[0:00] What is employee relations? and HR Acuity?Hello, the guest today is Deborah Mohler. She is the Class of 1987. She is the founder and CEO of a software business. So hi, hi, hi, Deborah. What does your What does your software business do? So Tony, we are the leading employee relations and investigations case management software. So in sort of simpler terms, in the world of HR or the world of work, we're the system that you go to when things sort of go off course. Course, when employees maybe don't do exactly what we expected them to do. Either it's a little thing that needs to be documented or it's a a bigger allegation that requires a more formal fact finding investigation. And all of those analytics really help inform the organization on what's going on. You know how trusted they are, where risk is in their organization so that they can actually build a better workplace. What are some examples of cases that would go into your software? Yeah, easiest way to explain what goes into it is, is through this paradigm of a traffic light. So organizations set things up to be green light. They set things up with here's your job description, here's what we want you to do in your job. Here are the goals we want you to perform, and here's how we want you to behave. And we set that up through policies or guidelines. Here's when you come to work, here is what we expect of you. So that's green light. And if employees always did exactly what they were supposed to do or hit their performance targets, HR wouldn't even exist. So what we take is really what we call the red light and the yellow light incident. So the yellow light might be someone violates a policy issue. It's not. It's not terrible, but they violate something. Maybe they're late for work or they don't show up on time or they don't hit their targets. And those are sort of yellow light incidents that have to be managed. They have to be documented. But if you start seeing a lot of those happening, they may be predictive of of bigger things. And then we have red light incidents that are harsher allegations that have not managed properly can lead to further harm to an employer or to the community or to the employees, Typically things like harassment, theft that require investigations. So in HR Acuity, we help you document and manage the yellow light and the red light incidents so that you can hopefully get more predictive about what's going on in your organization, managing risk for the organization, and also building trust with your employees, which is so important. Like how does a record in your software get filled in for example, like does the manager call in and say we have a yellow light incident here we got to add that record. Wow. I'd love it if they use that terminology. I think some of our clients do. It depends. We have a couple ways. We have a speak up platform so employees can go in and say, hey, something's going wrong, I need help. And we'd love that because, because we want to sort of normalize employees coming forward when things aren't going well. We have a part of our platform that managers can use. They're documenting issues with employees. They have a place, they're sort of tethered to ER, they're also tethered to some AI to help them manage those incidents that maybe HR doesn't need to get involved with, but we need to have them documented. And then of course, we have our sort of core platform where HR goes in and documents things or compliance or ethics or security. We've many work the accommodation to use it as well to document things, our conduct investigations and of course gather the analytics that they need as well. So I could see like if the employee shows up late to work one day, like the manager would tell them make sure to show up early next time. At what point do they document it? Do they document every time they're tardy or like what's the threshold for reporting? Sort of the age-old question and one of the reasons we built out the manager function of our tool because for, you know, 30 years or whatever, people have come and you go to a manager and Tony, I don't know, you know, if you've been a manager probably in your career and HR said to you, make sure you document that. So managers don't know where to do that. So if someone's late for work, I would put a note somewhere. Now, typically either managers don't do that or they don't know where to do it or it's in some folder in their desk. So in our tool, they can actually just go in and say, hey, I had a conversation with Tony today, just told to be on time. Hopefully, Tony, you're always going to be on time going forward. Doesn't matter it's in the system goes away. But if you're absent or late another time, it's documented there. Now we have that pattern. Maybe you move to another manager who doesn't know about that. We have that pattern. Maybe we have in that area. There's a lot of lateness in that particular, in that particular work site or that particular region. Maybe there's another issue there with performance. Maybe we have to look at our attendance policy or our hours because everybody's work, general relations want to re look at that policy. So documenting those things in one place and having that overview to look at those analytics and insights is really important. And did they only write like the yellow light things? Were they also like green light things? Like Tony did a great job today and they put it in as well. So a lot of our clients do use it for recognition as well to make track, to keep track of things that are going well as well. So it can be both. It's not a recognition system, but you know a lot of times that people are improving. You want to document that as well. And again, many of our clients will have sort of an issue category for recognition or, you know, achievements to make sure they're keeping track of those as well. And then like sometimes like a company might have like a ombudsman who's like neutral, like third party from the employee manager. Like at what point does like a third party come and they'll look at that data. Yeah, I. Mean, I think it depends. We do have some clients who use that ombudsman or mediator approach and they can have different access to the system. Again, it's all dependent upon what the organization wants to do and how they're managing it to look at those situations and see whether it can come in. Sometimes organizations use it for grievances, or they have an ombudsman process or an appeals process that can be used through the system as well. So it's a very flexible system. There's many different ways to use it. Very flexible, but it's really infused with best practices and our thought leadership. So it's more than just taking sort of a generic system and using it for this purpose. So, so after like a like a big company like installs HR acuity because you have like onboarding process where you train them on the best practices.

