Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talk to Roxanne Petraeus, the co founder and CEO of Thena, a SaaS startup building modern compliance training software.
In 2018, Roxanne started a new job as a McKinsey consultant and was surprised to find that even a company known for its phenomenal training used mediocre compliance training software.
It sparked an idea in her mind to create better software.
She started to talk to people about her idea, which eventually led to meeting her co founder and CTO Anne Ann.
The two of them set out to build Athena in 2019.
Roxanne talked with HR folks at over 30 different companies to understand their challenges and in a few short weeks the duo created their mvp.
Although they didn't charge for it initially, they were able to land their first customer in four months.
Today, Athena is a seven figure SaaS business with around 250 customers including Netflix, Zendesk, Figma and Notion.
Almost 100,000 employees are now using Athena for their compliance training and the founders have raised just over $50 million to date.
In this episode we discuss how the two founders have grown their business, mainly from a press article and word of mouth.
We talk about raising money and some of the lessons Roxanne has learned from raising a seed round all the way through to a series B so far.
How Roxane has learned to sell compliance software without having a background in compliance or HR.
The challenges the two women founders faced while building their SaaS business, which most men founders probably wouldn't have faced, and how they're adapting their business, which is currently dependent on tech companies as customers, in response to the wave of layoffs.
So I hope you enjoy it.
All right, Roxanne, welcome to the show.
Roxanne Petraeus (02:11.030)
Thank you so much.
Excited to be here.
Omer (02:12.710)
Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires you that you can share with us?
Roxanne Petraeus (02:16.870)
I feel like it changes day to day, but one recently that I have really liked.
I was talking to one of our early customers and you know, in tech and it's been a hard time in tech and he's like, people have forgotten that leaders do work.
And I was like, I really like that, that like leaders do work.
I feel like that sort of embodies like I think the leadership philosophy I grew up with in the army and that's been kind of motivating Me and my team.
Omer (02:39.170)
Awesome.
I want to talk a little bit about your background, but before we do that, just give people the overview of Athena.
What does the product do?
Who's it for?
What's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Roxanne Petraeus (02:49.900)
So Athena's compliance training platform for modern teams.
The problem we're trying to solve is that really crappy traditional experience you have where you're at a great company most days of the year, but then once a year you get an email saying do six hours of really dumb, kind of boring, totally irrelevant training about everything from sexual harassment to code of conduct, insider trading, all of that.
And the way we've solved it is make the training experience for employees actually enjoyable.
Employees can rate our training.
We have over a million positive employee reviews for what was historically the office's most hated training.
And then for our users, which are actually HR people, ops leaders, typically at companies goes up to legal, we've automated workflows, made it super simple for them to assign, track, reminds me and show for example regulators completion of required training.
Omer (03:43.770)
I've got to be honest, when, when I was going through with my team and looking at pitches and you know, the potential next round of people we wanted to invite on the show, when I saw compliance training, I was like, no.
Roxanne Petraeus (03:56.010)
Right, yeah, it's pretty boring.
Omer (03:58.490)
As someone who's been through that in the corporate world.
Yeah, exactly.
It kind of just drains the energy out of you.
And then when I kind of started to look at what you were doing and actually trying to fix some of that, it was like, okay, no, there's something interesting here.
So I'm glad we were able to make this happen.
Can you give us a sense of the size of the business?
Where are you in terms, in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?
Roxanne Petraeus (04:19.100)
See, we're about a three year old business.
About 60 employees have about north of 250 or so customers on our platform and it's representing almost 100,000 at this point, employees and learners on the platform.
Omer (04:33.760)
So let's talk about what you were doing before you started Athena.
Like what's your background?
Roxanne Petraeus (04:39.920)
I was an army officer for about seven years, so served on active duty, you know, deployed to Afghanistan, worked in Mongolia and Cambodia.
So very not related to SAS at all, but good leadership training.
And then I bootstrapped a business and then was a consultant for just about a year before co founding Athena.
Omer (05:01.260)
And you're also related to a slightly more well known Petraeus as well, aren't you?
Roxanne Petraeus (05:06.860)
I am not the more well known Petraeus that Is fair.
Yeah.
