had been and how totally unacceptable that was. And so. I'm glad I got that lesson early on, but as I say, even when I think about it now, I, I, I feel very ashamed of how I managed these people back then.

Yeah, I hear you. I really appreciate your sharing that. You are definitely not alone. And also, I really resonate with this, this notion of like, you look back at your sort of your, your callow youth and you just realize, oh gosh, I can't believe it was like that. But, you know, At the same time, I think those are the, the hardest lessons to learn are the most important for us. That's what I've experienced.

I agree. It doesn't make them less painful, right? And look, to be clear, like, it was mostly painful for them, but it's just the sense of— the sense of shame is, is very real there.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I wonder if, if that— and I'd love to hear about your book. It sounds like that might have been one of the little moments that kind of cued you into empathy because your book is called Trampled by Unicorns: Big Tech's Empathy Problem and How to Fix It. By the way, when I picked it up, I read it in one sitting. You should know. So it's really a great book. Everyone should read it. It's about a year and a half old, I think.

But it's still—

it's very, very relevant. So I'm just curious, just as a starting point, I— here's what I think. What I think is that we teach what we need to learn. And I know that you talk about corporate empathy in this book, but I just wonder if there was something in you that realized you had to learn empathy, and that's why it was such an important book to write about this.

Yes, absolutely. I, I, I told you about one episode, and there were a few more. And I, I was— I was very— BCG taught me the power of feedback. Because when you're, when you're at BCG, you get feedback at the end of every project. And if your project is long, you get feedback every, every quarter anyway. And it's hard because it's very direct feedback about all the things you're great at and also all the things you suck at. They call them area for improvement, but that's basically like, you're really bad at that. You need to, you need to focus. And it's, it's, it's hard, you know, when again, I, I joined BCG when I was in my 20s and, and No one had been that direct about all the things I was bad at, but I spent 6 years there and by the end I was like, you know what, this is so valuable. Even when it hurts, it's just like, I need to learn. I need to learn to do better every, every day of my life. And so, um, one of the things that, that kept coming back and then, and then I experienced that again when I became the CEO of Ozone. Is that sometimes I would come across as less empathetic than I actually felt. And I had for a very long time, I'm giving you the short version of what took hours and hours and hours of coaching, but I had basically associated in my mind empathy with weakness. And so every time I would feel that I needed to be more mindful of the impact that my decisions were having on people, there was at the same time a little voice in my head that was like, oh, be careful, that's weakness. And I think for me, the turn was when I actually realized that empathy is not a weakness, it's a strength. And that I needed not just to accept it, I needed to cultivate it. And it's hard, like empathy is a muscle. That hurts often when you train it because it takes a lot of energy and a lot of brain juice and a lot like, like it's, it's, it's a very difficult muscle to exercise on a certain basis.

How have you exercised it? How have, because the question is really like, what advice do you have for other people to exercise the muscle? What have you found helpful to exercise your empathy?

I, I don't have a recipe. I, I, or a secret weapon. I do, I do think about it a lot. Like I have an executive coach and I talk to her a lot about it. It's like I did, so I reflect a lot on what I did and what I said or what I didn't do or what I didn't say. And, and pretty much every week or every other week, like. I will come up with something that I'm like, nah, I wish I could have done better. I wish I could have said the things differently. I wish I could have done that differently. And just to be clear, it's not just because I think it's the right thing to do. Because I, again, then, then that starts sounding like a, like softy and like, oh, it's all like, uh, you know, unicorns and, and and flowers and cards. It's not that. It's, it's really, I think to be a good business leader, you have to have empathy, which is not the same as sympathy and, and not the same as pity. Empathy is really about your ability to under— the, the way I define empathy in, in the corporate sense of empathy is your ability to understand through and through the impact that your decisions have on people and really think how you can best mitigate the negative impact. And so, it's not a weakness. If anything, it's a superpower. Like, if you can, every time you make a decision or you have to make a decision, if you can think about all the stakeholders that your decision is gonna impact, how they're gonna react to it. And if it's a reaction that you believe is gonna be negative, Like, how can you transform as much as possible that negative into positive? Like, yeah, that's superhuman power. And so, I force myself to do that because every week I feel that there are stuff that I could just have done a little better. And so, again, no secret weapon, just consistency. Like, how can I be more empathetic?