[6:00] Employee relations best practicesSo we have a great implementation team and we do lead with our best practices knowing that they're different for all organizations. You know how you do things. So it's very flexible, but there's certain ways to do an investigation. There's certain things that we've seen that we know and we do try to to lead with those. Look, if the organization wants to do something differently because that's how they deal with it, we work with them as well. We're not going to say they can't do that, of course, but for many organizations, that's why they come to us. They know that we're not only going to help them implement what the best practices, but we are going to be continually enhancing our product with the best practices as the world changes. I mean, our system is very different than it was when it started. I mean, the world has changed a lot. It's sort of fallen on its head. And we've added innovation, we've added features to help organizations manage through that. And then like, what's like the incentive for for these managers to use the software? Well, hopefully they'll better performing people, right. Expectations will be really clear for the managers, for HR. You can start to get more proactive to see things that are happening. So for example, you know, maybe you have a lot of incidents happening in one region all of a sudden, maybe there's a cultural issue. Did you just put a new leader in there? That's not, it's not, it's not working. Or maybe you vote in an area where you're not getting any issues coming up. That also can be concerning because nobody's perfect, right? So maybe there's just this, this idea that we can't say anything here that, you know, it's, it's not safe to speak up. So all of that data can be very helpful to start managing issues at that yellow light stage before they get to the red light. How can we be more predictive of what's going in the organization? Now a lot of our organizations are using it to identify potential union activity since that sort of coming up in ways that non traditionally we haven't seen them. Gotcha. So so then there's a lot of like like yellow light could become red light over time. Like if people start to be tardy then they can escalate to red. Absolutely. I mean, I think you know, that could lead to like a termination doesn't come to. I mean it's sort of a very basic level. If someone continues to have an attendance issue for example, and you want to go terminate them at some point, you're going to want to have that documentation to support why you treated this person in one way. It wasn't because of any type of protected category or things like that. It was because we couldn't get to work and we're treating other people similarly and we have the records to show that. Yeah, so much data on like, like after a rework happens, what happens to employee motivation and. Or if you unfortunately have to do a reduction course looking at sort of how we're choosing employees for that as well or positions? Gotcha. It's like the early warning sign too that this team has some cultural issues. That was. Our hope that we get there, employee relations traditionally was not really seen as its own function. It was very reactive and sort of done in the shadows sort of part of your job. I mean, that's how I did it when I started in HR in the back corners. And we're trying and that's all. There's always going to be issues you have to deal with, but we're trying to make it a much more proactive function where, you know, employees don't expect everything to go right at work, but when something happens that the employer's managing it properly. Like for a company that has like a wide range of job descriptions, like everything from like the more blue collar stuff to the white collar stuff, like is this standardized across like like everybody uses HR acuity or do you find it work together for a certain departments? Yeah. We, I mean from our, our client base is extremely diverse. We have utilities, we have a lot of tech companies, we have financial institutions, we have hospitals. When you think about their populations, it's very, very diverse. I mean, people are people and if you put them in an organization, you're going to have conflict, you're going to have issues, you're going to have people not doing exactly what you expected. At HR Acuity, we have about 150 employees. We use all of our tools all the time and they work. Interesting like like the the goals to prevent like compliance issues or like like are you able to measure like a decrease overtime? So we certainly, we're starting to produce different KPIs for employee relations to use. Like if you look at legal costs per employee over time associated with these types of things, using this, you should see a decrease in performance costs, things like that. You should be able to see an ROI on that if you're using the tools. Is this the only thing that impacts that? No, but there are ways to really look at it and see the impact. Look at, you know, how many people come forward through your hotline or your, your speak up platform can introduce, you know, an indicator of psychological safety. How many people are recommending you as a place to work? We've looked at that. We've some data that's really interesting that shows when you ask employees, you know, how traditional Net Promoter score, how likely are you to recommend your