So my father in law is retired General David Petraeus, who commanded forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Omer (05:17.260)
Okay, so let's talk about where the idea for, for this business came from.
What led you to say, I'm going to go and solve this compliance training problem?
Roxanne Petraeus (05:25.100)
I totally hear you.
Compliance is incredibly boring.
I think it's just reframed as culture because that's really what it is.
It's like a culture of do you have a culture of PE people doing the right thing or not?
And when you talk about it that way, I think it's actually fascinating.
Right.
Like everybody is interested in whatever fraud is perpetrated that's on the COVID of the New York Times when me too was going on, like that was captured so much attention.
And so I came at it from that angle, which is like I was a woman in the army.
And it's no secret that the army really struggles with gender inclusivity, issues of harassment and assault.
And so I just saw both really great leaders and not so great leaders and the cultures that they brought about and thought a lot about, like what is doing the right thing look like and how do you get people to do that?
And then so that was percolating.
But then at McKinsey, I was going through kind of what you described that like, just click next, check the box, type training.
And I thought it was very strange because McKinsey is otherwise known for phenomenal training, corporate learning, you know, all of it.
And so I was surprised to see what I had seen in the army essentially at McKinsey.
And it just struck me as odd.
There's no way that this is what good looks like.
And it was weirdly around the time that I had a bet with someone on the team that I could write really good email subject lines for what is otherwise boring emails and get more people to open them.
And I won the bet.
And it just kind of showed me you can make even boring topics very interesting if you try.
And so then I ended up doing a little bit more research, thinking surely after me too someone had come along and modernized compliance tr.
How could it possibly be that we realized the scope of the problem?
And just to put a fine point on it, in the years after MeToo, more CEOs were removed for personal misconduct than for financial shortcomings, meaning CEOs were getting removed for all of the stuff that compliance training addresses, not because they missed quarterly earnings targets.
And so it's incredibly disruptive to a business, let alone the personal cost of all of these.
And sometimes the personal liability of them.
So, yeah, that was sort of the long and the short of recognizing that there had been a sea change in how we think about these issues, but there hadn't been a corresponding change in the products that are supposed to solve them.
Omer (07:37.050)
So how did you meet your co founder, Ann?
Roxanne Petraeus (07:39.050)
Yeah, I think it was one of those serendipitous moments.
I started thinking about this idea, and it was just like a real kernel of an idea, basically.
Not bad.
Compliance training.
Started talking to some founders in the New York City area, met one, and, you know, I almost didn't pitch him because I thought he was the founder of this AI company and, you know, his, like, big deal company.
And I had this, like, what I thought was kind of a small idea and ended up just telling him, like, hey, I got this idea.
And his eyes lit up because he had said he had just had to make his whole company go through compliance training and thought it was so dumb and such a waste of time and was like, oh, I know your co founder.
And I didn't take him that seriously at the time.
So I was like, that's a, you know, pretty absurd statement, but turns out he was totally right.
We had maybe two or three phone calls, met in person once and got into business, like, pretty quickly, not having any, like, shared connection.
We went to the same college but didn't know each other there.
So totally serendipitous.
Omer (08:38.290)
You've got this idea, you've got a co founder on board and basically your cto.
How did the two of you get started?
Did you.
Did you go out and talk to customers?
Did you try to raise money?
Did you try to start building the product?
All of the above.
Like, what did you do next?
Roxanne Petraeus (08:55.570)
We're in the all of the above category.
We launched about three weeks after we launched our beta, three weeks after we, like, had formally gotten together.
So it was very quick.
And we raised shortly after that, and we talked to a bunch of customers.
And the way I did that was just like, you know, have a bunch of conversations.
So I'd ask somebody, hey, is there like an HR person at your office?
Will they talk to me?
And usually when I'd say, I want to talk about compliance training, everyone hated it so much that they're like, yeah, I'll talk to you about it.
I'll almost complain to you about it.
It's great.
And so I just had a bunch of those and I'd follow every breadcrumb.
I'd say, do you have any friends who might want to talk to me?
So just very scrappy.
I kept a huge Google Doc, just jotted down my notes of what frustrated everybody.
