Cultivating Resilience Through Adaptation, Partnership and Growth | Christy Johnson, Ep 07

On stepping in as CEO of a portfolio company for seven years

“It's very easy to have ideas. It's way more difficult to execute on those ideas. I look back on things that I probably said when I was on the other side of the table and I hope I didn't cringe. I think I probably did.”

“They've just come out of a fundraising mode, and in that mode, everyone's like, make your TAM as big as it possibly can be. And so they're almost trained to talk about their market in a really large way. The second they take money, then I need them to start thinking about, okay, now we need to focus to the highest probability for success.”

“When you have to bring something in in order to make payroll, I mean if you've never lived that or you've only got so much to spend and you have to be so thoughtful about how you do that. And people who have never worked in those circumstances or have had unlimited budget or no repercussions when things don't go well because they're an incubator inside a large company and if it doesn't go well then they all just move on to the next project, as opposed to like I have to lay off people who have kids and families and the ones you know families that I know and I've met and feel extremely close to. That's not the same.”

On navigating COVID as CEO

“Within the first six weeks of going remote we lost our first and second largest customers. So that was incredibly scary. I turn to my husband and I'm like, I'm not sure we're gonna make it. And so that's a whole different message for the team too. It's like, okay, now you have two responsibilities. You have the responsibility of making sure that each of your co-workers is doing okay. This is uncharted territory and we've never been here before. But we have to dig deep.”

“If you would have told me in 2019 that we would be completely remote even when we didn't have to, I would have said I don't think that's possible. I now absolutely do.”