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Anthony Rose: So Hello, everyone. I’m Anthony founder at seed legals. And I talked to amazing people, and somebody introduced me to Shauna, and we had a chat, and I thought, we’ve just got to get on a webinar together. So Shauna is one of the founding members at headspace. Everyone knows about headspace. It had millions, and I think has millions of users.

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Anthony Rose: Mindfulness app. It expanded, it moved to the Us. It grew, it went through growing pains, and to get the warts and all on how to grow. Your company expand to the Us. Raise millions and build a product that zillions of people love

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Anthony Rose: over to the amazing Shauna. Now, normally on a webinar, I have to do all the hard work, but in this case I’m just going to sit back because Shauna’s got a great story to tell.

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Anthony Rose: So we’re going to divide this broadly into 3 parts. Number one is the founding journey from concept to 1 million users. Number 2, cross-continental selling

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Anthony Rose: from London to Silicon Beach, Silicon Valley and Number 3 is all about building a mindful organization during hyper growth. So the goal of this session is that you’re going to get the complete brain dump of the things to help you grow your company faster and learn from someone truly inspirational. So without further ado, Shauna, over to you.

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shona beats: That’s very kind. Introduction, Anthony, I mean. By all means, Anthony, keep me on track, though time wise and genuinely, to Anthony’s question previously, if anybody has any questions or anything they would love to know, please do drop it in the chat, because.

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shona beats: truth be told, I could tell a hundred 1 million stories, probably about what happened at headspace, and I could wax lyrical about all of them all day long. So far more productive and effective, and return on investment for your time if you let me know where you want me to go. So, Anthony, if I give you the job of

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shona beats: checking the chat, and just nudge me as you want to nudge me. But yeah, so I suppose to start off the founding journey. You know, I think what’s important to say about this particular founding journey and the headspace one is, it was really born from

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shona beats: a very deep sort of realization in the 2 co-founders, and that actually amplified out into the 1st few employees. So both Andy and rich, the 2 co-founders had had their own profound experience of meditation.

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shona beats: and what happened was. Andy was a Buddhist monk for 10 years, and he came back to London, and he started sort of teaching as a layperson, which essentially means you’re not wearing your Buddhist robes, which are quite probably off putting for a lot of people. And I think you know this is a very key point about headspace generally, you know, I think Andy realized that when he was in his Buddhist robes, trying to speak to say a London exec or you know, a London politician, or a football or a sportsperson.

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shona beats: It was harder to connect, and there was a lot of preconceptions about what it meant for him to be wearing what he was wearing. And so his decision was to remove that, and I guess in essence that was almost the birth of headspace, because that was like starting to rebrand something starting to make it accessible, starting to make it more mainstream and kind of acceptable to a mainstream audience.

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shona beats: So Andy was teaching one on one in a clinic meditation, and that’s where he met Rich, and at that point they decided to do a skill swap.

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shona beats: which I think, for everybody going through the startup journey in those early days where there are no pennies or pounds or dollars.

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shona beats: you know, being very hustly about how you start to build the things that you need is the way forward. And so this skill swap was brilliant. So Andy would teach Rich, who had been in advertising and advertising for many years, and himself burnt out, was teaching him how to meditate. And then, in turn, he was teaching Andy everything he knew about. You know the inside out of advertising.

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shona beats: So I suppose this whole idea of

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shona beats: you know your sort of you know your Mvp. Was born in that moment. So Andy was kind of practicing how to teach getting the language right, you know, seeing what resonated with rich as he sort of in a way, target, perfect user persona, and that then went from one to one to one to many. So they then expanded out into doing events. And that’s when I came on board.

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shona beats: I myself had burnt out in the agency world of events royally. I had chronic anxiety, and, you know, went to the doctors.

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shona beats: told them I was having a heart attack, and they just needed to sort me out. And they said, You’ve got anxiety, which, as a

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shona beats: Oxford grad, you know, go getter, you know, running around the world doing amazing events with big blue Chip corporations. I was like, that’s not. I don’t worry. I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t. I don’t. I don’t worry, so I don’t have anxiety.

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shona beats: But I did, and it was so bad I could barely leave the house, so I found a book about meditation, and I had started meditating.

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shona beats: So when I came across headspace in a magazine

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shona beats: which looked beautiful, they had this amazing brand, and I thought, Oh, God! There was me thinking of, maybe, how to bring meditation to the world, having had a very personal experience, they were doing it. So I joined them, really with a view at that stage to turn headspace into an Events company.

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shona beats: So the one to one went to one to many, but at that time, when we did do events and they were very successful, we were getting feedback. We knew that the Content was landing with people. We knew that the way that the Content came across was landing with people. And I think this is a key point, and I work with multiple founders. Now I’m a coach and a mentor, and quite often people come to me, and they say they’re going to build an app.

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shona beats: and I always remove that from the table. And I start about what impact do they want to have on people? Because at the time we did headspace, the app became the right

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shona beats: tool through which to communicate it allowed people to meditate wherever they were

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shona beats: whenever they wanted. There were certain features in the app which were really helpful for us, and so the app was the right solution for headspace at that time.

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shona beats: It was also around the time that subscription companies started to pop up, and there was this sort of monthly charge for ongoing content.

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shona beats: and there was a world of sort of health and happiness that we knew that we could bring

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shona beats: to people all around the world like the vision, was to improve the health and happiness of the world, the mission to create the most comprehensive guide to health and happiness. So we just knew that it would become this sort of ever growing library, of how to make people well.

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shona beats: So the decision to move to the app was slightly radical is 2011.

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shona beats: I don’t think Andy Puddicombe had ever really used apps. He’d been in the monastery for 10 years, and none of us had ever been part of technology, and we built the 1st version on the back of a very

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shona beats: not the right fit content management system. But with, you know, God, was it 50, grand or something wild? It was nothing like really elbowed it to do what we needed it to do. This is years ago.