I was learning about the space because I'm not hr, I'm not legal, and then simultaneously thinking about the product, and Ann's brain is going to work on what could have really, really scra.
MVP look like.
I would say we definitely fit in the bucket of, like, are quite embarrassed by our first product looking back on it, and then got it out the door because New York's city and state at the time were changing the regulations such that every company with one or more employees was required to train annually on sexual harassment, starting in October.
And I think Ann and I got together in September.
And so we thought, like, we've got to get something out to hit this wave, because, like, maybe we can ride it.
And, you know, ended up being correct.
But it was definitely a bit of a scramble to get something out that quickly.
Omer (10:22.990)
So when you were talking to potential customers, HR folks, did you have any kind of structure to the conversation, the interview, you know, doing Lean Startup stuff or the mom test or any of this stuff?
Or was it just like, just tell me about, you know, your.
Your problems.
Like, how did you approach that?
Roxanne Petraeus (10:40.750)
And.
Omer (10:41.470)
And what did you do to make those as.
As kind of useful conversations as they could be for you?
Roxanne Petraeus (10:48.870)
At the time I read the Lean Startup, like that methodology, I think look back, I had a doc with maybe five questions.
Thankfully, at McKinsey, I had done some work where I had done expert interviews.
And so I kind of treated it like expert interviews.
So you go and ask a bunch of people, and you can get smart on a topic very quickly if you just have a bunch of conversations and you're targeted.
So I would definitely ask the same questions.
I think I was like, why do you train?
What do you like about it?
What do you not like about it?
But then I would certainly follow breadcrumbs if someone kind of went off script and had something that I hadn't heard before.
And I stopped having conversations essentially when it was like the marginal value of an additional conversation was kind of zero.
Like, okay, they're just all telling me the same thing, like, got it.
You know, so they might have slightly different variations, but it was like, you hate it because it's a pain to administer, and you hate it because your employees hate it.
But you have to do it, like, got it.
And so, like, I just got to that point and kept, like, I think a Google folder or something of just all these different conversations.
And we try to synthesize them for Ann so that her product brain could kind of think about like, okay, this is the problem.
What's the solution?
Yeah, that's kind of how we.
How we tackled that.
Omer (11:59.650)
And then roughly how many conversations did it take for you to get to that point where you were like, I'm kind of just hearing the same thing over and over again.
Roxanne Petraeus (12:07.250)
Honestly, it happened pretty quickly because the space we're in is very established.
And so I would say, like, somewhere around 30 to 50, I think, is probably the number that I had before.
I was like, you know, at this point, I would just like to be able to sell something and see if that sticks, because, like, the problem statement has been articulated so many times.
Omer (12:26.670)
And then so at the same time, you're.
You're building this mvp.
And it was the embarrassed version, which is fine.
And so what did you do with this?
Did you.
First of all, did you.
Did you charge for it from day one?
Or was it more about kind of getting people to look at it and give you feedback?
Like, what.
Which approach did you take?
Roxanne Petraeus (12:45.790)
Because we were really trying to get something out very quickly, we decided not to charge for our first beta.
And I want to say we had something like, let's call it 10 customers in that beta, you know, so it was free.
And I'm glad that we did that approach because of just how quickly we were, like, moving.
It sort of felt.
Felt right.
And I think we did something pretty, like, clever that at least worked for the problem we were solving, which is we talked to.
In all these conversations I was having, I talked to HR at a VC fund, and she said, like, oh, yeah, you know, I hate this.
And also she was aware of the changing regulations.
And I can't remember if I proposed it or if she did, but essentially where we got to is, like, if you guys can give us something for free, I will share it with my portfolio companies.
I'm not going to make them do it, but I will send an email to, you know, all whatever, 50 portfolio companies we have, whatever it was saying, hey, guys, there is this regulation.
You need to know about this change, and here's a solution if you want to use their solution.
And I think it had, like, a Google form in it.
You know, sign up here.
And I just remember, like, oh, my gosh, people are signing up.
You know, and so that's how we got our first 10 was just through mostly through this cohort and then a little bit through our networks.
You know, we had a friend who was starting a company.
Okay, great.