And reflection. Sounds like reflection. And so, paint the rest of the picture. So, I really respect what you're saying, which is This is not to make me a nicer person, although as I always say to my clients, it's fine if it makes you a nicer person. But you're saying it is an important business weapon, like tool, I should say. Why? What makes it an important business tool? Like, could you paint a decision you've had to make and how it was really important for you to have empathy and how that helped the stakeholders around you do it better or helped it be a better outcome?

I think it all starts with acknowledging, which is not a given in, in tech companies, and I speak a lot about this in, in my book, acknowledging that everything starts and finishes with people. Like, you're only as strong as your people are, as your employees are. You only, and you are as weak, as unfocused, as unengaged, as disorganized as your team, as your people are. And so if you, if you agree with that, And I say it out loud because having had this conversation for decades now, across multiple companies with multiple leaders, I came to the conclusion that a lot of people in tech actually pay lip service to that, but don't really believe it. And that there is a almost, there's a deeply ingrained belief that, oh God, if we could only replace people with lines of codes and robots. The world would be so much better. Like that the, basically people are messy, people are unpredictable. Like they're the, they're the highly variable part of any formula. And so if you could only reduce the volatility of that variable in your formula, like it would be so much better. And so I always start with that is if you believe that every business starts and finishes with people. Then why wouldn't you want to understand through and through how your people are motivated, how they're impacted by your decision, and how you can get them to give you their best? Because that's related. How are they, how are you gonna make them happy and, and engaged? Because the only way they're gonna give you their best is that if they're happy or engaged. And so, there's multiple decisions related to that. It's like, how, how do you explain any decision so that they have enough context so that they understand how it's gonna impact them? And then how do you make sure that you leave enough time for Q&A and you create a safe enough space that they feel they can actually ask these questions that potentially they're afraid to ask. And, and, and so, like, this is critically important. How, how decisions are being made. Like, are you, uh, can they make decision? And if they make decision and they make a mistake, how is that being treated? What are the consequences of this? And how do you, again, with empathy, how do you treat someone who makes a mistake? Like, do you consider that this is a mistake, this is totally unacceptable, how dare you, what were you thinking? I mean, this whole, you know the line. Or do you go to the absolute other extreme, which is, oh, it's okay, you know, everyone needs to learn. And my view is that it's neither of those. Because one is treating people like disposable and the other one is objectively weak. And so, like, empathy is about finding the right middle, which is recognizing or trying to recognize as much as possible the context under which a certain decision was made, why the employee, assuming good intent, why the employee made this decision that specific way, which led to a mistake. And then have a conversation around how can we make sure that mistake doesn't happen again? Because it's okay to learn from mistake. You just need to make sure that you don't repeat it. And so, it's just every step of the way for me, Ethics and empathy is about how do you make sure that every stakeholder that is being impacted is part of your reasoning. And, and by the way, you can decide to ignore it. What I mean by that is it's not because you have understood the, the impact you're gonna have on someone that you, you have to mitigate that impact, but at least you have the knowledge and you can decide to take it into account or not. And I find that too often the leaders don't even bother going through that process of figuring out how is that going to impact people. And I want to be clear, like, I don't get it right 100% of the time. Like, every week I can find stuff that frankly I wish I had done better.

Yeah, of course. I think we're all on a learning journey. But you've just said so many really important things. One thing that I pulled out is that I think this is— people equate empathy with just being really nice and letting everything go. And it's not about that. It's about understanding that mistakes were made or bad outcomes happened and making sure that we talk about it and discuss it and talk it through, but also recognizing that that's a human being there. And oh, by the way, you've made mistakes too. So I think it's treating people like human beings, but still being able to hold them accountable. And then, the other piece that you said that I think is so important is psychological safety. We all are talking about psychological safety. We're all giving lip service to psychological safety. Really what that means is it's the ability for people to feel safe inside of work, a sense of belonging, a sense that they won't be embarrassed or punished for what goes on inside of the workplace. How do you create psychological safety? What specific advice do you have for other leaders how to create psychological safety within the workforce?