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shona beats: and it works. But I suppose the point being is that we knew it was going to work because we’d already tested the content. We already knew the right language to resonate with people we’d sort of done all of that work to

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shona beats: to test it. So the in a way. We were also, I suppose, at one, you know, on the one level, testing the product.

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shona beats: But we were also testing the marketing.

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shona beats: because obviously the the one of the largest challenges we had was to make people feel comfortable.

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shona beats: to meditate which back then was really woo, woo!

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shona beats: And bearing in mind, we’re in the Uk you know, over in California. It was less woo woo, but still actually woo woo in the, you know, and I’m saying, Woo! Woo, you know as if that’s a derogatory term. I’m using it because I think you’ll understand what I mean when I say that to a lot of people that’s how they thought of it.

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shona beats: But we were testing lines all the time.

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shona beats: you know, in the events, we’re testing lines, you know, a gym membership for your mind more calm and clarity meditation for the masses. We were always testing lines in the content that we’re creating. So by the time we actually came around to really expanding our marketing efforts. We already knew the language that was cut through.

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shona beats: and how it would land with. You know, those people that we were trying to communicate with

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shona beats: I guess the final thing to say on the getting to the 1 million users. Obviously the app was very helpful. It then became accessible at the click of a button, which is amazing, and people could use it there and then.

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shona beats: But one of the biggest tools that we used in the 1st instance was storytelling.

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shona beats: So through storytelling we brought the idea of meditation to people that would

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shona beats: quite often have never, ever considered it before.

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shona beats: and there was storytelling through press, but there was also storytelling through partnerships.

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shona beats: So we knew that if we could partner with brilliant brands, so twinings, tea, Virgin, Atlantic, Selfridges Western Hotel Group

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shona beats: that you know, with that brand sort of partnering with us. It brought something to this idea of meditation that automatically made it go mainstream. And actually I found this, and I thought it would be quite cute to show you I was sort of looking through my things, and this came up. So I mean, this is a booklet that we created for onboarding people. But I was going to read this out because I think this is really powerful underbelly of really what headspace was all about.

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shona beats: Media is about awareness, education, and permission. Media outlets can speak to consumers in a way that we never could ourselves.

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shona beats: If this awareness gives people permission to try any kind of mindfulness that’s great

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shona beats: if it gives them the confidence to choose headspace best of all.

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shona beats: So I think you can tell from that tone that really our mission was to demystify meditation, not to sell headspace.

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shona beats: And you know, I think that’s quite interesting when anybody is growing and scaling their you know their product. It’s how are you building a relationship with people of trust? And for us the requirement of trust was very, very deep because of what people we were asking people to do. And then the the experience that people would go through

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shona beats: yeah, and those partnerships really worked. The press really worked we? So it’s now like many years on when I’m in conversations with startups. And it’s all about Ltv, and it’s all about Cac. I kind of giggle a bit inside because we didn’t talk about that stuff for the 1st couple of years. It was, you know, are we getting in psychology’s Magazine? Is the BBC. Doing a documentary about us? And it just goes to show how how different.

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shona beats: how different the channels of marketing are nowadays, and how we can get people’s awareness. But yeah, we were pretty old school to start with. Partnerships, press, and a ton of word of mouth.

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Anthony Rose: All right. Well, thank you, Shauna. So I’ve been collecting a few notes, been talking a few things I’d like to dive into. So the 1st one is for any company. I think there are 3 roles you need amongst the founding team, which is the domain expert, the hustler, you know, Doctor Dialysis machine. In this case, you know, monk, or whatever

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Anthony Rose: the second one is, the person who’s going to help deliver it, which often maps to the CTO. And the 3rd personality is the one that’s going to make it a vibrant business that’s going to make money that can raise investment, which often maps to a Coo or Cfo. And clearly, in this case

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Anthony Rose: you had a person who was off the grid literally for 10 years. I’m just trying to picture the founder in a Vc. Meeting, pitching up as a Buddhist monk going. I’m raising 10 million, offering you liquidation, preference shares and the investor going. Wow! This is a strange life I lead, but clearly you were the person brought on board

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Anthony Rose: to make it a proper business. So let’s dive into what you see, and the feedback and help for founders, as how they might map themselves into one of these roles and complement themselves, because the business presumably would have gone nowhere had there been somebody who was laser focused on turning it into a proper, you know, growing business.

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shona beats: No, I think it’s a really fair point. And you know, I think hands down

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shona beats: multiple, often conflicting types of people are required to build out a company of substance and structure. So, yeah, absolutely, you know, just a funny story. So obviously, Andy was the content through and through like, in a way, he was the product because the product was content. The product was teachings. The product was philosophy.

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shona beats: You know, the app itself wasn’t really the product. It was the house within which everything came through, you know, Rich was just just the most extraordinary entrepreneur.

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shona beats: and you know, with all of those entrepreneurial qualities which a lot of founders have, which is just die hard hustle can sell eyes to Eskimos. So creative, I mean, the ideas were thick and fast from rich, almost too thick and fast, and I think that’s where where I then came in. And you know we often talked about ourselves as Bart and Lisa, you know, like Rich was sort of Bart Simpson and Lisa Simpson, which you know, is both the most wonderful combination and quite difficult, because you’re such different characters.

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shona beats: Yeah, I mean, definitely early on, you know, I remember rich saying to me in a London street, he was like, We have all these big ideas like they are not stopping. And we have this audacious goal.

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shona beats: Can you just help us make it happen? The can you just make it help us make it happen

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shona beats: is really, I would say, born from really excellent project management skills like. Ultimately.

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shona beats: if you think about it, the very early stages is you go right departments. Legal finance. Hr. Sales, you know, whatever you’ve got customer service, and you start, you start spinning plates like across the board, and I often say with founders that I work with, even if you are a team of one, understand that you are all departments, because the reality is is when headspace grew.