company as a place to work across the board? In most companies, that's typically in the 30s. It's not a very high number, which is somewhat sad. We did a survey a couple years ago where we asked that, asked that question to about 2000 employees, but we also had asked them about their experience and whether or not they'd ever been involved in an investigation and sort of how that came about and the outcome of it. And when employees said that nothing had happened to them, nothing bad, Their Net Promoter score was in the 40s. When they said they had an issue, it was investigating negated and and it was resolved. And we didn't ask how it was resolved. We just asked whether it was resolved. And then we asked their Net Promoter score. It was in the 50s. I think it was like 57%, which is sort of counterintuitive, except when you think about it, you know, when when everything's fine, you don't need the loyalty. The loyalty is built when things don't go so well, right? When something happens in the workplace and the company takes care of you, that builds loyalty. And that's why this process is so important for turnover, for really keeping employees engaged at work. They want to be sure that their employer in their back. And then if the Net Promoter score goes up, then even more people want to work at the company overtime. Absolutely. And they're going to stay and they're going to remain engaged. Gotcha, gotcha. So these yellow lights and red lights, you want to stop them? How you quickly? And then you. Go wrong. It's a big determiner, sure. Gotcha. So like the like a lot of Cornell is going to HR after graduating. They they do like a rotational program like there's total rewards, there's like a recruiting, there's there's like HR business partner, like which of the functions typically use HR and QA. So it's typically in larger organizations, they will now have an employee relations function. That was not the case when I left Cornell and started at HR, but that's really in the past few decades we've really being that elevated. When I did it, ER was sort of very transactional. It was sort of something I did as part of my generalist or my business partner roles or my leadership roles. But now it tends to be for larger organizations, enterprise organizations, A centralized function. So you know, apart from like a comp or an org development or something or something like that. But again, we also used in compliance and ethics departments, safety departments, really across the board, anywhere where they're dealing with sort of employee misconduct. It's not always misconduct, but employee issues. And and how does HRQD compared to like the general solutions like work day? It's a great question. So actually Work day is not only

[13:11] Positioning the software businessa client of ours. So they actually use HRQD for their employees, but we are also an innovation partner with them. So we actually integrate with their software in a couple of different ways because it's what we do is not something that they do. How does it differ? So an HR or an HHCM is typically used for documenting the employee of record, right? So here's one employee and I'm going to sort of document their life, life cycle through their employment. ER issues are not so one to one. We're really one to many. There's typically other people involved. There's different issues that are coming in and so it has to be managed separately. They're also much more nuanced cases. It's not workflow driven. Everyone's different. They tend to have a different confidentiality level. So they're they're integrated, but they're, they're quite different. And so actually we have a couple of different clients, work day ADP, who use our software internally because they recognize they're just different. Gotcha. So like if they have like a work day instance of a big company has like a work day instance installed, they can install yours as like an add on to it. Yeah. Well, right now they don't sell it, they may soon, but certainly about one of our clients are probably work day clients at this point. So we integrate so their employee data feeds and takes our acuity and we've just become a partner with an integration. They have something in Work day called Work Day Help, which is their ticketing system. We integrate with that. So someone comes in sort of a Tier 1, Tier 2 issue, sort of, you know, you know, something that's sort of handled based upon policy or based upon rules that's handled in Work Day Help. It's monitored there. But if something comes in that is more of an ER issue, whether someone's having an issue with a Co worker or their manager or there's a policy violation or an allegation that gets pushed directly to HR acuity. So there's a bidirectional integration with them. Gotcha, so data can go back and forth between. Yeah, and get the information that they need, but it still remains confidential and they have the work processes that they need. Yeah, that makes sense. So like as you were building HR acuity, like focus on building a niche, kind of like focusing your niche, where did you think of going broader as well? How'd you build that balance? Yeah, so my founding story is a