So I spent a lot of time thinking about that. Because I'm, you know, I like to move fast. I like to think big. I like to, I like people who make good decisions fast. And by definition, it's really hard to make good decisions when you go fast all the time. And so, I spend a lot of time thinking about how can I really create an environment where it's not that mistakes are tolerated and it doesn't matter. It's like, no, no, it does matter when you make a mistake, but people are also not terrified of making these mistakes. And I think the best advice I got was from a, from a CEO who said, I basically admit my mistake in front of everyone so that they understand And then I explain how I learned from there and what I'm going to do to change. And, and, and then I hold myself accountable in front of them to explain like what I've done, what I've not done, what I've been successful at on that path. And I wasn't, it wasn't clear to me why that matter. And then I, I was like, okay, I respect that person. Let me just implement and see what, what comes out of it. And what I realized is that. Part of creating psychological safety is showing people who work with you that you make mistakes too, that you're not perfect, and that you're owning these mistakes, which means that it's okay for them to own them too, which means that, you know, again, nobody, nobody's perfect. And so to me, that has been like the number one thing. The number two was zero tolerance for bullying, retaliation, personal attacks. Like, it's totally okay. And I'm sure if you talk to some people who work with me, they will tell you I like an intense debate. And I can be, I mean, I'm, yeah, I can be pretty, I can pretty be pretty into it. But the line is never crossed in terms of personal attacks. Uh, in terms of screaming at people, calling people names, like this is an absolute no tolerance policy. And, and I think to feel safe, including by the way, making jokes, because a lot of the time the way safe space are being, are broken is because people make fun of someone else quirks or, or, or someone else answer or for someone else failure or whatever. It's, it's It's not like brutal frontal, like, how dumb are you? It's more through the lens of jokes, and that can hurt really badly. And so, what I try, and as a CEO, I have a little more power than most people in the company. I try to be very vigilant in meetings to, one, role model that. Never going too personal, never scream, never like, um, but also if something happens that crossed the line, to be very public about the fact that this is unacceptable, that we're not— that basically stopping that immediately, as soon as I realized that we're basically going down that path, uh, and, and then having real feedback session afterwards with the, the person who may have engaged in, in a past that they probably should not have engaged. And I have found that because by the way, they're also humans, they also make mistakes. Uh, and so just go to them and be like, hey, you did that. That's not acceptable. Here is why, here's how you need to correct that, et cetera. I find that with these two things, you get to a decent place. And then after that, it's like hand combat on a daily basis.

That's right.

One-on-one.

Um, I think that's really powerful. And I appreciate especially there are these sort of teasing attacks or like, "I was just kidding," kind of things, which actually can be very hurtful to people and very, you know, talk about like bringing an inclusive culture can be very excluding for people. So psychological safety has to take into account all of those things. So I really appreciate you bringing those up. One thing you talk about in your book, "Trampled by Unicorns," is about how do you create an empathy KPI? So what is like a use case? How do you suggest measuring empathy and turning it into a KPI?

So it's a little different for every company. I think you have to start— because every company has a different business model, different stakeholders, different ways they impact the world around them. And again, if you think about corporate empathy as the ability for a company to think through the impact that they have on their stakeholders and integrate that impact in their thinking, you need to start by like, what are the stakeholders and what are the things that we, we actually want to be very aware of? And so it can, it can go from the way employees are engaged and integrated into the company to the way the company has impact on local community or international impact. It can have things to do with your environmental footprint because again, that has an impact on people. And then like thinking through like what it means for the world at large is actually, I would argue, a very empathetic trait that companies should develop. And my biggest problem with tech companies is that still have, for most of them, a very, very narrow vision of their impact. And somehow surprisingly, it's always the the positively narrow impact that they're looking at, or the narrow positive impact that they're looking at, rather than like the broad impact, including the good, the bad, and the ugly. And so, what I do, and I did that with a couple of companies, is I start talking to them about if they were the most empathetic company in the world, what would that look like? Understanding that this is a target, this is an aspiration, this is This is not necessarily something that you can reach at all or for sure right away. And then we start putting together, like, okay, so we have the big picture. What are the key components of this big picture? Like, what are the things that you want to be able to look or say or do to say, oh yeah, we applied our principle of empathy. On that particular dimension. And then you transform that— like, this is where my BCG background is useful— then you transform that into things that you can measure, and then you aggregate that into a KPI, which is basically like how you measure this, this overall empathy effect. I don't know, it's a little, it's a little, uh, theoretical as I describe it like that, but it, it works actually really, really well with—

