Diversity, Inclusion, and Entrepreneurship with Mandy Price of Kanarys

Speaker 1: 0:00

And if people don't have clarity around what they're doing, that's why your revenue is fucked, and so not enough of that investigation happens. So what I evangelize a lot in the world is the very hard version of people productivity but people by general is soft and nuanced and complicated, and unless we solve that we're kind of fucked as knowledge workers because machines will do tasks better than any of us in five or eight years. And so unless we figure out how to solve the harder to measure software stuff, machines are coming for us.

Speaker 2: 0:46

Hey folks, this is a special startup edition of the Winning Zone. You asked for it. You want to hear from startups the things that they've been challenged by, the ways that they've overcome them, the things that might have been surprising in their startup journey. Here are all of the tools and tips and tactics and techniques from friends of mine and folks that I've reached out to to help bring you insights, to help you have the greatest opportunity for success in your startup.

Speaker 3: 1:13

You're entering the Winning Zone.

Speaker 2: 1:18

Mandy, great to see you.

Speaker 3: 1:19

Great to see you, Helman.

Speaker 2: 1:21

You're always so busy. I'm so glad that I got time to get to all that. You found time to grace me on the podcast.

Speaker 3: 1:30

Well, I feel like most founders are very busy. And then you add that to being a mom of two, two young kids Then yes, it makes me have a very busy schedule, but it's such a pleasure because I'm able to do something that I love. And then, obviously, kids bring the joy of their own.

Speaker 2: 1:52

So it is still something that you love, even multiple years into the startup journey. It's so interesting because sometimes you talk to founders and they get to that point where they hit the wall, either from a stress level or from what's happening in the economy, or shifts or growing or scale or any of the things that you're constantly juggling with those plates on stage but you look like you're still immersed in loving what you do.

Speaker 3: 2:14

I think you have to love it to keep going. I think you will walk away if you don't love it because it's so hard and it's so difficult. But I try to always come back to the mission and the reason why we started the company, and so, although we may be getting pulled from various stakeholders around different issues, it's really cementing myself in that why, because I know that that is the reason why I took this leap of faith and I know that's why our employees work here, and so I think it's so important to never forget that.

Speaker 2: 2:50

And you came from a legal background and now you're running Canaries. I'd love for you to share what Canaries does and even just a little of the personal motivation around making that leap. What was the judgment call and what is the mission?

Speaker 3: 3:06

Yeah, so at Canaries, we believe that everyone should have an equal opportunity to succeed in the workplace, regardless of their background, beyond just gender and race. We know that a lot of times, when we may talk you around issues of diversity and inclusion, or inclusion and belonging, people think that we're only talking about certain backgrounds, and what we advocate for and work for is how do we ensure that the workplace truly has an equal opportunity and that all employees feel welcome and included, whether they're a caregiver, a veteran, someone who's neurodiverse or disabled. And so I think it's so important that we really think around the structures and the policies and the practices that organizations need to have in place to ensure that they're creating that workplace of the future where everyone belongs. And so we understand that the future needs to start with creating a culture of belonging, and so that's what we do. We help and we're dedicated to helping organizations create this culture by focusing on diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging and providing them the tools that they need to make meaningful changes in their workplace.

Speaker 3: 4:13

So one of the things that we saw kind of and what drove us to create the organizations that many organizations were well intentioned but they didn't have the tools they needed to drive true change, and so we think that, in order to truly be successful in building a better future for all employees, that organizations have to have those tools to create that long term systemic change and to have the framework, benchmarking and data and metrics they need. So that's what we do we help organizations with that data collection, with that measurement, with that benchmarking, with that creating those KPIs that they really understand how to support their employees in the workplace and what strategies they need to implement. So let me ask you.