[15:16] How Deborah started the businesslittle unusual. I, you know, I left H Cornell in 87 from the ILR school, went into HR Citibank started down that path. It had no thoughts of building a technology company. And in about early 2000s, I was sort of fed up with corporate America, decided I wanted to do something else. And I actually started HR Acuity to conduct workplace investigations as a third party. That was the idea, wasn't a tech company at all. And as I started doing that, I started thinking about the processes internally and that there really were none that I sort of taught myself that there was no data collected, that it was really manual and art. And as I started seeing all this other technology being built and data becoming such a driver into everything we did, I just realized there was a gap. I started to hear that also from my peers, from my network when I went out saying, hey, I want to do your investigation. They'd be like, well, we don't. We don't have a good process so. What's an investigation like? What's an investigation like? So an investigation, the difference is you document something like an ER case when you know, I know you're late, Tony, I know you're late. Like there's nothing to investigate. There's something to answer. But an investigation is when you need to do some fact finding, Hey, XYZ is harassing me or somebody stole something or I'm not being treated properly. Someone comes to you with that issue. You need to make some determinations #1 is it against policy? Typically that's what you kind of anchor every investigation on. Who's it impacting and really what's, what's the determination? Is there merit to this allegation? So you need to do some fact finding. You need to talk to people, you need to review documentation and make a determination. That's the difference between an investigation and just pure documentation. It can be really straightforward. You know, this person said this, this person said this. I look at the policy. We make a decision still in the investigation or it would be very complex. You have dozens of people involved in it, lots of documentation, audio, video files, evidence that comes in that you have to look at sometimes looking at things like credibility to make a determination as well. So for things like that, they hire a third party to do the investigation. No, I mean, that's what HRQ was initially born to do. And sometimes companies will do. Sometimes it's in their best interest. They don't, they don't have the the time. It's extremely complex. Maybe it's involving very senior people. So it's really in their best interest to go to a third party. But for the most part, people in their HR organization will manage those investigations, sometimes in their ethics and compliance organization, sometimes their legal team will get involved. And so they're doing those all in house. But they need that process. They need that consistency. They need a place to die document and that's really the foundation of what HR Cutie brings. Gotcha. So in the mid 2000s you started as a investigation company? Yeah, So, right. So I was just doing investigations and then I decided, hey, we could use technology to do this. Tony, I didn't know technology. I was not in the engineering school. I didn't, you know, in the 80s we had our math labs. That was that was it. That was our big innovation, which was actually pretty innovative of Cornell back then to have a Mac lab. But all I knew about technology was that I used really bad HR technology. HR technology back then was bad. It was, it was not built by anybody that understood our jobs. So that's what I knew. I didn't want to build Betty. I wanted to build technology that actually understood the users. And I understood the users because I was in that position. But I didn't know. All I knew was PowerPoint. That was my, that was about as far as my technology stack one, but I jumped in. I, I did actually design the first version on PowerPoint by like making pictures of what I thought, you know, here's a login screen, here's a dashboard, here's what it would look like. And then I shared it with a lot of colleagues on that I'd worked with over the years and they got excited about it. And then I had to go down the road to find developers. And that was a journey because I wasn't speaking their language and I didn't really understand what they needed from me. But somehow, some way we got it to production in 2009. That's when we first came out with the the solution boots. I was bootstrapping it the whole way. I, you know, I didn't know about funding. I was in New Jersey, I wasn't in the Silicon Valley. Really lucky to get some early adopters at a tough time. We were in a recession, so also not a great time to be launching a product. But what did I know? I went all in. This was my job. I, you know, I was doing invest instigations on the side to earn some money and it took hold. We had a lot of great early adopters. We learned I was able to slowly grow the business. And then the world started changing. You know, we had me too. In 2018. People started thinking a little bit differently about allegations that were raised in the workplace and we were there. We had some really great companies that were already using US, like well known logos that were already using US. LinkedIn Bloomberg at the time were using US then. You know, we went got through that and then we had COVID, another issue that came up where people Dutch and became even that much more important. We had all the social movements that were happening, Black Lives Matter. All of a sudden, all those things were coming into the