is there an ex— is there an example? Yeah, is there an example at all to bring it from the theoretical to the, to the practical?

Um, example of, uh, you could actually, uh, if you go to my website, the, the one that I put together for Trampled by Unicorns, there is actually a test around measuring, uh, whether your company is empathetic. And I, I keep telling people, this is not a test of personal and individual empathy. Like, you do not take that test to figure out whether or not you're an empathetic person. There are plenty of books that exist to help you with that. This is really about corporate empathy. And so there is a test in there which has what I would call decently standard questions. We put that together with a team of researchers. And so we did full-on research to put together that test, which actually works decently well. It's called The Empathy Test, and it's really about corporate empathy. And you can see the methodology.

That's really great. I love that. One thing you also talk about as it relates to the broader environment is some of these perks that the companies give their employees. And you have definitely a bit of a— you look askance at perks. By the way, in my book, From Startup to Grownup, I also talk about perks as being a mixed blessing. How do perks play into this and what are the, what is the problem with perks in corporate environments and tech companies?

Um, all right, so we need to take it step by step. I think perks are great. Like if you can work for a company that can make your life, the life of your family more comfortable, awesome. Like that, that's, that's great, especially in countries where healthcare may not be where it needs to be, where education may not be where it needs to be, where safety may not be where it needs to be, where like, there's a bunch of stuff that I do think companies can do out of the, the good of their heart, obviously, but also because it, it relieves the, the pressure on employees, uh, on different fronts. And so that's, that's, that's awesome. And I, I wish frankly, every company was able to bridge the gap for employees wherever the gaps are. Now, let's be real, not all companies can afford it. And so, there is this question of like, how do you manage that? But I think this was even out of the book. I think my biggest, the biggest concern that I have and that I talked about in the book was, in tech companies, especially the ones where, who were, that were flushed with money, uh, either because they were raising bigger and bigger and bigger funds or because they were printing money, like because in the ad business, for example, uh, like super high margin. And, and so like literally printing money. Um, this perks step by step. Become a bubble that isolate the employees from the rest of the world. And so there is a fine line and it's a difficult one, which is why I started by saying like, when an employee can, when a, when a company can help bridge a gap to make the life of an employee better, like by all means, just, just go ahead. I, I wish every single company, uh, in America offer like the best healthcare possible so that healthcare, taking care of the health of your family was never, ever a financial problem. But when that goes way beyond that and that becomes an isolating factor that stops you to see what's out there in the world because you suddenly, you never have to interact with anyone that is not within your company. Because there is someone to take care of your laundry, of your shopping, of your, like, your haircut, like everything. Like you just basically can live in a bubble. Like, that's where I think it becomes really dangerous. And just to be clear, like, there are very few companies that get to that level. But as I was talking about big tech, I talked about the fact that I do think that this is one of the aggravating factors that contributed to big tech being completely isolated from the reality of the world, which is a lot of the employees just had no idea of what was going on in the world because they did not need to interact with the world anymore.

Right. I think that's so well said. I think that's so well said. So you wrote, you took time off, you wrote your book, Techstars then recruited you to be their CEO, and you've been there since January, is that right?

Uh, since last January. So it's been 18 months.

Since last January. Ah, okay. Got it. Can you search back to your memory bank? So 18 months ago, What was your onboarding like? You know, you'd been a CEO before, you'd been a tech executive, you took time off. Now you're re-engaging in the sort of the, you know, the, I won't say the corporate world, but certainly in a job world and at a senior executive level, the CEO level. How did you think about onboarding yourself into Techstars?