Speaker 2: 5:02

I think that maybe I'm wrong, but I think that if you were to survey the average person in a workplace, maybe even like, let's just take another layer of that and say not just the average employee, but managers and leadership in most workplaces around the United States, I think if you stated to them you know the elements of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, they would probably say I'm an inclusive person, I'm an equitable person, I treat everybody fairly. I think everybody should be working here. How does? What is the need inside of these organizations? You mentioned the term systemic. What is the systemic need that is present in spite of individuals' potential best intentions?

Speaker 3: 5:45

So when we think about diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, there are certain things that everyone can do to create a more inclusive workplace.

Speaker 3: 5:53

A lot of the times, even though we say DEI or DEIB, people automatically think of hiring, and so it's really understanding the fact that each of these different concepts mean something different and who must activate it is different.

Speaker 3: 6:09

So when we start to think around equity within the workplace and we started to think around systems change, all employees can help to create an inclusive workplace, but leadership and management teams have to have the structures in place to de-bias their systems.

Speaker 3: 6:24

And so what we see is that a lot of times, organizations may not understand kind of what metrics that they be tracking, what are the best practices and research best practices that they need to implement around the entire employee life cycle to promote inclusion, equity and belonging within their workplace. So, although we're a technology platform, our platform and our assessments and our tools and our benchmarking was put in place by aisle psychologists and practitioners with the backgrounds to help organizations really understand how they should tackle these issues. And so, although many organizations are committed to this, they may not understand what's working and how they need to move forward, because we know companies have been doing DEI for 30 years yet, troubling, very few have been able to quantify what's worked from a DEIB perspective. And that's really where we go in is that we help them track and measure the impact of these business outcomes and help them understand how to create more inclusive and equitable work cultures.

Speaker 2: 7:29

You find that that tracking and measurement creates a greater opportunity than perhaps the more altruistic desire of just being an equitable workplace. Is this something that you found in the marketplace as you've grown the company?

Speaker 3: 7:43

We do because it allows them to have targeted interventions and to understand the strategy based off their own workplace and what their own employees need. So one of the things we do with a lot of our workplaces and our clients that we work with is we help them around self-id, and that's where I was saying helping them to understand their workplace, their employees and how to support them. So, as we start to look at things around, what are the? How many caregivers do you have within your workplace? How many neurodiverse employees? How many employees that have disabilities? How do we support people with different religious backgrounds within the workplace? So there are certain things that we can do where the strategy that we may need to have in place for a certain department or a certain division will be very different.

Speaker 3: 8:25

In what we've seen in the past, that organizations may have a blanket strategy where it may say everyone's going to do an unconscious bias, training, but not really understanding.

Speaker 3: 8:34

Okay, how do we ensure that, as we think of caregivers, we're putting in place strategies that support them? So those are a variety of different things, right? So we're able to provide examples from benchmarking, from industry trends, to say these are the things that we're seeing that are working in other workplaces, so having meetings set up during core hours, when individuals are more likely to have a child care between 10 am and 2 pm. So there's just different things that we know that we can put in place from a structural perspective, that sometimes it's not that organizations don't want to do it, but they just may not understand what they need to have in place to support their own workplace because many of them don't have the data and analytics to really understand the wake, the makeup of their workplace. These are just things they haven't tracked. They've only looked at gender and race and not really understand these other elements that make up their workforce.

Speaker 2: 9:33

So if you're to reverse engineer the tech roadmap and here's what I mean by that you have a mission, obviously a very clear mission around what it is that you were intending to build when you co-founded this company. And then you reverse engineer to I've got to build a product, and I need to start with an MVP, and then I need to build something upon that MVP that then becomes investable, and then I've got a North Star, though, of the impact we'd like to make and you've got some very large customers right. How did you take all of that and distill it down to day one? And then how have you grown incrementally thereafter in deciding because this is a tech product, it's not just professional services I shouldn't say just, but it's not professional services where you're out there consulting.