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shona beats: All that happened was that these sort of we actually had a circle organogram. So it was a kind of circle in the middle and circles round, because we didn’t really particularly love the hierarchy idea. But the point is, all these circles would sort of grow at certain times, but in defining them early on.

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shona beats: you know you knew what was coming next, and you knew who to hire, and if you’re hiring too heavy over here in content, and you’re not hiring at all over here in marketing you are off balance. So the whole thing was about balance. And then there’s all of the people stuff as well, you know, I think that piece of the puzzle when you’re early on is a big deal. You have to keep team members happy, empowered.

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shona beats: almost stretching them very, very quickly and fast, because if you move quickly they have to move quickly with you, and there’s an art to that.

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Anthony Rose: Okay, so thank you for that. So a couple of things. Firstly, the reining in and focusing ideas. So

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Anthony Rose: sometimes I see founders who are again, you know, domain experts, doctor, whatever. But the problem they’ve got is interfacing. What’s in their mind. Save the planet with the tech team and go dude. Give me some stuff to work on in the next sprint. And there’s just this complete mismatch between the way things are described. And I’m guessing that’s where you played a major part, which is to say, great. Thank you for these 58 ideas.

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Anthony Rose: We’ve got 4 developers, and so we can do 3 of them right now let’s choose the most important ones, and then let’s frame it in a way where, if you tell developers, the world needs to be more mindful. That’s not helping them what to do in the next sprint. So how do you overcome that.

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shona beats: Well, I think anybody in business knows that.

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shona beats: especially when you start working with engineers, designers, actually, anybody that I can think of quite often to do their best work. They have to be heads down.

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shona beats: If you keep distracting somebody and keep even interrupting their day. You’re not going to get the best work. And so I feel like my role was twofold.

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shona beats: You almost have to protect the team from distraction like you really like, because, you know you you we used Okrs quite loosely in the early days we had a camband start with, and we moved to Okrs.

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shona beats: but you have to protect their time, you have to protect their integrity, to be able to do their best work, that being said, not at the expense of innovation

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shona beats: opportunities, and sometimes you have to move fast and break things. I hate the phrase to be honest, but you know that sort of sentiment that comes with it.

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shona beats: So I sort of saw my role as twofold. One is making sure that this team were growing. They were happy, they were well, they were resilient, they were inspired doing, you know, and that required some space and some focus and not disrupting them too much

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shona beats: equally. It’s sort of working with the co-founders to make sure that we are not dropping opportunities, you know. I remember sort of I remember when Selfridges came in, it was like, who’s going to work on it. There wasn’t any spare capacity.

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shona beats: So you have to do a very quick rejuggling. But you know you do it on both.

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shona beats: So that’s okay.

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shona beats: Toys are with them.

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Anthony Rose: So it’s to leverage the capabilities of the founders and keep them at the right distance from the team, and then create that abstraction layer so that they send all the crazy ideas to you and you presenting a slow and steady stream of

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Anthony Rose: filtered things. So the team don’t go crazy. Okay. So the next thing I want to dive into, which is a very common thing with startup founders is they have built a person product. So it might be somebody who helps doing pitch decks or somebody do tax planning or something, and then they want to turn that into a platform. And in this case

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Anthony Rose: it was somebody creating content. It could be a book. But now there’s a product and a platform. And so a big question is, if you’ve been providing a service as a person. We’re going to help you do this. Can you turn that into a platform? Will people pay for it as a platform? And that’s obviously this scaling, enticing factor. But there might be a fundamental mismatch that

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Anthony Rose: nobody people wanted you. They didn’t want just the content. So how did you get past that and know that there was something, and then take the best content and productize it.

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shona beats: Hmm!

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shona beats: Really good question.

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shona beats: I so I wonder whether you know I don’t know this for fact. But if I look back, I wonder whether some of our ability to do that came from the industries

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shona beats: from which we had come.

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shona beats: I’d come from an industry which was, you know, huge live events where you are creating an immersive experience. So it’s the eyes, the ears, everything and obviously same. For you know, rich in advertising, it is a very immersive experience through one advert you are looking to completely transform somebody’s

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shona beats: feeling about something, and obviously same for Andy, like very embodied and a lot of the team that came on board were creatives. They were from sort of creative industries, actually, rather than tech, because obviously we didn’t even know it was going to be a tech company to start with.

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shona beats: And I think that I mean, I think that there is something that happens in the live events. And we did actually always keep those going.

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shona beats: I guess the point is is that I never really considered headspace to be you know, it became a tech company, and it was sort of obviously seen as a tech company. But it was an experiential company ultimately.

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shona beats: and you know, when we started getting into developing the app, which was literally drawn on bits of paper that was about as good as the ux got in the early stages.

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shona beats: It was about building a relationship with somebody, and you know I’ll give you an example

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shona beats: when you meet somebody for the 1st time. You don’t tell them your whole life story. You’ll give them a bit, and then you’ll wait, and you’ll hear back from them. And then you might say, Do you want to come and sit and have a coffee, and you can have a coffee, but there’s a nuance to it, and there’s a sort of a tactileness to it. Ultimately. Now, obviously.

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shona beats: you might not think this is tactile, but if you look at what headspace did with its branding, if you look at what it did with this animation, if you actually look at the flow of the app.

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shona beats: Most of the consideration was sort of around the doors that you were walking through.

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shona beats: you know, rather than kind of like, here’s the ux and the functionality. It was less functionality, and it was more flow. And I think that if you approach a product in that way. Then, yeah, for sure, you can replicate some of the similarities of what it’s like to engage with a human. But I think you’ve got it’s an art rather than a science. And I think it totally depends on who you’re trying to replicate how you’re trying to replicate them. Yeah.