I've talked about it a lot too. As you can see, I think a lot in general. That's great. And I've talked about it a lot for two main reasons. Uh, besides like, hey, you have to be, when you're the CEO, like any new, any new CEO coming in has to really like be careful, uh, because everybody's looking at them no matter what.

Exactly.

You can't really onboard discreetly as a CEO. That's not really possible. Um, but there were two additional factors that made me say, oh, I really need to think that through. The first one is it was COVID. And it meant that people at Textor and frankly, not just at Textor, everywhere had, had a really, I'm going to call it weird to, to, to keep it neutral, but like a weird working experience for the last 12 to 18 months. And a lot of relationships that existed in a world where people were meeting in person had, had evolved. Some people had actually never met with each other in person, and a lot of, a lot of employees were truly disconnected, uh, from what was happening in their company. And again, I'm not even just talking about Techstars. I heard fellow CEOs telling me exactly the same. But so here I was, and then the second factor was that I was replacing the founder. And founders are the birth parents, you know, it's like, and it's a little bit like when you move from birth parents to adoptive parents, like you got to think through that, like this, this is not, this is neither good nor bad, but it is a real change. And so I spent a lot of time thinking through that. And the first thing that I decided to do, which I had done at my previous job at Compass, and I had found to be incredibly insightful. Was to go on a listening tour and tell employees that for the first time, my goal was, uh, Techstars at the time had 280 employees or something. My goal at the time was to speak with every employee one-on-one during my first 100 days. And I had sent them a pretty basic questionnaire, which, which was really like, hey, you know, tell me about you. I'm trying to remember, but like, I think it was like 5 questions, like, tell me about your job. Tell me what you're the most excited about. Tell me what, if there was one thing that I could change that would make it easier for you to do your job and be happy at work, what would it be? And then in general, what do you think we should stop, start, and continue doing? And so, all across the 3 categories. And so, I went through the entire company and I met with every employee.

You spoke with everybody one-on-one?

Yeah.

208, 200 and—

80 people.

80 people. My gosh. Okay.

And it was so— and again, I had done that at Compass before. And to me, that was so insightful because I heard from all places in the business. And you start seeing trends and you start seeing how people perceive what's going on. And, you know, perception and reality are a very interesting Venn diagram. Like, it's sometimes the same, sometimes not the same. And it's fascinating to see how different people will have different overlap of perception and reality. And so I would highly, highly, highly recommend to do that. It is a marathon. It's, it's, I can tell you that I was happy when it was over. But at the same time, I learned so much about this and about the company, and this was particularly helpful.

That's what a beautiful story, and thank you for sharing that. And you're right, it's a marathon to get through all those folks. And I guess I would like to double-click on, you know, you're replacing the, you know, you say the founders, and I would say kind of the storied, you know, founding story of Techstars. Could you talk a little more about like the— how, what, how much, what help you got and what that was like for other employees to kind of see that transition?

I think if Harvard ever does a business case for how to transition a founder, how, how a founder should transition to what basically is an executive for hire, like, or a mercenary if you want to call it that way, um, I think David Cohen and David Brown should be the business case for that. That's amazing.

Yeah.