workplace and the ER team was really being looked at to navigate how do we deal with this? How do we deal with these geopolitical issues that are happening right now? The people are talking about the divisiveness at work. What the back in 1987, the olden days when I started working, the way we managed those things in the workplace was very simple. We didn't talk about them. We didn't talk about race, we didn't talk about religion. That was how the workplace was. And times have changed. Regulation has changed. The workplace has evolved. People's expectations of what they should expect from their employers has changed, and that's why this has really came at the right time and is really, you know, really grown. I mean, I mean, we've grown because I think we're great software. We're here at a time that organizations require this now. That's so interesting. So back in like 2009 when you first built the first product, you didn't expect all this overtime? Pandemic was not on my What's going to happen? Yeah, I don't think anyone else did, right. It's like a tell me more about the early days. I see a lot of Cornelian like a service businesses. They stay services. Did you always know you want to grow something bigger than just services? It was really listening to my

[21:24] Transition from consulting to technologycustomers because I was out there talking about my investigations and you know that I was going to do investigations and then my customers or my network would say, well, that's great that we'll, we'll use you for investigations when we need you, but we need a better way to do investigations. We don't have consistency. And at first I sort of ignored it and I thought, no, no, what? I just proprieted Terry, like you do that. And then over my HR career, you, you know, in your business career, you know, listen to your customers, listen to your customers. I finally started listening and I thought, they need something. I know they need something because I was there. I was in their shoes. It's lacking. And there's so much power to what we can do with this part of HR. And that was really where I transitioned into the tech. When people asked me about it for advice, I didn't think much about it. I just sort of dove right in. I was, I had a little bit of money, not a lot. I didn't think it would take a whole lot of money, a little bit wrong on that. But so that was one thing. I had a very supportive spouse, also a Cornell Ian, So maybe that's good too, who was like go for it and I went for it and really never envisioned that the company would be as big as it today it is today. Never envisioned that we'd be working with the world's largest logos. And I think that if I had gone and investigated what does it take to stand up and enterprise wide technology company, if I'd gone and explored everything I would have need to know, I would have run, run away really fast. Wait, who am I? I'm an ILR. Yeah. What do I know about technology, right? I know about HR, but luckily I didn't do that. I just and and maybe that's part of, you know, Cornellians, right? We just go in, we see a problem and we figure out we're going to solve it and we're smart enough to do that. And just it happened. What was like like after 2009 after you started the software did did more of your revenue become more and more on the the licensing side rather than the investigation side like? Beginning, yeah, it was a transition. I'm not sure exactly when, but I continued to do investigations on the side because they were pretty lucrative. You know, they helped fund fund the business and the software. But very fortunate for me when I was early on, I formed a small Advisory Board because I was getting into something that I wasn't that familiar with. And one of my good friends joined, he's in sales, still a good friend. And he said to me, this is early 2000 and eight probably. He said, I think you should build your business as SAS. And I'm like, what's SAS? He's like, well, it's software as a service. It's a subscription. It's sort of a new thing that people are doing. It's you know, and I'm like, all right, so that's how we went into this early on. We, we never installed behind someones firewall. We would get questions about it and I thought about it if it was a big enough company, but we went in as a SAS subscription based company. And so quickly as we saw that and as we started to gain some traction, I was able to stop doing investigations. We recommend people to do investigations, but now really 95% of our business is is subscription based off. Gotcha gotcha. And I really like the the daily line because it was like more pre emptive. Yeah, absolutely. Tony, what we talk about a lot are they're really predictive indicators. You need to pay attention. Nobody comes in one day and says, hey, here's a good day to harass someone. There have been things going on in the organization or the things that that person has been doing that are predictive, I believe, of issues to come if they're not sort of put on hold or they're squashed or they're allowed in the organization. So organizations have to either when an investigation happens, either they haven't seen those signs or they've chosen to ignore the signs. And so those yellow light things are so important. And actually when we started the system, it was all about the investigations. And now investigations is still a very important part of the