Speaker 2: 10:16

You know what I mean. How did you take something that is a big problem if someone's listening and they're thinking you know, I've got this huge mission that I'd like to achieve, and I'd like to achieve it through the implementation of technology or the application of technology. How do you reduce that down to something that then has stages of growth that allow for investors and stakeholders to get involved in the organization initial customers to kind of give you a thumbs up and directional indication that you're doing well. Tell me a little bit about that.

Speaker 3: 10:43

So our product has changed over time. You know, I think the initial core mission and purpose of what we've created hasn't changed. But if we go from our initial MVP to what it looks like now, it's very, very different. But our key goal was always how do we help DEI decisions be driven by data and how do we help ensure that employees have a way to communicate to the organization that'll provide some psychological safety and they won't be fearful of any type of retaliation or retribution, and so to really have that free discourse around the things that they need within the workplace. And so that hasn't changed. Now there's many other components of the platform that have changed, but really ensuring that organizations are moving and I don't want to kind of make it sound like programmatic DEI is a problem, because I think that that's part of the puzzle.

Speaker 3: 11:43

When I talked about there's different individuals that you know, as we think about the diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, they drive different components of the strategy that every employee can be inclusive, but there's things that only leadership, team and management can do, and how do we ensure that they have the data that they need to ensure that the strategy that they're putting in place is effective?

Speaker 3: 12:05

And when we look at other business units, they have a level of data, KPIs and metrics that they're able to look at in real time and course correct. When we look at diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, what we saw is that many organizations had no data other than representation data, and so how do we ensure that they're really driving the strategy and we're creating the metrics and the data that they need to ensure that they have a successful strategy? So one of the things that our VP of sales likes to talk about is that he can look at Salesforce and see exactly where they stand right, yeah, and know this is what we need to do. This is how we need to revise our strategy to ensure we meet our goals and targets, and we don't have that on the D. Well, for Canaries, we didn't have that right. Two is have that one source of truth where we integrate with the.

Speaker 3: 13:10

HRIS systems, where we integrate with the ATS systems, where we integrate with the systems that have this data. Where you know, when I first came into this work, I was shocked that many chief diversity officers or heads of DEI didn't have access to the data that they needed to make their decisions and drive their decisions. So what we do is we integrate with those systems, we deploy our own assessments through the software so that they have the data and the information they need to drive their decision making. And so I think you know, anyone that's ever had a P&L or being in charge of a certain business unit knows the need to have the data to drive their decision making, and we think that in order for DEI to be successful, we got to have the same thing as we look at those leaders in helping to ensure that they have the metrics and data they need to drive their strategy.

Speaker 2: 14:00

Hey folks go to Foundersalesacceleratorcom. If you are at that stage of trying to figure out and go to market, it's critical. It's a 90 day program. But let me tell you something it starts off super fast. In the first 30 days you're going to lock down data sourcing. You're going to lock down your market in personas. You're going to lock down the messages that you're going to use on every single channel and you're going to get those things out of the gate so you can start developing top of funnel to mansion.

Speaker 2: 14:25

30 days out from that, we're going to be looking at the proof, looking at the activity, looking at the data, looking at the iterations, looking at the conversions on the work that you've done the first 30 days and then, by month two, we're already looking at scale. This is where we're looking at the volume. We're looking at the resources you want to throw at these opportunities and ensuring that we are tweaking your pipeline to optimize for the highest level of conversion and qualification. This is the GTM accelerator that actually works, as opposed to beating your head against the wall trying to figure out how you're going to get to market and how you're going to generate revenue. So go over to FoundersalesAcceleratorcom, click on book a strategy call. I will be on the other end of that call and I'll talk you through the process. What were some of the assumptions that you made in building the tech that actually, once you got out and deployed in initial customers, proved to be maybe a little different than you had anticipated.

Speaker 3: 15:19

So I would say the first thing is, you know, when we first launched our project, our platform, it was actually a, b to C to B, and so we, I think, didn't really understand some of the challenges of trying to get large scale consumers onto the platform, and so that's something that we pivoted away pretty quickly from to go to B2B directly.

