Ethena: Breaking the SaaS Mold – Women in Tech – with Roxanne Petraeus [344]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

OMER
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 took to Roxanne Petraeus, the co-founder and CEO of Ethena, 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 Solmssen. The two of them set out to build Ethena 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, Ethena is a seven-figure SaaS business with around 250 customers, including Netflix, Zendesk, Figma, and Notion. Almost 100,000 employees are now using Ethena 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 Roxanne has learned to sell compliant 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
Thank you so much. Excited to be here.

OMER
Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires you that you can share with us?

ROXANNE
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 it's intact, 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 leaders do work. I feel like that sort of embodies. I think the leadership philosophy I grew up with in the army, and that's been kind of motivating me and my team.

OMER
Awesome. I want to talk a little bit about your background, but before we do that, just give people the overview of Ethena. What does the product do? Who's it for? What's the main problem you're helping to solve?

ROXANNE
So Ethena is 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 in most days of the year, but then once a year you get an email saying, do 6 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, remind and show, for example, regulators completion of required training.

OMER
I've got to be honest, when I was going through with my team and looking at pitches and the potential next round of people we wanted to invite on the show, when I saw compliance training, I was like, no, right, yeah, it's pretty boring, but 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, this 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 of revenue, customers, size of team?

ROXANNE
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 or end learners on the platform.

OMER
So let's talk about what you were doing before you started Ethena. What's your background?

ROXANNE
I was an army officer for about seven years. So served on active duty, deployed to Afghanistan, worked in Mongolia and Cambodia. So very not related to SaaS 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 Ethena.

OMER
And you're also related to a slightly more well-known Petraeus as well, aren't you?

ROXANNE
I'm 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
Okay, so let's talk about where the idea for this business came from. What led you to say, I'm going to go and solve this compliance training problem.

ROXANNE
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 people doing the right thing or not? And when you talk about it that way, I think it's actually fascinating. Right? Everybody is interested in whatever fraud is perpetrated that's on the COVID of The New York Times. When Me Too was going on 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 in the cultures that they brought about and thought a lot about what is doing the right thing look like and how do you get people to do that? 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, 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 really 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 like, I won the bet. And it just kind of showed me, like, 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 training. Like, how could it possibly be that we realized the scope of the problem and just like to put a fine point on it, in the years after Me Too, more CEOs were removed for personal misconduct than for financial shortcomings. Meaning like, 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 like 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
So how did you meet your co-founder, Anne?

ROXANNE
Yeah, I think it was like one of those serendipitous moments. I started thinking about this idea and it was just like a real kernel of an idea, like basically not bad compliance training. Started talking to some founders in the New York City area, met one, and I almost didn't pitch him because I thought he was the founder of this AI company and his 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 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 pretty quickly, not having any shared connection. We went to the same college but didn't know each other there. So totally serendipitous.

OMER
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 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
We're in the all of the above category. We launched about three weeks after we launched our beta, three weeks after we 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, 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 say, like, 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. Great. And so we 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 like 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 brain is going to work on what could a really scrappy MVP look like? I would say we definitely fit in the bucket of are quite embarrassed by our first products, looking back on it and then got it out the door because New York 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 Anne and I got together in September and so we thought we've got to get something out to hit this wave because maybe we can ride it and ended up being cracked. But it was definitely a bit of a scramble to get something out that quickly.

OMER
So when you were talking to potential customers, HR folks, did you have any kind of structure to the conversation, the interview, doing Lean Startup stuff or the mom test or any of this stuff? Or was it just like, just tell me about your problems. How did you approach that and what did you do to make those as kind of useful conversations as they could be for you? At the time.

ROXANNE
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. 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. Got it. And so I just got to that point and kept, I think, a Google folder or something of just all these different conversations, and we try to synthesize them for Anne 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 tackle that.

OMER
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
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, at this point, I would just like to be able to sell something and see if that sticks, because the problem statement has been articulated so many times.