life cycle, but we've really built this life cycle of employee relations where it's only part of it. One of the important things we do now is focus on aftercare, right? You can do a great investigation, but if you don't solve them, if you don't make the workplace better and graded of whatever is happening, doesn't matter how good your investigation is. So this idea of aftercare, this idea of through care, making sure people feel that it's a trusted process, it's all really there's. Before there's after it's really. Circular, right, because it goes back to that Net Promoter score. You know, someone goes through the experience, whether they're a subject, a complainant or a witness that's going to, that's going to build when they see somebody else in the, in the organization having a rough time for that person to say, hey, you know, I went to HR with a similar issue and they actually helped me. They actually helped me. Why don't you, why don't you let them know what's going on now before it blows out of proportion or, or allows the ER or the HR organization to see those signs and say something's going on over there. I'm going to get ahead of it and let's see if we can figure it out and nip it in the bud before it does become something that could not only become an allegation, but could damaged the company's brand and their reputation. You know, with social media now, these things can just. Oh yeah, absolutely. So, so, so, so, so as you were building, did you consider going to other functions as well? Like once you have investigations built, do you think of going to compensation or total rewards or any of the other verticals? We believe there's enough here. There's such a big part of the employees, but now we do integrate. We can integrate with things because, or you can take our data and put it in your data lake and, and maybe get some additional information. But there's a lot of really good software that does that. We want to be best at what we do because we think it's so critical that we understand the space for our clients. But we we want, we want to be deep in employee relations so that we can deliver that expertise to our clients. And employee relations has really broadened as a function over the years and the understanding of it. And then like I see a lot of Cornelli and startups these days, they all go down like the venture capital route. Did you go down that route too?

[26:59] Venture capital and private equity fundingSo I didn't, I was sitting in New Jersey. I had, you know, a couple decades of experience under my belt. I was, I didn't know about venture capitalism. I had my, I think I had $40,000 to start this and that's what I knew. So I started it that way. I bootstrapped it. I was very fortunate to get a tech for equity swap a small piece of equity at the beginning to get us to production. And it wasn't until 2018, so almost nine years after being a business, that I had a really great advisor who just said to me, I really want to do a friends and family round. I think you need capital. And I resisted. I resisted because I'd heard, oh, don't take capital, it's not good. He convinced me to do that friends and family round and it actually was good. Sometimes you need capital to grow. So that was in 2018. And then we did our first round, seasonal round in 2019 with a terrific growth equity firm, St. Partners, who I was really fortunate to meet, really helped me understand and learn how to be a CEO of a growing tech company that wasn't my background. They were really helpful to spur that growth. So much so that three years later, not even three years later in 2021, we went out and did our Series B with K1 investment, a larger growth equity firm. Our early investors still rolled over into it. And you know, together with K1 and gross St. we've really continued our growth. I still have majority right now, but it, it was, it was right for me at the time. But I'm really glad that I didn't go down the venture capital route. I think there's a lot of pressure on organizations to do things that maybe are not in their best interest or to grow too fast. And I was, you know, I can't say it was a plan, but I feel really lucky at how we went about our funding. Well, there are some of the changes that happened after you got the growth equity rounds like did you grow a lot faster? Yeah, some things that are sort of silly about what happens when you get funding, but it's the reality as soon as you've institutional funding for some reason people want to work for you like it's you're legitimate, you're the exact same company. It's there's legitimacy, which is really. So we we had exposure I would think to better talent. The other thing is when you do grow equity versus venture capital, you have a team of operating partners with the firm that help you and can really be whether it's through recruiting or helping you do some analytics or to tell you what other people are doing or to sort of help you understand what the metrics that matter really are as you kind of continue your growth journey or make of a board that can really help give you advice. So I think that's that's been part of our journey and has really helped us. The great thing about our partners is while they've given us this, they've been minority investments. They also respect our expertise. So they know what we bring as founders and respect that and listen to that. So what they're