Speaker 3: 15:52

I think one of the other challenges that we had is, in the beginning we didn't have as many integrations, so that a lot of the things that we needed to kind of distill the data down from their internal systems, we had to have our CS team, our customer success team, do that manually, and so, as we know, every workplace, the data and the employees who they're hiring, who they're maybe leaving the workforce, is changing all the time.

Speaker 3: 16:21

So it led to some pretty time intensive work. So building up those integrations were really key and critical for us so that we could have that seamless flow of real time data. So there's things like that that we just learned along the way. And then I think it was important for us and what we've had from the beginning is ensuring that we had chief diversity officers and heads of HR on our product advisory board so that, as we start to think around what features and components and how should the platform evolve, that those individuals have always been a part of our team and helping us to think around our buyers and our customers on how do we best support them, and so I think it's so important that you have those trusted advisors that are very familiar with the space, that are able to provide that insight as far as the challenges that your users, your buyers, are having and can help you proactively address those concerns.

Speaker 2: 17:24

And you've just recently, I believe added Melanie Parker, chief Diversity Officer at Google, to your advisory board.

Speaker 3: 17:30

Right, we did, and she has been phenomenal and fantastic, obviously, of keeping us abreast of the changes that we're seeing take place in the diversity, equity, inclusion landscape.

Speaker 2: 17:42

I think this is an important note for founders who might be listening with respect to the advisory board, because you've done a great job of amassing advisors even early stage. How would you recommend to someone who might be listening who's thinking, yeah, that could be really pivotal for me, not just from the vantage point of the advice they'd give me, but also the potential doors they could open? What does the conversation sound like to an advisor or potential advisor to get them interested in a company? Think early days, right before you've got impactful customers or before you've made a splash of PR or having made a fundraise. How do you manage that conversation?

Speaker 3: 18:20

You know, I think it's important to understand that it's going to take some time to woo these folks right, like when we think of being able to attract the folks to the organization. It wasn't something that happened overnight. It took us having to prove ourselves and to continue to have conversations with them and keep them updated on the company. And one of the things I know is a challenge as a founder is that your time is very limited. There's so many things that are always pulling at your time and you know I've had conversations with lots of founders that will say I don't have time to manage our board and an advisory board, and I will say the best thing that we have done is to have an advisory board because it keeps more people number one, you're getting more input and information around the market landscape, but the more advocates that you could have out there advocating for your organization, the better. So, even though it may seem like something else that you're going to have to prepare for or pull at your time, I will tell you that our advisory board has been our best advocates and has really helped us think through the issues. One of the things you know where your board of directors is very different because that's usually investors that have invested in the company. As you noted, melanie serves as our independent director, which our investors also believed was very important to have someone who understands our industry and comes from that background. But our advisory board allows us to have the perspective of experts in a variety of different fields. So we have people that have marketing backgrounds and sales backgrounds and finance backgrounds, and so, as we think of how do we leverage the expertise that we need, every startup has to have so many different.

Speaker 3: 20:19

You know, I used to get a lot of questions on how did you start a tech startup when you don't have a tech background? And I would always say, well, when you're a founder, you got to know about finance, you got to know about marketing, you got to know about sales tech. You learn a lot. So, when you think of all the different expertise that you have to leverage by being able to bring those experts on, I had someone that I knew that, okay, this person was a CFO. I can call them to answer these questions right Around revenue recognition and these other kinds of concepts that I had to get up to speed on really quickly, and so I think, really viewing it from that opportunity and not seeing it so much as something else. That's eating at my time, I think is really key and important.

Speaker 2: 21:02

So you're series A funded and you've raised 9.6 million bucks and you are not a technical founder you might be now.

Speaker 3: 21:11

Yeah, so we. I know Pitchbook and Crunchbase have certain things in there, but we raised 10.5 million so far today 10.5 million dollars.