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Anthony Rose: Okay. So my reading of what you’ve said, there is in many cases when you’re designing a product, maybe at seed legals, we’re thinking, okay, you need a settings page, and you need a documents page, and you need a funding page. So you start mapping out all this

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Anthony Rose: architecture, whereas in your case, you’re saying, actually, I’ve got this great content that I want to get in front of somebody. What is the you start with the content and then work out the path to get there, which might help you get much more of a content focused app. Okay? So we’re going to switch gears

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Anthony Rose: team are in London. Everyone’s settled. And now somebody has the bright idea of moving the company and people to the Us. So this is something that used to be insanely expensive and complex at seed legals. We’re looking to productize the Delaware flip.

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Anthony Rose: So I’d love to understand why you did this. What worked what didn’t, and in the next few minutes you’re going to cover the strategic decision. Why the logistics, the cultural adjustments, access to capital and talent acquisition. And I know from being in New York right now. That cost of talent in the Us. Is like 2 or 3 times what it is in London. So something to bear in mind

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Anthony Rose: over to you.

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shona beats: Absolutely okay. Well, it’s a bit of a running joke that when people ask me why

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shona beats: there was a move to California, I say, because the 2 co-founders love to surf.

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shona beats: but that is not entirely untrue.

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shona beats: And, in fact, when I, you know, Rich and Andy, did their 1st trip to the States a. Recce. I suppose it did genuinely involve a trip down the the West Coast to see the best places for surfing beaches.

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shona beats: but I

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shona beats: you know, that might sort of to an extent sounds unimportant. But I actually do think there’s some importance to that, and I think that when you take on the monumental task of growing and scaling. You know, a dream or a passion or a vision. Lifestyle is really important. You know that balance of well-being and work is really really important. So I think, you know, to some level, I sort of joke about it. But I think at another level

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shona beats: actually arguably vital, you know, rich and Andy needed to feel great in doing everything that they were having to do. But obviously that aside, you know, strategically, the Us. Was much further ahead with their acceptance of meditation, their understanding of meditation.

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shona beats: You know, much larger market at that point, you know. This is, you know, sort of 14 odd years ago. Investment was much, much bigger there for these types of companies, I think, you know, had you gone to a classic Vc. In London 15 years ago, and talked, said meditation. They would have laughed you out the room. So I think that there was a real understanding from Rich and Andy, that that was their place.

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shona beats: the move itself, you know. I mean again, it’s layers. And I think, you know, coming back to the classic project management, it’s just a really, really, really solid task of decent project management top to bottom. And you’ve got the the sort of nuts and bolts the tax planning the legal side of things. Where are you going to be? What do you need to register the whole Delaware piece? You know. What does that mean for your investment. There’s all of that.

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shona beats: And then there’s humans.

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shona beats: And you know, it’s an interesting one, because you’ve sort of built and stabilized this organization. And I think we were sort of 2030 people at this point in the Uk. And if you think about it, particularly in the early stages, it’s lots of camaraderie. It’s lots of everybody pulling together. You’ve gone through emotional like stages of this of this thing, and then you do a transplant.

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shona beats: and we took some team members to the Us. And some team members. You know, when we were looking at how the how the company would scale, we realized it probably wasn’t right to take everybody over. So

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shona beats: there was an emotional process. There, you know. I’m not going to lie like I think if you are a good, purposeful leader. You understand that there will be feelings that come up around this, both for the people that are going, both for the people that are staying also for the people that you’re bringing on board. So I would say, you know, I personally definitely part of a big part of my job was really

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shona beats: not managing those feelings, but like understanding them and working with them to get to where we needed to get to

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shona beats: So it was interesting. So we landed over in the Uk, and there was a sort of gradual move of various different people at various different times, and I was almost the last to go, so I think it was around. October 2014, I went, and by this point Rich and Andy were there, and a number of the other team members were there definitely. There was, you know, 2 things, I think, jumped out to me straight away. Culturally.

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shona beats: I think one, whereas headspace was quite like unique and a bit Shoreditch. And if for anybody that knows London, it’s quite a sort of quirky, creative place in London, you know. It was quite a little touch radical, quite new. In London.

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shona beats: you know, in California, everybody knows meditation, and so, in a weird way, the brand like took a little bit of growing up when it when it hit California, because people talked about meditation in a different way. And so we were looking to retain our brand, which was London born, truth be told, and Andy is, you know, very British, and born in Bristol. So that was definitely something that we worked through

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shona beats: even little things like language, you know, like multiple times in there was one particular investor that just.

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shona beats: I had no idea that when I was talking and using phrases, and I use a lot of metaphors. He would be like, what was that phrase you said? And I’m like, Oh, I forget, like there’s certain quirky, you know, British phrases that I use. So again, having to really think about how you show up in the room.

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shona beats: But the one thing that hit me very quickly was a stark difference in hiring people, and how they showed up at the interview table. I went from feeling like I was interviewing people to being interviewed.

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shona beats: and I would say, and I love now working with founders in the Uk. To kind of bring a bit of that energy into Uk businesses and Uk startups. It is quite fast, quite furious, very focused, very confident. A lot of the people that I would interview just would come in with such a level of confidence, but it is an entirely different Hr structure in the Us. To the Uk. So there was some navigating of that for us.

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shona beats: you know. Did we do holidays like generally, people didn’t take holidays, but we were a well-being company. So we didn’t want you to burn out. So there’s all these like subtle cultural differences that I would have had no idea about until till I went there. I mean access to capital definitely. You can start physically networking. Bearing in mind.

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shona beats: This is Pre covid, and like digital working was not as much of a thing as it is now. So I do actually think that the playing field has changed. Now I think so much can be done remotely, whereas it really wasn’t the case back then.

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shona beats: But yeah, you know, we started to get Jared Leto in the building, and Jessica Alba in the building, and they became investors in headspace. And so obviously they were there. And I remember the I remember Rich and Andy going to some event, Leonardo Dicaprio’s house, and all of a sudden you’re sort of engaging with a completely different community.