Do you you know, 10 people want to be, be in it, that kind of thing.
And that got us our first beta cohort which really gave us some amazing feedback both from the employee and the admin experience that we then turned into like essentially going heads down.
And I think we released our actual product around I want to say like late January, early February of 2020.
And that we did charge for from day one with the idea that we wanted to demonstrate to ourselves that hey, like someone would, you know, really pay for this.
There's, there's real value there.
Omer (14:30.110)
How long did that take from the point you started to the first customer?
Roxanne Petraeus (14:33.630)
So that would probably be like I don't know, four months or so.
But we did pre sale.
So I remember like you know, over the like Christmas holiday doing some, some pre sales.
So let's call it like we had existed for a quarter or so before we were selling.
Omer (14:49.150)
What does your first customer pay you?
Roxanne Petraeus (14:51.130)
I should know this.
I still remember like a couple of the first calls where we signed somebody.
I don't remember exactly, like, you know, wasn't very much.
These are like at the time was 30 person companies that we thought like holy smokes.
I remember our first large customer, like very large customer said can you sign send over the msa?
And we had just been doing online click through, you know, order forms or something and I immediately had to email out our network and say, can someone give me an msa?
Because like we really hadn't been, you know, like all of our customers had been quite small and had been okay with the sort of self serve flow.
And yeah, so it was definitely like, oh, we got a whale that we had not been anticipating.
Omer (15:34.520)
The third thing you said was you were also going and trying to raise some money or you did raise some money shortly after kind of had these conversations and building the product.
How much did you raise and generally how easy or difficult was it to raise that first round?
Roxanne Petraeus (15:50.400)
The first round for us was actually very easy and I never want to say easy because fundraising can just be consistent face punches.
But for us this was pretty easy and I'll attribute that entirely to my co founder.
So we raised from Ali Partovi's Neo Fund they have this network of engineers and they do pre seed seed.
I think the world of him and of Neo.
And he had known Anne, my co founder from engineering networks.
And like later after I talked to him because I remember pitching him being very nervous and I said like what did you think of the first pitch?
And he's like, honestly I don't really Remember it?
I wasn't paying attention.
We were going to invest in you because I believed in Ann and you know, you passed the like sniff test but that he had just seen her track record and, and so you know, it was easy.
But I have to credit my co founder for, for making that round come together quite quickly.
Omer (16:45.130)
How much did you raise by the way?
Roxanne Petraeus (16:46.250)
That was about 750k.
So it was a pre seed and it was Ali, you know, some great angels.
That's how he pulled that together.
Omer (16:54.250)
I was watching a video with you and Hunter walk and you know, he's another investor in the company but he didn't invest in the first round and made it very clear how much he regrets not having invested earlier.
Can you just help us kind of understand like that's kind of a good example of an investor who kind of eventually saw the opportunity but at that early stage he had some concerns that were holding him back.
Can you just tell us about that?
Roxanne Petraeus (17:27.639)
Totally.
And I can kind of paint the picture because that was our seed round that he put a small check in but you know, passed on leading and has since bought up and has been a wonderful investor and I think the world of manager.
So in no way is this me talking bad about him.
Yeah.
So I mean one, that seed round was a bit cursed in that I flew out to SF the week essentially that Covid hit the US it was like the week of the NBA games being canceled and all of that.
I ended up getting on a red eye and coming back to the US because we thought like borders were going to close.
Everybody was suddenly working from home.
No one knew what this meant.
So like, you know, I'll give a pass to everybody for just trying to like navigate that that time because that's when we were, that's when we were all figuring out like what is Covid.
But I think that the other thing that I've since learned is I wasn't doing a great job of pitching the vision.
I was pitching the company and there's like a distinction and I wasn't sort of pulling for this long term vision.
I was more saying like, look, we launched very quickly, we have all these customers and here's a really established market and we're going to win it.
And I think a lot of investors rightfully were like that sounds like a good business.
It doesn't sound like a good venture scale business.
And I think I could have done a better job of explaining.
No, no, Ann and I have that in our heads.
But what we are someone back channeled us once and said we were like very sneaky operators or something.
We don't posture, we don't come off as like I'm going to crush it and change the world.