OMER
And then so at the same time, you're building this MVP, and it was the embarrassed version, which is fine. And so what did you do with this, first of all? 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? Which approach did you take?

ROXANNE
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 ten customers in that beta, so it was free. And I'm glad that we did that approach because of just how quickly we were moving. It sort of felt right. And I think we did something pretty 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, 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 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 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, sign up here.

And I just remember like, oh my gosh, people are signing up. So that's how we got our first ten, was just through mostly through this cohort and then a little bit through our networks. We had a friend who was starting a company. Okay, great. Do you ten people want to 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 essentially going heads down. And I think we really start 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, someone would really pay for this. There's real value there.

OMER
How long did that take from the point you started to the first customer?

ROXANNE
So that would probably be like, I don't know, four months or so. But we did presale. So I remember over the Christmas holiday doing some pre sale, so let's call it like we had existed for a quarter or so before we were selling.

OMER
What is your first customer pay you?

ROXANNE
I should know this. I still remember a couple of the first calls where we signed somebody. I don't remember exactly. It wasn't very much. These are at the time of 30-person companies that we thought like, holy smokes. I remember our first large customer, like, very large customer, said, can you send over the MSA? And we had just been doing online click-through order forms or something, and I immediately had to email out our network and say, can someone give me an MSA? Because we really haven't been all of our customers have been quite small and have 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
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
The first round for us was actually very easy and I never want to say easy because fundraising can just be like consistent face punches, but for us this was pretty easy and I'll attribute that entirely to my cofounder. So we raised from Ali Partovi's Neo fund. They have this network of engineers and they do like precede seed, I think the world of him and of Neo. And he had known Anne, my co-founder from Engineering Networks. And 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 Anne and you passed the sniff test. But he had just seen her track record and so it was easy. But I have to credit my cofounder for making that round come together quite quickly.

OMER
How much did you raise, by the way?

ROXANNE
That was about $750K. So it was a preset and it was Ali some great angels. That's how we pulled that together.

OMER
I was watching a video with you and Hunter Walk and 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 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
Totally. And I can kind of paint the picture because that was our seed round that he put a small check in but passed on leading and has since spot up and has been a wonderful investor. And I think the world of in no way is just me talking about about him. Yeah. 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 I'll give a pass to everybody for just trying to navigate that time because that's when we were all figuring out 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 forward this long-term vision. I was more saying, 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, Anne and I have that in our heads. But what we are someone backchanneled 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, like, relentless executors. I think that some of that I just didn't understand kind of how to translate that. Like, builder me into fundraise me. Not not in an authentic way, but just in a way that was explaining, like, 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
It's funny you say that because I spoke to Rahul Vohra, the founder of Superhuman, a few weeks ago.

ROXANNE
Great Ethena customer.

OMER
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. I think I'm the same as well. Growing up in England, I always used to look a little bit, like, 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 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
I was very sympathetic to your point to the end user. I got that. Like, 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, like, CSVs and checking against maybe their HR is 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 6 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 was completed. They are saying that the training was offensive because it had really, for example, gendered stereotypes in the training. So I need to explain not just that employees hate it because employees complain about everything, but how does that 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 deal with those. Or let's talk about risk associated with the fact that there are errors. And then they'd say like, yeah, that's actually like, 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
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 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
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. We said, for example, the course that we had was 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 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, like, 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, at 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? Like, 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 Ethena. And suddenly it would be like, boom, boom, boom. We'd get five emails and be like, Where did you guys come from? And they'd say like, oh, Susie, or 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 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.

OMER
And then they bought the press. 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 kind of getting out there and talking about the problem with initially it.

ROXANNE
Was one, but we did a really good job of 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 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, 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
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, like, to hopefully make sure that you have the right kind of culture in your organization.

ROXANNE
I mean, I think this is why we've grown through word of mouth. 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 Ethena? This is the hot take. But I think perhaps the reason the problem itself wasn't tackled is one of the biggest 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
Ethena has two 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
Yeah.