Speaker 2: 21:21

congratulations. You don't want to undersell that. That 900,000 is going to go a long way. So tell me and I do seriously, genuinely mean congratulations. I've sat in pitches, I've sat in a number of conversations as a VC, where you're confronted with someone who may have subject matter expertise, may have a lot of passion and is not a technical founder, and you think to yourself, okay, they've got a lot of energy, they've got a lot of smarts, but eventually someone's got a code. How was it? Was it challenging for you? Or I guess you don't know anything else, because you raise is who. You are right, but what was the experience of raising in the environment that you were raising in for this company and not being a technical founder? Did you follow the old sales adage of if you can't fix it, feature it? Or what did you do?

Speaker 3: 22:17

Well, you know, I've always been very open to how do we get advice from experts, and so, you know, I want to say maybe our first year or so when we were doing the MVP, we didn't have someone with a strong technical background. We did some mistakes that a lot of other founders make where we had kind of an outside dev firm that we were working with. But we very quickly started to get that expertise on our team around the product and in TAC. And so, you know, we were very, very fortunate to have folks that have deep expertise around product and TAC and engineering to join our team so that we could build out that internal team.

Speaker 3: 22:58

Now, you know, obviously there's a lot of challenges to black and female entrepreneurs when it comes to raising. The statistics are poor. I'm always forward for them to get better, but what we've seen with the downturn in the economy around VCs is that we've seen that downturn really affect the disparities even greater when it comes to black and female founded companies. So, you know, one of the things that we have tried to do is, obviously our company is really focused on how do we close gaps, how do we ensure that kind of same disparities that we know exist within corporate America and being aware of how do we may need to change our approach and how we may deal with our fundraising process, knowing the disparities that exist within the VC ecosystem. So because of this, we would really think and did a lot of research around some of the research around how VCs are more likely to ask male entrepreneurs promotion-oriented questions.

Speaker 3: 24:10

So those are questions that focus on hopes, achievements, advancements, ideals, why women entrepreneurs are more likely to receive prevention-oriented questions. Those are focused on safety, responsibility, security, vigilance, and so when you think about it, you know a promotion question is going to be get a promotion answer and a prevention question be gets a prevention answer. And so we really prepared ourselves and tried to practice on okay, how do we spin the questions? We may be asked to address the question, because you always want to address the questions as asked, but then also be able to talk around the opportunities that exist within our organization and with our company, and because we've seen the entire conversation talking about risk, you're gonna have a much different feeling at the end of the meeting than if you really talk about the true market opportunity. So we knew that and really ensured that we prepared for that.

Speaker 2: 25:03

That is a brilliant analysis. I'm talking to Mandy Price, ceo at Canaries. In 30 seconds, tell us what's next for the company. What's next for you?

Speaker 3: 25:14

Um, so you know we are trying to ensure that we really support our clients as we see some of the shifts that we're seeing around diversity, equity, inclusion. What we know is that we've seen DI become more politicized, unfortunately, we know it's it's not a political issue, it's a it's a human issue, and, again, we try to make sure that workplaces are presenting equal opportunities for all employees. But we've tried to lean into the challenges that we know that chief diversity officers or organizations may be having, and so we've formed some collaborations with some law firm partners and some communication partners to really help provide critical resources and guidance as organizations start to navigate the implications in the workplace. And so that's really what we're focused on is to how do we provide not only our data driven insights but, with these partnerships, ensuring organizations have the legal proficiency and the strategic communications that they need to move their DIB initiatives forward.

Speaker 2: 26:22

Love it. Mandy, it is always a pleasure to talk to you. I know you're a busy woman and you're out there carrying the torch for a really important issue and you've had great success with your company. I wish you continued success in the future and I hope to see you again soon.

Speaker 3: 26:37

Well, thank you so much, Elman.

Speaker 2: 26:39

Thanks, Mandy.