So they were, they were two founders, one which had the formal CEO title, and I can't remember what was David Cohen's title at the time, uh, but they worked very much in tandem and, and were extremely involved in the business, both of them. Uh, and when I came, uh, they both stayed on the board, um, but they stopped having, uh, operating function, both of them. And David Cohen became the chairman, um, but a non-executive chairman. Um, and I can't tell you how much support I got from both of them with zero ego. Like zero, like I would come back and obviously, you know, when you take a new job and you go through on this listening tour, like you uncover stuff, you uncover great stuff and you uncover less great stuff. And, and, and the, the, the stress that you have as a new CEO is like, okay, so that is really not working. Um, and that's going to take me some time to fix. How do I talk to the board about the fact that? Yeah, that's really screwed up and I need to figure out a way to fix it without making the previous leadership who sits on your board, making them feel like, who is this person who just comes in and like, basically like criticize what I, what I did. And every single time we were, we found ourselves in that situation, both of them were like, 'Yeah, we're owning it. We could have done better. Totally happy that you can fix it. Like, here are a few ideas, but like, you feel totally okay to ignore them if you have a better way to do it.' And, and that was such a relief for me because it's, it's, it's really, it's really difficult when you created something to see someone take over and build upon it, which is the positive way of saying what's going on, but also sometimes like rip apart stuff that you spend weeks, months, years to build. And sometimes pretty harshly because you're like, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. And so I think that was fantastic, the availability, like I can call, text, email any day of the week about any question that I have in mind. And both founders have always been incredibly responsive. And again, zero ego. Like, I'm like, hey, I don't understand that concept. And I would get like the full history, including the things that really didn't go well and the things that went really well. And so that just was amazing, still is amazing because I still talk to them very, very regularly. And then the last thing I would say was, um, and I've seen that with, with a lot of founders is Taking again this analogy of birth parents versus adoptive parents, if you're the founder, that's your baby. And like, it's so hard to let your baby be raised by someone else. And, and, and a lot of founders just, they, they, their, their mind, their rational brain is like, I know I need to step out of the business. I know I need to not be there. I know that when people are calling me, employees that I recruited, like, I know that I need to not answer or to redirect them to the new CEO. And, but for a lot of them, it's almost impossible to do unless they're completely out of the business. And it's like, I don't even want to hear about it. And what I have found to be incredibly inspiring and amazing is that both David Brown and David Cohen were totally able to manage that, which is We're available for you if you need any help, day or night, but we are not anymore operating the business. You are. And we're comfortable with that. Or at least we're, we're, we're, we acting like we're comfortable. And that's what matters at the end of the day.

Right, exactly. We're pretending to be comfortable.

So I've been, I've been, as I say, I would, if I ever had to give, uh, to a founder an example of of how a founder can support a new CEO who's not the founder, I would give David Cohen and David Brown as examples.

That is beautiful. Well done, Davids. Congratulations to you, Davids, for—

Davids, as we call them, as we call them at Techstars.

That's right. That's right. You know, Maëlle, you are so, uh, well-spoken. You are so knowledgeable. You've had so many incredible experiences. Have you ever experienced imposter syndrome or severe self-doubt in this wonderful career that you've had?

All the time. All the time.

Can you tell us about that?

I think that is part of the learning experience. I think anyone, I think we've been, we've been vilifying imposter syndrome. And obviously if you have a, a very extreme case of imposter syndrome, yeah, you probably need to work on it. But I think the reality is imposter syndrome comes from this idea that you don't know everything and you need to learn and you need to learn more. And there's so much more that you could do. And, and there's so many people out there who know so much more than you do. And I think that's healthy. I think that's the, that's right. Again, I mean, you, you gotta stay on a sane path, but, uh, and so Yeah, all the time. Like, because I always feel like there's, there's stuff that I don't know and people that I should talk to because they, they have so much more experience than me. And, and then the other thing that I say to myself and, and, and to a lot of, uh, to a lot of women, because this conversation happened very often with women, it is— I can't even remember. I'm sure there was a case, but I can't even remember. A man ever coming to me and talking to me about their imposter syndrome. I remember dozens of situations where women would come to me and talk to me about imposter syndromes. So that's why I'm saying it's, it's, it's usually been with women. So I've, I've talked to them as well about, um, the fact that the imposter syndrome is also the sign that you're stretching yourself. That, like, you're, you're trying to do something that you've never done before. Um, and that's a good thing. Again, that's how you learn. That's how you transform yourself. And, and at the risk of sounding a little grandiose, that's also how, how you transform the world by trying to do stuff that, that others have not done or that you have not done. And I think the— and I'll finish on that. I think the fine line, and I talk about this in the book too, I wish there were more tech leaders who suffered from imposter syndrome, because I think the fine line is, you know, wanting to transform the world, wanting to be disruptive, believing in the fact that you're going to try this thing that no one has tried before. And if you don't have a modicum of imposter syndrome, then you're going to start believing in, in your own, um, in your own story. Like you're going to start having, you're going to stop having this critical look on what you're doing. And that's how you end up with some of our most infamous tech leaders who believe that they can't do no wrong and that they're kind of like God sent to Earth to help us see a better path. And the more you push back on them, the more they're like, you don't understand. Like, you don't understand. Like, I know how to do it. Versus if you have— again, I cannot insist enough on like a healthy imposter syndrome. If you have a healthy imposter syndrome, you're like, this is my dream. This is my vision. This is the thing that I want to stretch myself and I've never done it, but I think it's possible. But at the same time, there is also this little voice in your head that says, okay, who are the people who may know more than me on this thing that I may wanna talk to just to double-check that I'm not completely crazy? Um, and I find that, I find that distinction to be very, very important, which is I'm generally a fan of imposter syndrome within reason.