That's just not our vibe.
We're relentless executors.
And so I think that some of that I just didn't understand kind of how to translate that, that builder me into fundraise me.
Not in an inauthentic way, but just in a way that was explaining.
It's not that I lack ambition, it is that I am also very good at executing.
And so figuring out that balance I think was something that wasn't nailing when I pitched Hunter.
But he's since been able to see the executor us and been like, oh, I get it.
They might not come in flashy, but they will just kind of put up wins consistently.
Omer (19:32.980)
It's funny you say that because I spoke to Rahul Vora, the founder of Superhuman a few weeks ago.
Roxanne Petraeus (19:38.420)
Great Athena customer.
Omer (19:39.940)
Oh, I didn't know that.
There we go.
And he said something similar where I think it's more for him like I'm from England, we're understated.
We don't go in and say we're going to do this and like you said, take over the world and stuff like that.
And I think I'm the same as well.
Growing up in England, you kind of.
I always used to look a little bit puzzled when every American person I spoke to was super excited to do something versus just excited.
But I say that stuff now as well.
I think I've been Americanized now.
Let's talk a little bit about just the idea of selling compliance software.
There's been software around for a long time and as we talked about, it's not exactly the most engaging experience for employees to go through.
I can definitely see the end user desperate for something better.
Like ideally not having to do it, but if they have to do it, give me a less painful, maybe even a pleasant experience when I use kind of go through this training from a buyer perspective, that's the person that you need to talk to.
Maybe how much of the pain did they experience from this and how easy or hard was it for you to convince them that they needed this software?
Roxanne Petraeus (20:52.440)
I was very sympathetic to your point to the end user.
I got that the random salesperson was like this is dumb.
Why am I here?
I didn't understand our actual buyers pain points because I had never lived that.
So I didn't understand that they were spending sometimes 10 hours a week going through CSVs and checking against maybe their H R S data.
Who hasn't done the training?
Oh, my gosh.
All of California didn't actually get the right training because, whatever, we had some glitch.
And so it took me a while to learn, like, oh, they have two pain points.
One is that nobody likes to be the fun police.
The person who says to the entire company, you're going to do something you hate for six hours.
But I needed to understand why in particular is that painful.
So I think really great sales is about discovery.
And so in talking to our customers and talking to prospects, I would understand things like, oh, you get support tickets because the software crashes, so the random engineer can't even do the training.
They claim they've done the training, but you can't see that it's completed.
They are saying that the training was offensive because it had really, for example, gendered stereotypes in the training.
So, like, I need to explain not just that employees hate it because employees complain about everything, but how does that, like, specifically, where does that pain show up?
And so I started to uncover, like, okay, it shows up in support tickets.
Let's talk about how many and how long it takes you to, you know, deal with those.
Or let's talk about risk associated with the fact that there are errors.
And then they say, like, yeah, that's actually kind of a problem and it's been flagged by our legal team and, okay, can you solve that problem?
And so it just ended up getting from general to specific.
And then we could align the product with the specific pain points and eventually show impact, not just the features.
Omer (22:36.660)
So you've got some big names as customers.
Netflix, Zendesk, Figma, Notion, Superhuman.
How did you go out and get these big customers?
What were you doing?
Was this, like, out?
Actually, it wasn't outbound because you told me earlier that that's something that you've just recently started doing.
So how did you get these customers?
Roxanne Petraeus (23:00.129)
Totally.
So we got our first huge group of customers to include Netflix, actually through press.
I think press can be like a really underutilized tool where maybe you just say, like, we raised a lot of money.
Yay, us.
But we really tried to talk about the problem that we were tackling.
So we said, for example, our.
The course that we had with sexual harassment.
So we said, like, hey, companies are investing a lot in inclusivity, but once a year they sit everyone down and they have this huge opportunity to explain what inclusivity looks like.
Let's talk about what's right and what's wrong and what to do when you see wrong.
And instead we're all just clicking a box, like, literally, what are we doing here?
Why don't we do this thing?
Why don't we take something that we have to do and make it something we want to do?
So we talked about that in an article that was in TechCrunch and later found out that the CEO of Netflix had seen it, shared it with his legal team, and that's how I learned about them.