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shona beats: Yeah. So I think you know that that being said, I, hands down, would say that there were headspace superstars from the Us. From the Uk. And beyond, you know the company’s now grown beyond.

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shona beats: so yeah, great people everywhere. It’s just trying to trying to find the right fit for you.

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Anthony Rose: All right. Well, thank you. So a couple of quick observations. So you know a key one. When you know, building a team in the Us. And taking Uk team members along or going to be one. Can you get a visa to work in the Uk in the Us. And Number 2. It’s going to be spouses, right? So you might have somebody going. Yes, I’d love to be there, but their, you know, husband or wife works at a bank, and it’s just not movable, and so on. So, regardless of whether you want to be there. Logistically, it may or may not be possible.

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Anthony Rose: Number 2.

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Anthony Rose: You mentioned the different Us sort of energy levels, and it is said that one of the 1st roles that people hire when it’s a Uk company looking to expand in the Us. Is a head of marketing, and it turns out a while later you learn, the only thing they can market is themselves.

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Anthony Rose: because what happens is, you meet this Us. Person, and everything’s awesome, and you’re used to the more modest British. Yes, it’s quite good. So you think this person is amazing. But actually, after you talk to lots of us people, you realize it’s just the norm.

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Anthony Rose: So you know, as we see legals now in the Us. We also need to dial things up to match. So if people go, how’s business? And you go? Yeah, it’s pretty good in London. That means it’s pretty good in New York. That means, oh, my God, you’re like you’re dead next week it has to be awesome. So you have to modify things accordingly. And likewise

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Anthony Rose: one of the things. When I see pictures in London to Vcs, you basically talk about the problem that you’re solving. And then there’s the team bit at the end. By the way, I’ve done this before, and so on, whereas the Us. Like 2 thirds, the entire pitch is going to be. How the person was a leading engineer at Facebook or Google, and they were at Harvard or Mit, and there’s a whole bigging up of

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Anthony Rose: the personal credentials. And as a Brit in New York you can feel slightly

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Anthony Rose: insecure about the whole thing, so you need to dial it up a bit. But still keep your own personality. And then you realize people just start treating you as

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Anthony Rose: the Brit in the Us. Do you have any thoughts on how you dealt with those cultural differences? Did you suddenly go dial it up to 11 American, or did you stay very grounded and more modest.

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shona beats: I would have to ask other people to be to tell me what I did. I I would say we stayed pretty much the same

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shona beats: and in a way again, you know, just to go back to this, I think this was quite. These were things like this were very important for us when we moved, and I think

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shona beats: what I would say is, we went into detail about the backstory of headspace, and we knew in a way that the brand, and because it was really born from Andy’s practice, had to stay humble like it had to always remain an invitation to practice rather than get meditation 20% off, like it’s going to change your life like.

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shona beats: in a way, like a lot of the marketing. The Us. Marketing wanted to go that way. But that is not how you know. Given the lineage of the practice, that’s just not how.

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shona beats: So, in a way, I suppose we had an anchor that we were almost like with integrity staying true to?

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shona beats: I don’t know. Would it have been twice as big if we’d gone down the other road. Who knows but I personally, I totally hear you with the hiring piece, and everyone’s brilliant, and everyone can really really sell a story. So I would say, you know, bearing in mind, I’m meditating a lot right now. I’m doing an hour and a half a day, and didn’t take a break for 6 years.

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shona beats: But I think intuition was enormous. I would say, when people walked in

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shona beats: bit like speed, dating, I knew, like in a hot second, whether they were gonna they were going to come into the team. And so, in a way, I think I was predominantly making my decisions on intuition and then obviously, really pressure, testing their experience and really pressure testing how they could show up.

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shona beats: But to your point, if you just go on, you almost have to kind of go beyond the Cv a little bit, or the resume. And yeah, and and really sort of go, am I really feeling this person? Are they a good culture fit.

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shona beats: Yes, I think that’s a really important piece of the puzzle.

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Anthony Rose: Okay, the culture fit is really important, you know. Sometimes people hire just on skills and sometimes on culture. And you have to figure out where on that spectrum is going to be the sweet spot at seed legals. I insist on doing the final interview with everyone actually on the interview. I say you are. This is much for you to ask me questions as me to ask you questions, and the person the questions the person asked me are actually

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Anthony Rose: a leading indicator for me on how they’re thinking is. So if you’re watching this and you’re interviewing at sea legals, you’ve got your top tip right there. All right. Now, we’re going to switch gears into nothing specific about the Us. But this is about a hyper growth company. So

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Anthony Rose: a problem that founders are going to discover when their companies take off, are a range of things. So initially, your company is all about performance. Sorry about purpose, and then, as it grows it switches to performance. So initially, it’s the cult of the founders. You’re focused on a problem. But later on you’ve got teams, as you explained, and the okrs and kpis, and you know, sales targets to reach, and some of the initial joiners

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Anthony Rose: who joined for the purpose now feel alienated, and some of the initial joiners who had access and facetime with the founders. Now, when there’s a team of 200, they no longer have, or even a team of 30. So let’s go through how you help steer.

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Anthony Rose: and how the company adapted in this hyper growth phase, because if any founder is lucky enough to be in this problem space

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Anthony Rose: it can severely test because you have no playbook for us, right? As a founder. You’re probably really good at maths or making electronics or whatever it is. And suddenly you find yourself with this giant team and things. Are you surfing, or are you drowning? And with that, as the backdrop to part 3 over to you.

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shona beats: Yes, the you know. I think that I always

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shona beats: yeah. I think one of the

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shona beats: one of the hardest things, I suppose when you’re scaling that quickly is by the time you’ve come up with a plan to fix something, or perhaps a new process. It’s almost outdated.

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shona beats: So you have to get very used to working with a knowledge that nothing will ever be finished.