Beautifully said. Beautifully said. It's another word also for humility, like I don't know everything. And also encouraging you to get other people on board really, and to be able to talk it through so they can point out where you need to make changes. But also I really love what you said, which is it's a sign that you're stretching yourself. And we'll never get anywhere if we don't stretch ourselves. I appreciate that. Maelle, just two more questions. What do you wish you had known earlier on your journey?

That no one succeeds alone. That it's okay to ask for help, that it's okay to be vulnerable, that it's okay to get people on board. I, I, I grew up, as we discussed, I grew up in a family that, that didn't have much and whose motto was literally nothing worth doing is ever easy. And, and that gives you a certain vision of life, which is like, it's you against the universe and you can't possibly complain because the, the, the fact that it's hard just very likely indicates that it's worth doing. Even though it's a bit of a twisted logic, because it's not because it's hard that it's worth doing, is that it's— there's nothing really worth doing if it's not hard anyway. Semantic. But the downside or the consequence attached to that is like, you gotta do things, you have to work harder. Like if something is not working, just work harder, work more, do more, rather than be like, okay, that's not working. What am I doing wrong? Who can help me? Who can I talk to? And it took me some time to learn that.

I get it. Beautiful. Beautifully said.

Thank you.

And the last question, what advice do you have for founders as they embark on their journey to grow into leaders?

Surround yourself. I'm going to repeat myself a little bit, but like surround yourself with the right people. I find, uh, you know, at Techstars we have 3,000 portfolio companies and we receive thousands of applications every year. Um, and so we work with a lot of founders and most of us like me are former founders. So we've, we've gone through that at least once, if not multiple times. And I find that it, it is very easy to either believe that, you know, you know everything or you know better. And so discount basically the need that you have to surround yourself with other people or to get very attached to the people who helped you build the business without realizing that Uh, some of them may not be, uh, the people that the business need anymore. And it's, it's one of the hardest conversation that as a founder you can ever have. It's like the people who've been with you in the trenches, who, uh, with whom you cried and celebrated and, and went to battle. With, and suddenly there comes a day where you're like, I don't think this are— this, this is the person that I'm gonna need in that function to go from point A to point B. Or we went together from point A to point B, but I need to go from point B to point C, and I don't think in that function this is the right person. Um, and it's hard, but it's necessary. To really be very level-headed in terms of who are the people you have around you. Because again, no one succeeds alone. And I, so I spend a lot of time talking to founders at Techstars about how do you get the right people around you professionally. And then I spend some time talking to them about always making sure that they keep the people that they have in their life outside of work because you need, you need some kind of balance and the balance is always different from one person to another, but you need, you need a family, you need friends, whatever family means, by the way. I'm not, I'm not judging in any way, shape, or form, like what family, what does constitute a family, but like you need people who, who are with you, uh, outside of work and with whom you can talk about something else than work. And, and it's very easy as a founder to get all consumed by your business and, and completely forget about the other side of your life. And, and I can tell you, once, once business is done, whether it's a very successful business or whether it's a very unsuccessful one, what you are left with is your family and your friends. And so if you've never cultivated that as you were building that business, like, you are up very likely for a very difficult awakening. And so cherish your family and your friends. You need them.

Wisdom. What can I tell you? Wisdom. Maëlle, thank you so much for this rich conversation. So helpful. Wonderful to talk to you. And I know people are really, really going to benefit from this. So thanks for joining me.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alisacohn.com.