And I would have this very minimal CRM where people would put their emails through, and I would just look and see, like, oh, big company.
And I would email them and be like, hi, what do you want to talk about?
And I just got on a call with them, totally unafraid, because I figured I've got nothing to lose.
We're a small company and did discovery.
Learned about their pain points.
Why are you on a call with me?
You have a lot of other things to do.
Oh, you really hate your training.
What do you hate about it?
So press was one, and then once we started getting customers, the second big one was word of mouth.
So we never took a customer for granted.
We were just so excited to have our early customers.
And so I think that looked like delivering a really great experience, such that when they were in an HR slack channel and someone slacked out, hey, I've got to do my annual compliance training.
Any good vendors out there?
Someone would say, hey, check out Athena.
And suddenly it would be like, boom, boom, boom.
We'd get five emails and be like, where'd you guys come from?
And they'd say, oh, Suzy, at whatever.
And then the third thing we started to get really good at is just working our network.
So someone who I went to college with knew someone, and I would.
Or actually a great example.
I was interviewing someone to be on our sales team, and it wasn't a good fit.
But I was like, do you want to tell your legal team about us?
And the guy was like, sure, I'll tell my legal team about you guys.
And that's how we got a public tech company.
Because just like someone we interviewed emailed their HR or legal team, and they were willing to get on a call with me, and then they bought the press.
Omer (25:19.280)
Was that just the one TechCrunch article, or was it like, kind of a result of a number of these kinds of articles or whatever that you were.
You were kind of getting out there and talking about the problem with.
Roxanne Petraeus (25:34.550)
Initially, it was one, but we did a really good job storytelling and brand Building and did the work behind it.
So, for example, I wrote a Fortune op ed about why sexual harassment training is broken, and I wrote it with Gretchen Carlson.
And that got a lot of attention because, like, it was very well researched.
I articulated like, there is research that shows at best this doesn't work.
At worst, it makes men in particular have more unconscious gender bias.
This is bananas.
And then some chr would read it and say, like, this is bananas.
And be like, yeah, like, I'm citing studies.
I'm just like, marketing the problem, really.
And then we can talk about my solution.
But yeah, initial press moments followed up by, I think, like a smart approach to essentially being a thought leader in the space.
Omer (26:16.070)
You know, I'm, I'm amazed that nobody has tried to build kind of this modern compliance software.
I mean, maybe there are other products out there.
Yeah, it just seems surprising that there are so many employees still kind of going through this painful experience when if it's done in the right way, it could actually achieve what the objective is.
Right, as you said, is to hopefully make sure that you have the right kind of culture in your organization.
Roxanne Petraeus (26:50.420)
I mean, I think this is why we've grown through word of mouth.
Once people are, one of the biggest ways we'll grow is even an employee, not even hr.
A current customer will switch jobs and they'll just share it to their hr.
Hey, I just took our current training and it's kind of bad.
Could you please look at Athena?
This is the hot take.
But I think perhaps the reason the problem itself wasn't tackled is one of the biggest, like the sort of most commonly done, meaning completed course for compliance is sexual harassment.
And that disproportionately impacts women.
And women don't get funded by venture capitalists.
And so I think that this problem, while the problem is pervasive from a market perspective, I think it is, unfortunately, the type of problem that is seen differently based on a bunch of demographic factors, but one of them being gender.
Omer (27:43.030)
Athena, is two women founders.
Yes.
You've been able to raise money and I think you're at, what, just a shy over 50 million now, right?
Roxanne Petraeus (27:52.470)
Yeah.
Omer (27:53.430)
Did you face any challenges raising money because of your agenda, do you feel?
Roxanne Petraeus (27:58.870)
I think there's no way to look at the stats and say that there isn't a disparate experience for women founders.
And I mean, the stats are atrocious for founders of color.
There's a bunch of different ways that this manifests.
But my experience is with being a woman.
And yeah, I had blatant examples to include VCs asking if I was pregnant or planning on getting pregnant.
I saw my co founder, who's our cto, be sort of challenged, like, okay, but you're the actual engineer.
There were definitely questions that she just wouldn't have gotten if her name was Tim.