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shona beats: And you know, I like, you know, I get a real sense of satisfaction. When it’s like amazing. We’ve changed the process and it’s good to go. Oh, okay, it’s broken, because now there is a new hire, or there’s a new suggestion. And and so I guess there’s a couple of bits to to mention there.

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shona beats: Actually, I’ll mention this one because I do think this is important in this day and age, and it’s a little bit different to when we were scaling headspace.

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shona beats: What I find nowadays, when I’m working with a lot of founders is, they are listening to every podcast

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shona beats: they are following multiple founders. They are gobbling up every blog, a new strategy or new way of thinking or new way to approach sales or new way to increase your conversion metrics or new ways to do things. And it comes so thick and far. I actually, I’m not on Linkedin. But I’m off social media because it’s an overwhelm of information. It’s an overwhelm of points of view that you get.

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shona beats: And I think there’s something really important about knowing ultimately yourself, like, what is the right thing to do, and almost slightly slowing down on some of these strategies and different ways to do it, because I actually think business is relatively simple.

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shona beats: you know, to an extent relatively simple. Understand your customer, know what makes them happy, give it to them effortlessly and easily, and give it to them a great price, and make sure your customer service is stellar, you know. So for all the strategies in the world like, ultimately, I think that’s where you need to start. So

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shona beats: I suppose that you constantly have to be looking at every part of the organization and evolving it like what needs to evolve in customer service today because it needs to catch up with how quick product is moving. Right? We’ve now expanded, and we’ve got 10 people in product, whereas we used to have 2.

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shona beats: How do they operate together? How do they communicate together? And so I guess. Really, a large part of my role was relentlessly sort of going through the organization and just ensuring it was, well, you know, like a well oiled car. You have to go in and sort of work it out.

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shona beats: How you do that evolution is

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shona beats: again, you know. 9 times 19 times out of 10. It’s about people I mean, that may change in the near future.

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shona beats: I’ll leave that there. But back in our day it was people, and a lot of it. Most people are super smart, and they can usually do whatever you want them to do. It’s getting them to want to.

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shona beats: So when you’re bringing in a new process. Or you’re landing okrs on people, and you’re asking them to get involved. You have to pitch.

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shona beats: but you have to pitch. You have to persuade you have to support if they don’t understand, and that takes a bit of time. And that takes a bit of effort. Now, obviously, in the early stages. It’s a lot of one on ones that is unsustainable. As you, said, Anthony. So as you go forward you have to kind of grow. How you do that, and then also trickle it down. So you then have to empower amazing leaders on your behalf to move forward and do do all of that work for you. I think the one thing we did at Headspace, which was.

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shona beats: you know we did without fail from the beginning, you know. Well, all the way through. I was there, and I’m 100% sure they’re still doing them is quarterly team.

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shona beats: get togethers, and we would put serious time and effort into shaping that deck. So you know, for each one of those moments we would we would spend time on that deck. It was never rushed.

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shona beats: It was always really well considered. We pored over it as a management team, because, in a way.

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shona beats: you know, when you’re pulling people together physically, probably even more so now, when people have remote workforces, that is your one moment to really bond your team together with what you are, whatever it is that you’re sharing whether you’re launching a new process, or you’re trying to fire them up for a new stage of the company, or you know you’ve brought on new investors, and you want people to be really on board with that remove their fear.

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shona beats: And you have to be creative, you know. Do people need to be able to vent how they’re feeling right now, right? We’re going to have an open house and people can share. Do they want to do that anonymously? So let’s make a process for them to do that anonymously

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shona beats: again, you know. I wish I could say there was a 1. Size fits all, but there just is not. And I think you have to really find your way through it. But

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shona beats: yeah, I think culturally as well. I mean as I say, I keep showing this. But things like this were important. I mean, you can see this is quite a long, you know, deep booklet about the history of headspace. What we mean when we’re talking about each value. There was lots of depth to anything based on our culture, our brand, how we speak, how we show up in the world.

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shona beats: and we really just made sure that every single person was immersed in that from the moment they started interviewing with us to the offboarding interview, you know. There was still a headspace tone to our offboarding interview, so we knew then that people were leaving out into the world.

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shona beats: you know, with the right view of the brand.

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Anthony Rose: All right. Well, thank you for that. So one of the key things that jumps out from your talking there was about at least within the founding team. Some of the founding team were super fixated on team happiness, culture, and so on.

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Anthony Rose: That may not always be the case in the case of headspace. It was all about mindfulness, so one might expect that’s the case, but it could get lost in the growth of the company. But in many cases founders. And this is the important point I’m looking to make here.

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Anthony Rose: Founders may not be people, people. They might be mathematicians, statisticians, engineers, and they would much prefer to listen to music and do emails late at night by themselves. And all team things are transactional. Here’s a Github ticket. Here’s slack. So if it’s not you as the founder, how do you surround yourself with team members? Can you outsource this to like a head of talent? Or Hr.

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Anthony Rose: How do you create that culture that everyone cares? And is there to support each other?

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shona beats: Well, I think there’s, I think, a couple of parts to that question. One. I think it depends what company you are and who you’re hiring.

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shona beats: My 1st question to anyone that was ever, you know within my leadership was, How do you want to be managed?

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shona beats: And I think there’s 2 ways of approaching management. One is, it’s my way, or the highway enjoy

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shona beats: which works, you know, with seeing that in many ways the other is.

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shona beats: how can I get the best out of you?

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shona beats: Because I can’t change you like I mean, maybe over time, but unlikely. And you know, within sort of like 6 months or a year. So I have a choice, you know, to me that’s a data point of excellence. You know. They have told me what motivates them. How they like to receive feedback. I’ll give you an example. You know I had people in my team who I knew

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shona beats: would want to sort of get their issues out at me. So I’d like fine. I’ll give you kind of like 10 min to do that. Now let’s move forward and work a solution. I had another team member that was like, basically just verbally beat me up like, I just want you to be like, get this done. I was like, no problem. I will show up and do that. So I think that

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shona beats: you know there’s a bit of both sides, isn’t there? There’s sort of like, how best do my team want to be managed? And you can ask them. And and then there’s a middle ground, and I think if it’s not your natural tendency. You know I’m probably a very empathic person. I find that very easy. If it’s not your natural tendency, how else might you do that? Maybe you know, maybe it is about creating a deck which is inspiring and getting all your points across and delivering through a deck like quite often. If it’s hard for you to.