bringing is really, well, how do you sort of take it and move it as a tech company, which is something that a traditional founder, because they're specialized in their field, doesn't have in their background. So for us it was, it was great. Like what were the changes that you made as a result have having growth equity? Capital is being able to invest. So we were able to expand our our our sales team. We were able to invest in different marketing levers that traditionally are expensive and you have to invest in before they come up. Certainly in we could sort of get ahead on our development because we had the funding available to do that. So all of those things, yeah, I mean, we've, yeah, obviously grown considerably because we've been able to make those, I think, educated bets on what was going to help us grow. And this was also around the time when the zeitgeist was changing as well with the me too, so that they saw it as like a growth opportunity too. Yeah, of course, we closed our first around the Series A in December of 2019, which is an interesting time to close funding when 2, you know, three months later we basically all went home and the world sort of shut down. They were supportive. 2020 ended up being a great year for us. It was a little slow in Q2, but they were really supportive partners. What was the process of finding them like? Like those YC, they go to YC, they have demo day and they get introduced. It goes down Sand Hill Rd. It's like a well charged on path like what was your path like and finding those initial? I wasn't looking, I was not looking. I had my Angel round that came to me and then, you know, they sort of just start finding you. You get calls. You get a lot of calls though. You get a lot of calls I find from people that may don't understand your business. And for me it was really finding the right partner was really important. So grocery partners who was our first investors, they called us, probably cold call called me. I liked it because they were partners. They were the principals that called me. We got along really well. We always tell a funny story, the how I blew them off because I wasn't ready for funding and they were going to come to town and I was not available. I just was too busy. And then ironically, a few years later, I was out in San Francisco visiting Lyft, who was a prospect of ours at the time. And I was at their offices in San Francisco and I was walking through the office complex and I saw a door that said Gross St. Partners. And I was like, I think those are the guys I talked to. I think. So I knocked on their door. No one was there. So I sent them a text or an e-mail and I said, hey, I think this is where you guys are located. I'm walking by. Sorry I missed you. So they said, it is next time you're in town, let us know. We'll have coffee. Fast forward, that was February of 2019, I think July of 2019, I was back. Lyft was now a customer of ours. We were visiting them and I and I called them up and I said, hey, let's have coffee. And I thought we were too big for their fund. I thought at that point we had sort of accelerated too much. But we started talking and we weren't. And by December we had closed the deal and, and I really liked them. And I think that's, you can't like understate the important or overstate the importance of that when you're choosing a partner. They're going to be doing a lot with them and they still are just, I mean, they'll always be just very special people in my life and I was very fortunate for them to partner with us.

[33:00] Importance of capital in growing businessesLike at that moment in 2019, did you feel like you needed more capital to because there's a lot of demand you're able you weren't able to supply or did you feel there was a big technology shift and you had to upgrade your technology I. Think I think that first Angel round I did before really made me aware of that Capital is not a bad thing. I think sometimes people say, oh, you know, wait, don't get institutional investment. It's, you know, just keep it as long as you can and sometimes that works. But it gave me the window that you know, the time is right, everything going on in the world, now is our time to cap for it. And I didn't want to under capitalize and lose the moment. And so it just seemed like the right thing to do and I'm really glad that I did it now. I was lucky enough that I was far enough on my journey that I didn't have to give it all away. Like in venture capitalism, you typically have to and then you're under somebody else's control. So I was able to do minority investments, which for me was really important initially. I was able to keep my women business enterprise certification, which was really important to me. I had to eventually give that up, which is unfortunate. Why did it have to? Because the board became more male. We bank is the women's business enterprise certification, I think it stands for and you have to show that you're a majority women owned business. And we were still a majority with our Series A with our Series B, even though I still maintain the majority our our the structure was such that it didn't it didn't hit their qualifications. Obviously, I'm proud to be a woman founder. You know, women founders do get far less money of investment. So, but you know, so I feel fortunate. Did you also start like the employee relations, the networking group as well?