People would have just assumed that she had the engineering chops.
And those are the things that I see.
And so then the things that I don't see or that are unconscious, they're not explicit.
But when you look at.
When you think about what a SaaS founder looks like, you don't see a team.
You just picture the archetype.
You don't see a team that looks like my co founder and I.
And I think that maybe the positive side of this is that I do think that being a team that looks like ours has allowed us to attract some really great talent and kind of punch above our weight for recruiting, precisely because we build a culture where it says, like, we want to have a place that, you know, everyone feels like they can show up and do great work and just like, candidly, like, not have to deal with this bullshit.
And that doesn't mean we're flawless, but it does mean that I think we've just, like, attracted a really great team.
But yeah, it is absolutely manifested in a bunch of different ways in terms of raising venture capital.
And I don't think you can look at the stats around less than 3% going to teams that look like Ann and I and conclude any differently.
Unless you think that teams like us just have worse ideas.
Omer (29:44.960)
Yeah.
And I think often, as you said, I think it's.
Often there's this bias or people say things and they don't realize what they're saying.
But, you know, it was clear to you, you pick it up.
I remember once spelling my last name and this person spelled it as K A H N. And I said, oh, it's actually K H A N. And this person said, oh, yeah, that's right.
You people spell it the other way around.
It's like you people.
Right?
And so it's.
Yeah, it's just like, you know, when you're, when you're on the receiving end of that, you notice that whereas the person who's saying what they're saying maybe doesn't even realize.
Realize.
Right.
Roxanne Petraeus (30:22.260)
Yeah.
I mean, I think it shows up a lot like words like hustle, which, like, I completely understand why that is incredibly important, but I sometimes feel like I was almost.
I mean, I've had, remember someone saying, like, this is a really hard thing to do.
Like why do you want to do something hard?
I was like, do you ask male founders who pitch you why they want to do something hard?
And being in particular confused because my background, like I've deployed to combat, I have jumped out of planes.
Like I'm not sure why you think that.
Like I've had some coddled existence such that it is odd for me to express ambition here.
And yeah, so like that's, those are my thoughts on that.
Omer (31:03.440)
All right, so let's, let's talk a little bit about kind of where you are today.
A lot of your customers are obviously tech companies and we're going through some changes in tech right now.
How is that affecting your business and kind of the way you look at the outlook for the coming year?
Roxanne Petraeus (31:25.390)
You're exactly right that our primary customer base is tech.
We actually sell a lot into finance as well finance and fintech.
But yeah, I mean it's like a, you know, if you look at our logos, these are companies that have gone through like some of them, 20% layoffs, like it is a hard time in tech.
I think that's like not a, not a controversial statement.
What I am so proud of is our renewals are just incredibly high, like north of 95%.
We just keep the customers who join Athena.
And that's been true even when we see a renewal of a company who has gone through layoffs or sort of other headwinds.
And I think what it's taught our team is it's incredibly important to show value and we are incredibly grateful to be a mission critical system that is you have to do compliance training and in any sort of distributed workforce, meaning you've got employees across multiple states, you need an elearning solution that's very good.
And so that's not to say we sit on our laurels because I think you absolutely need to continue to fight hard.
But it has made us grateful that our entry point into the market is one that is required.
You just got to.
It's legally required.
But I think that it's manifested in all of the challenges.
Teams needing to say, hey, we have fewer people and us needing to rethink our messaging and say, you know what, let's really make sure we show how much time we save in admin and let's just break it down and say you used to spend all this time doing manual work.
You told us this.
And get a little bit more, I think, precise in terms of the value that we provide.
Because understandably teams are asking these kinds of questions.
Omer (33:03.320)
So Is your pricing.
I couldn't find pricing on your website, so I assume that's because you're still testing your pricing.
Roxanne Petraeus (33:10.200)
It is not, but it's more of a.
Our website can continue to be improved.
We have very standard pricing pricing.
But I hear your point.
Omer (33:17.970)
Okay.
Okay, good to know.
Is the pricing based on the number of employees or people taking the training?
Is that how you structure it?
Roxanne Petraeus (33:28.450)
That's exactly right.