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shona beats: you know. Speak directly to people, or a big group of people.

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shona beats: Talk to the deck, you know. Sit down while you’re delivering your inspiring message. And this is sort of coming from my pre headspace event days. I used to work with a lot of yeah boards of directors. And just because the CEO was a phenomenal. CEO doesn’t mean he liked public speaking like 9 times out of 10 they did not. So you you find ways to get comfortable with inspiring your team or using different channels to inspire your team. But yeah, I think there’s something to be said for hiring.

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shona beats: Well, I suppose, if I look back at headspace the mix of our personalities, the mix of our skill sets was very helpful, and I do think, you know, looking back.

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shona beats: and that’s beyond Rich and Andy and myself. That’s the whole team. There was such an extraordinary mix of characters that, you know there was always sort of people we could lean on for the right advice or guidance, or for team members to go to if they needed to.

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Anthony Rose: Okay. So this is all about the art and craft of being a founder in a growing team, and it seems that it was a privilege for the company to have you on board, because this is clearly the combination of understanding and execution, and we’re going to get that back to that in a few minutes, as we talk about when people should talk to you now. So the next one is, there was a question about work-life balance. So you’re in California or in London.

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Anthony Rose: you know. One of the interesting things is in the Uk. 5 weeks of holiday in the Us. Is it? 2 weeks or no weeks or whatever. It is one of the challenges. If you’ve got teams in both places, are your Us. Team getting 2 weeks holiday while your Uk team get 5. Maybe if they’re getting us rates and Uk rates, maybe that comes with it. So.

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Anthony Rose: But let’s talk about work-life balance. Did you run into those issues? Did you have to, you know, mindfully work out how to find the right place, or did it sort of, or some people got completely burnt out, and then left because you didn’t find the happy medium.

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shona beats: So I think from a

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shona beats: the the very early team members so rich and Andy myself.

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shona beats: you know Maria Nick sort of Tom when I when I when, and Helen when I think about some of these names, Louisa.

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shona beats: those team members meditated, and and they because I suppose, really, in the early days of headspace again, meditation wasn’t a big thing, and so we tended to draw people that were really interested in meditation when it got bigger, and it was a tech company, you know, with a great sort of investment opportunity. And you know all of that. It was different. So early days

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shona beats: we all had a pretty solid meditation practice. We meditated in the office, so at least once a day we would take 10. We would just

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shona beats: sit shut our laptops, close our eyes, hit the app and take 10

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shona beats: and I think you know I’m doing a bit of an inadvertent plug of meditation here, but obviously the science and the scale of calm and headspace speak for themselves.

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shona beats: What meditating can provide you is sort of I call it time and space to begin with. But then.

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shona beats: you know, once you do it a bit more regularly, it gives you awareness and perspective, and that awareness and perspective.

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shona beats: it sort of becomes embedded in you. I’ll give you an example.

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shona beats: You’re sat in a meeting. Somebody says something, or they want to go ahead with something, and you wholly disagree. And you know, when you disagree with something like Oh, you know, it can start like for me personally, it starts to get into my body, you can tell, because I start moving, and I do a lot of like adjustments, and if anyone knew me well, they’d be like oh, she disagrees.

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shona beats: But what you can see is you’re like a couple of seconds removed from that like, okay, that’s what I’m feeling. But you’re not in it. If that makes sense. So then I can more objectively be like, right? I’m having these feelings. But are they important? Are they based on something personal? Do they have any relevance here, so I suppose the early team were keeping their well-being

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shona beats: quite well in check, and the other thing I think meditating does is it keeps you present. So I guess with that when I’m at work and when I was at headspace it was intense, but I was present with every meeting I was present with every moment, which also meant, when I got home.

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shona beats: I was home.

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shona beats: and I wasn’t holding all of the chit chat of the day in my mind. Quite so much

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shona beats: so. I definitely recommend meditating if you are a founder.

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Anthony Rose: Super interesting. I think if my team at seed legals who would normally expect a conversation with me about you know, reading the Company’s act. If I said you should take time out to meditate, they’d probably think I’d smoke something and would be seriously concerned. But

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Anthony Rose: you know it’s an important thing, and I guess mileage will vary by company. So let’s talk very quickly. You’ve got a growing company. How do you manage underperformers, toxic personalities, and conflict? Because this is one of the challenges you, you know. Often the founders just focused on products and so on. And then you notice some people underperforming. But you don’t want to terminate or fire them. It’s unpleasant.

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Anthony Rose: Do you sweep it under the carpet? And then, sometime later, you regret it.

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Anthony Rose: What what’s your strategy in in those areas. And what top tips have you got for people watching.

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shona beats: Well, I think

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shona beats: I think there’s a couple of parts to it, and somebody gave me a very good bit of advice once, which I really

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shona beats: holds true and firm to this day, which is, if it is not a yes, it is a no.

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shona beats: So I think when you’re making the hire in the 1st place, and having made hires that were not a hundred. But you know those hires where you’re like, they’re really really good. They’re so good, but and there’s a but that comes up unless you are absolutely desperate, and there are kind of other reasons that you need to make the hire. You probably shouldn’t make the hire, so I would say 9 times out of 10, whenever we have a little bit of an unsure, it usually played out.

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shona beats: The Us is a very different

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shona beats: you know, framework within which to hire people, because obviously, the it’s a bit of a higher fire situation. There is not that being said? That’s not how we operated at headspace. We always gave people excellent packages when, if and when we were moving people forward.