[34:37] Leading the employee relations functionYeah. So, you know, employee relations was really new. So we really, I was building this technology, but what I didn't realize I was building was really this community of a function that was growing. It was really mature touring through the past couple decades. So in about 2015, I started two things. We started an event called an employee relations roundtable where I invited 50 employee relations leaders to come together and just talk, just talk about what was going on in in our industry, in our function. And people would come and say, Oh my God, I found my people like this is like, I don't know, other people do this. And that kept growing to today, it is a network of hundreds of global employee relations leaders. We get together in person once a year. Google, Disney, Apple, Salesforce, Adobe Marathon, MasterCard. I mean like all the largest brands, many of whom are our clients, get together to talk about what's happening in employee relations. That same year we started our benchmark study, which we do. There wasn't one before. There still isn't another one. It's a definitive study on employee relations benchmark. We, we produce it every year. If anybody's watching, you can download it on our site. It is free. We'd also love people to participate in it. This is this year's I always, I love a hard copy because I'm a big, you know, just to hold it as a prop, but it's real and really benchmarking processes, resources, numbers of cases, it's the only place you can get that. This year's cover. I think over 9 million employees are covered and it's over 200 employers that take this study. And then in 2021 is sort of an offshoot to our employee roundtable, employee relations roundtable. We started Empower. So it's Empower hyphen, er.org. It is a free community for any employee relations professional. Whether you're starting out, you're just leaving Cornell, the ILR school and getting started, or you've been in the business forever or you do it as part of your job. You can go there. It's free. We have close to 7000 members. It is a place where there's a really active live feed. We have a lot of empower hours, employee community LED discussions, which are great. We have hundreds of people join these to talk about different things. Very specific things are dealing with an empower. We have a group that does only labor. We've partnered with the LRI and they lead a labor group. We have a global group, you can post your jobs, you can look for your own job there, what's available, and we're really proud of that. It's really just the only place for this community to come to because it's it's really sort of a, a very young function. We say we're teenagers right now. We're still growing, we're still maturing. Yeah. It's really interesting how you're institutionalizing it over time. Like, is there like a lot of like academic studies into employee relations as well Like like. Not yet. We're starting to get those going because it is still a new function and really, you know, literally write the book on it. Do these employee relations people today set this as like their niche for their entire career? A little of both. I mean, I think anybody in HR should take a, take a stint in ER just to learn because it is difficult. But you're finding more because the function is really growing and maturing where it is people's, you know, this is their career and this is what they've done and they learn and they're how do we be because it's becoming so much more strategic. Before, it was very reactionary, so it was a place you could kind of land it for a little bit and jump out of it. You still should get that experience. And I would always, you know, give that advice to someone that's sort of new in the field. But there's definitely some very seasoned people who've done this who are just such a pro for that and really leading, leading and working with us to really lead the future of the function. Do you have like certifications to make sure that everybody knows the best practices? Yeah, we don't yet. We actually this is sort of hot of the press, but we just started offering different types of certification training. So we have a mediation course that's starting in September through the site. And then we are going to be later this year launching investigation training in partnership with a law firm that we feel really comfortable with. And we're really excited about that partnership as well. So people will know this is the place to go and get great training. Interesting, like of the Fortune 500 for example, do every one of them have have employee relations now? Yeah, you can. You can avoid it now in Fortune 5 hours for sure. There's no way you can be doing this decentralized. There might be a couple trying to, but for the most part interesting. Not really. This is it's a requirement. It's a requirement to have a centralized 1 and like the CHRO is like asking for these. They're not what they could be. I mean, this will report into your CHRO. It's, you know, otherwise it's very difficult for you to get data. You need a system to be able to understand the trends, to be able to report to the board what's going on, where the risks are, the cost of it. It's becoming quite a strategic function. Interesting. So for the for the closing question, I always ask the what's the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

[39:22] Closing questionWhat's the kindest thing anybody's ever done for me? Well, I'm going to talk sort of in generalization kind of back to building a business. But when I started thinking about building my business, I kind of had a list of all my network because I was well into my career. So I had a lot of people. I thought these people are going to help me and people said they were going to help me. This person is going to do that. And I would say that kind, when I think about my business, there were people that came out of the woodwork that I hardly knew that jumped through hoops and made connections for me and I didn't hardly even know them. And I always think about those people according to my little list on the side. And then there were people that are on my network list that said they do stuff that's fine. That didn't really do anything for me. And I bring that up not because it's not a specific situation, but it taught me that I want to be that person. I want to be that person that helps other people. And I hope that I've learned to do that. People reach out to me and say I'm looking for. Role or you know, hey, can you look at my resume or you know, talk to my niece. I always try to make time for those people because even if I don't really know them, because people did that for me and it did make a difference and it did sort of open doors for me. I think about some of our largest customers that we got into and it wasn't because I knew someone or work for some of somebody else that just just decided to sort of do something kind and it makes a difference. The hard works on me, but opening those doors, giving someone that piece of advice can really make a difference. That's wonderful. Thanks for sharing depth.