Per employee per year.
Omer (33:31.570)
So if you're seeing a 20% company with a 20% layoff, that potentially means that the kind of the contract value there could also be.
Roxanne Petraeus (33:43.700)
That's totally right.
Like contraction can be.
And I think it's like I spent a lot of time talking to SaaS founders with similar business models and revenue contraction is absolutely something that's important to keep your eye on.
I think how I've been navigating this time is sort of asking in the same way that a company like mine will see the good times.
Right?
Company grows with us.
Yay.
Their contract grows.
We will see the challenging times.
Company is now 50% of the employees.
They were.
That is, that is going to absolutely hit.
Hit.
Our top line as well is to sort of ask myself, like, what are the fundamental drivers of like, if we're providing value?
And I mean, I think it's a piece of advice that I got two years ago, but didn't resonate as much then.
But like, don't ride the highs because you'll have to ride the lows is like, don't celebrate kind of almost like vanity metrics or just like, yeah, the economy is growing, we're growing.
And instead ask like, why do I believe that Athena will win?
I believe it'll win because it's a mission critical system.
But it's also now something that companies want, right?
Culture and compliance.
And like, that hasn't changed.
And just because of these like, economic conditions, that may mean I need to position it differently and maybe structure things differently.
But end of the day, if I can get and keep customers like that, you know, is the long term drivers.
And I've been very grateful for, you know, a group of investors who I think is like less, maybe like twitchy than what I can feel sometimes on Twitter of just like, oh my God, everyone's software is dead.
It's like, software's not dead.
It's a hard time, but we just can't swing like that dramatically.
It's very hard to operate in an environment in which you do.
Omer (35:21.700)
Okay, let's wrap up, move on to the lightning round.
I'VE got seven quick fire questions for you.
You ready?
Roxanne Petraeus (35:28.500)
Yeah.
Omer (35:29.220)
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've ever received?
Roxanne Petraeus (35:32.260)
It's probably back to the first quote of Just like leaders do work.
It's like, pretty good advice.
Omer (35:37.140)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Roxanne Petraeus (35:39.820)
I really like Reed Hasting.
No rules, Rules.
It's him and a co author who I'm forgetting.
I think it's an amazing book on company culture.
Omer (35:49.180)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Roxanne Petraeus (35:53.580)
I think it's a steady hand.
Omer (35:55.100)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Roxanne Petraeus (35:59.100)
I'm going to go very low tech and say walks outside with no screen.
Omer (36:04.060)
Well, what's a new or crazy business that you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Roxanne Petraeus (36:09.510)
Oh, man.
I don't have one at the top of my head, but I'm a mom and I feel like I've had a million ideas for random, like, child baby things that, like, the world probably doesn't need.
Omer (36:20.070)
But yeah, I'm telling you, when you're a parent with a baby, you'll buy anything if it gives you stuff.
Roxanne Petraeus (36:27.230)
Take my money.
Just like, take my money and make it stop.
Yeah.
Omer (36:31.910)
Will they help me sleep?
Yeah, I'll pay.
Whatever.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Roxanne Petraeus (36:37.060)
I grew up in Walt Disney World's planned community.
Omer (36:40.500)
Wow.
What in Epcot?
Roxanne Petraeus (36:43.540)
It's basically Epcot.
It's a celebration.
Florida.
It's right outside of Disney World, and it was intended to be like Epcot, but people live there.
Omer (36:52.340)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Roxanne Petraeus (36:55.780)
I really love working out.
I am a crossfitter, which is embarrassing to admit in public, but it brings me a lot of joy and stress relief.
Omer (37:04.580)
Thank you so much for joining me and congratulations on the traction and the success you've had to date.
If people want to check out Athena, they can go to goathena.com and that's Athena with an E, even though I make it sound like an A.
We'll include a link in the show notes and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Roxanne Petraeus (37:25.940)
Probably LinkedIn, which I know is not where the cool kids hang out, but it is definitely where I am.
It's Roxanne Petraeus.
Omer (37:32.990)
Awesome.
We'll include a link to your profile in the show notes as well.
Thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success.
Roxanne Petraeus (37:39.550)
Thank you so much.