OMER
Did you face any challenges raising money because of your gender, do you feel?

ROXANNE
I think there's no way to look at the stats and say that there isn't a disparate experience for women founders and 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, our CTO, be sort of challenged, like, okay, but you're the actual engineer. There are 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 think about what a SaaS founder looks like, you don't see a team like, 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 everyone feels like they can show up and do great work and just candidly 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 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 Anne and I and conclude any differently. Unless you think that teams like us just have worse ideas.

OMER
Yeah, and I think often, as you said, I think it's often there's this bias where people say things and they don't realize what they're saying. But it was clear to you, you pick it up. I remember once spelling my last name and this person spelled it as Kahn. And I said, oh, it's actually Khan. And this person said, oh, yeah, that's right. You people spell it the other way around. It's like you people 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.

ROXANNE
Yeah, I think it shows up a lot like words like hustle, which I completely understand why that is incredibly important, but I sometimes feel like I was almost I mean, I've had remember someone saying, this is a really hard thing to do. Why do you want to do something hard? 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. I'm not sure why you think that I've had some coddled existence such that it is odd for me to express ambition here. Those are my thoughts.

OMER
All right, so 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
You're exactly right that our primary customer base is tech. We actually sell a lot into finance as well in fintech. But yeah, if you look at our logos, these are companies that have gone through, some of them 20% layoffs. It is a hard time in tech. I think that's 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 Ethena, 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 like, 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 like, distributed workforce, meaning you've got employees across multiple states. You need an e-learning 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 like it's legally required. But I think that it's manifested in all of the challenges. Teams needing to say like, hey, we have fewer people, and us needing to rethink our messaging and say, like, you know what, let's really make sure we show how much time we save an advent 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 into these kinds of questions.

OMER
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
It is not, but our website can continue to be improved. We have very standard pricing. But I hear your point.

OMER
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
That's exactly right. Per employee, per year.

OMER
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, you know, dip.

ROXANNE
That's totally right. Like, contraction can be, you know, 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 like, that is going to absolutely 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, yay, the economy is growing, we're growing. Instead, ask like, why do I believe that Ethena will win? I believe it will win because it's a mission critical system, but it's also now something that companies want, right. Culture and compliance. And that hasn't changed. And just because of these economic conditions, that may mean I need to position it differently, it might mean I need to structure things differently. But end of the day, if I can get and keep customers, that is the long term drivers. And I've been very grateful for a group of investors who I think is 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 is not dead. It's a hard time, but we just can't swing that dramatically. It's very hard to operate in an environment in which you do.

OMER
Okay, let's wrap up, move on to the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. Are you ready?

ROXANNE
Yeah.

OMER
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've ever received?

ROXANNE
It's probably back to the first quote of just like, leaders do work. Like, pretty good advice.

OMER
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

ROXANNE
I really like, Reed Hasting’s No Rules Rules with him and a co-author who I'm forgetting. I think it's an amazing book on company culture.

OMER
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

ROXANNE
I think it's a steady hand.

OMER
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

ROXANNE
I'm going to go very low tech and say, walks outside with no screen.

OMER
What's new or crazy business idea that you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

ROXANNE
I don't have one off the top of my head, but I'm a mom and I feel like I've had a million ideas for random child-baby things that the world probably doesn't need.

OMER
But yeah, I'm telling you, when you're a parent with a baby, you'll buy anything they give you.

ROXANNE
You take my money. Just like, take my money and make it stop. Yeah.

OMER
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
I grew up in Walt Disney World's Planned community.

OMER
Wow. What in Epcot?

ROXANNE
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
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

ROXANNE
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
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 Ethena, they can go to goethena.com. And that's Ethena 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
Probably LinkedIn, which I know is not where the cool kids hang out, but it is ah, definitely where I am. It's Roxanne Petraeus.

OMER
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
Thank you so much.