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shona beats: But we did move quickly on that, because you know as much as mindfulness was baked into the company. We were all there for a vision and mission, and and sometimes the reason that people became not the right hires was because the company would shift.

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shona beats: you know. Maybe we would slightly shift focus. You know, we might have gone from B to C to B, 2 BA little bit, or we may. At 1 point we moved away from b 2 b. We realized we were stretched thin and we had to close b 2 b.

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shona beats: and we had to close b 2 b, you know, to get to that vision and mission. We had to make those decisions. So the way that I would approach any of those moments where there was a significant change, or somebody felt like they were underperforming, so much so that we felt that they were not the right fit is, I always use the sort of vision and mission as the touchstone of why decisions were being made. It’s not personal, is the truth.

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shona beats: because everybody is excellent in the right places, doing the right things. So if somebody is in a position, and they’re not excellent and not doing the right things. That’s your responsibility. I would always take everything as my responsibility. So it was never personal, and I would never make it personal. I would almost make it my problem for making not the most perfect hire, or perhaps not supporting them or growing them in the right way.

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shona beats: whether that’s right or wrong, you know, debatable at the time, but I think the tone of that really helps people move on in the right way, and therefore creates less disruption for your day to day, and you’re moving on with the rest of the company.

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Anthony Rose: All right. Well, thank you for that. I think. What’s the interesting point and interesting point has been. If it doesn’t feel yes, then it’s a no, and the challenge is, you know, your team who might be doing the 1st pass, filtering at hiring people get 150 resumes, and it’s so much work, and then they get it down to 5, and at the end of it you desperately want to hire somebody.

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Anthony Rose: but actually saying no is perhaps better than saying Yes, unless it gets to the person who’s going to be a great match for the team. And actually, that’s still why I see legals. I like to do the final interview, and it’s moderately rare that I say no.

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Anthony Rose: but because I know that the team has worked so hard to filter, so many to get to a person to send to me, you know, if I say no, there’s a lot of work that has been wasted. So if I say no, it has to be a mentoring moment for the team as well, and to explain why I said, No, all right. So this has been amazing.

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Anthony Rose: Let’s switch to how should people contact you? What are you doing these days? Who should contact you? And how can you help companies.

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shona beats: So I’m on Linkedin. Jonah Mitchell beats. You can go to my website. shonabeats.com, and I’m a coach executive coach leadership coach startup coach, but I would call it part coach, part mentor. So you know, in the classic world of coaching there’s this idea that you know you don’t give advice. I don’t prescribe to that. I absolutely do both, but I think the reason the coaching part is important is because

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shona beats: at the end of the day. I cannot

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shona beats: make something happen on your behalf.

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shona beats: It is 100% down to you. Your leadership, your team’s follow ship of you, your decision making your resilience, your ability to cut through the noise that is going to make or break your startup. So yeah, so I sort of combine coaching and soundboarding, mentoring advisory. And I work with brilliant founders. I work across

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shona beats: Europe, us. Uk, yeah, and I absolutely love it. It’s profoundly rewarding. And so many cool ideas. I mean, this is what I think is exciting about what I do now is, you know, I was obviously within headspace for so many years in your heads down. And now I work with all sorts of people, doing all sorts of amazing things, a lot of which are looking to improve the health and happiness of the world, I should add. So I think there’s real resonance there with a lot of my clients.

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Anthony Rose: That’s great. Thank you. So if you’re a founder, what are the key indicators that suggest you should reach out to Shauna? When do you know you need help.

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shona beats: I think a founder’s journey is well, particularly for for sole founders, I think quite often. If you have a really positive co-founder relationship, you can, you know, use each other in a way, in a sort of coaching way, depending on your relationship. I think the 2 times that it really shows up is when you are a lone founder, because you have to be holding all together all the time like that is your role. Like you are ultimately the solid rock at the top of the tree, and all of your team is sort of beneath you.

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shona beats: But the reality is, you might not feel like a solid rock every day. But most founders don’t want to tell people that, you know there’s a bit of ego attached to that as well, and so I think when I work with people there’s a real empathy there. I can shoulder with them because I understand what it is, but they can also let off steam, and they can. And I think, in the letting off steam quite often the understanding of right. This is what I should do next. Come back. So it’s sort of a virtuous circle of constant empowerment and sort of constant clearing of whatever it is that is in your way that you need to get clear of.

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shona beats: So I think definitely sole founders, but equally founders that co-founders that perhaps are not gelling with each other. So again, you know, how can you get gelling with each other? If this is starting to shake the foundations of your of your company, because that could make or break.

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Anthony Rose: Right. So, by the way, this is a great founder Chat group called Anonymous Founders, and because everyone’s anonymous, people can say the things they ordinarily wouldn’t say in founder groups.

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Anthony Rose: and someone posted, how many days do you feel like strangling your co-founder? And I think of all the posts had got the most interaction which probably sums up many co-founder relationships. Maybe it’s a bit like a marriage. It works, or it doesn’t work. One of the great things is, if you don’t have the same view.

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Anthony Rose: you’ve got someone to riff off where you can’t do it with your team. You can’t go to your team going business is not what we want. We’re running out of money. I’ve no idea what to do next. Come back. Don’t everyone leave, whereas with your co-founder. That’s exactly the discussion to have on the flip side. If you don’t see eye to eye on agreeing what the next step is, then it can be difficult with that decision making. And I guess you’re going to be playing part

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Anthony Rose: part-time coo, part-time strategy coach and part time psychiatrist. So in your role, all right. Thank you so much for sharing the headspace journey and your journey. I think there was a huge amount of information here that’s going to help all founders, and for anyone who is looking for a bit more, feel free to reach out to Shauna directly. Thank you so much. Everyone hope you enjoy it.

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Shona beats: Hey? Nice to meet you, everyone.

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Anthony Rose: Thank you.