In the 1978 classic tune The Gambler, Kenny Rogers meets a world-weary, card-toting traveller who offers the singer some life advice in exchange for a swig of whiskey and a cigarette:
"If you're gonna play the game, boy / You gotta learn to play it right / You got to know when to hold 'em / Know when to fold 'em / Know when to walk away / And know when to run"
Arguably, those same principles apply to today's generation of company founders. Even if they're more likely to be delivered via a sober Zoom call than a mellifluous country backing beat.
In startup parlance, "knowing when to walk away" from a previously set company direction is broadly known a "pivot".
It's an experience that Tandem co-founder Lauren Humphrey, who spent her career years in tech in America before moving to Australia with her family in February 2021, is intimately acquainted with.
In the latest instalment of MP's Female Founder series, we spoke with Lauren about how she balanced her "gut instinct" that something wasn't working at her feedback company Tandem with the right data points before making any drastic changes.
"I’ve started to realise that whatever I feel in my gut doesn’t have to be right, but it needs to be considered. Knowing we needed to pivot - it felt like something was wrong," she says.
When she’s not working or raising her three kids, Lauren is also a voracious reader. But more on that later. For now, MP readers, meet Lauren Humphrey.
Natasha Gillezeau. Thank you so much for making the time today. So - do you want to tell me how you ended up founding a business? What was the journey to that moment in time?
In every role that I’ve ever had, I’ve loved building things. I’ve felt not just comfortable, but thriving going out and doing something for the first time and creating value out of nothing.
Even when I was just out of college and talentless, I saw this regulation that had come from government, and I said “I think it’s going to be hard for our customers who are doctors to understand this, I’m going to read it and then I want to run a pilot to help them adopt to this so they can get stimulus money from the government." No one asked me to. The regulation was 900 pages, but I kind of took the ball and ran with it, and ended up as a 28-year-old leading the public affairs for a public company.
Working in startups then became a second path to becoming a founder, and I could just never get away from them, because I love the creation side of things.
How did you work out what was going to be the solution or product for Tandem? And how do you define where Tandem sits as a product or service? I’m sure it’s evolved.
Tandem helps companies raise their performance by helping team members connect and regularly give high quality feedback. Three years ago, we started a business called The Mintable. The problem we were solving at the time was ill-equipped people managers.
We ended up getting started by offering a service, the idea being that we’d get really close to managers and their companies and kind of defined the problem and build software. The good news? Our training was awesome, and we sold it to a lot people and companies. The downside was that it was my first time doing product, and the problem was just too broad and not well defined enough to solve it with software.
So in May 2023, we kind of got to a crossroads where we said, gosh, we don’t really want to productise training, we don’t want to enter the fray of training platforms, so we either need to give the money back and go build a service business and solve the problem that way, or we need to better define a problem within this space and put all of our focus, time and attention into software.
We chose that path, so a year ago, we picked the problem of feedback. So basically, the problem is that people don’t give enough regular feedback or get enough regular feedback on the job and we’re essentially hamstringing ourselves as individuals and businesses by only giving people feedback once or twice a year during reviews. When we are training managers, we saw how much they wanted to give feedback, but they struggled. They struggled to remember to do it, they struggled to know how to do it, so it felt like it was a juicy problem with a lot of upside if we can solve it.
Where have you found your customers?
We have customers kind of everywhere - Australia, the US, New Zealand and the US. Of course there are cultural differences when it comes to feedback, but the unifying factors are that they want their team to be high performing, but they realise that the path to do that is not just to set a bunch of metrics and see what happens and get upset if they don’t hit them. They realise if we invest in our people, and their growth, they will perform at a high level.
They’re also around the 100 to 150 employee mark. They’ve reached that inflection point where they need to systematise things like values and expectations and giving and receiving feedback. But I really don’t want to adopt the status quo, which is like okay let’s do reviews once or twice a year and do forced peer feedback.
Awesome. And given your experience with The Mintable and your first time delving into product, how did you get clarity about what to focus on after the pivot?
When we started the pivot, we did kind of like a big Miro board exercise of literally labelling every problem that we’d heard from managers and HR. And then we looked at everything in the industry - people tech is very crowded. So there was a really moment of going - oh my God - does the world need another people tech tool? And we came very close to saying ‘no’. But then we kind of looked at what’s the most urgent, persistent problems that we’re seeing - and are any of those not being solved today?
So you’re doing the Miro board exercise, and you’re like, do we really want to get into people tech, it’s kind of crowded …
Yeah, so we got to have a look at all of the problems raised by managers and HR on the left side of the board, and then all of the solutions on the right side, and that’s where the problem of consistent, regular, high-quality feedback just was like “ahh” like an angel kind of moment. There are tools on the performance review side, but if you ask anyone at any company that has reviews, they won’t say "I feel like I’m giving regular feedback that makes me better."
What are the early use cases that you’ve noticed? How do people tend to use Tandem, and has that aligned with your expectations? I feel like when you launch anything into the world, there’s what you think is going to happen, and what actually happens. Is there anything from Tandem being in the wild now that you’ve found interesting?
One thing is a bit of confirmation. Our ultimate goal or vision isn’t specifically about feedback. That’s ‘how’ we do it, but the ‘what’ that we have in mind is we want to improve and strengthen every relationship at work. The thing you talk about with your partner or roommate, is the people at work. It’s the bad relationship, it’s the amazing relationship. What’s been confirmed is that people really care about those, and the absence of feedback or the giving of feedback is a key and essential part of those relationships. So I guess it’s been good to confirm that the strengthening of those relationships is what people want help with. Everyone is really busy, but we know from building up people managers that there are ways of building connection that don’t take endless meetings.
Another is we got an AI tool is to help people generate feedback. A learning there is just - more of that. We had no idea how much people would want us to write feedback for them. Obviously you need some source input, but it’s been really cool to see how effective what we’re building is, and two, how much people want it. It’s not that they don’t want to be thoughtful, but there’s a hangup on feedback. The more we can remove the blank canvas, and let them edit something, the easier it is and the more likely it is they’ll give feedback.
With the integration of generative AI into the product and into the feedback process - it makes sense when you think about teachers not looking forward to doing their student reports. I don’t know what it’s like in America, but in Australia, students typically get a report card twice a year. How do you ensure that people are still giving feedback tied to the essence of a person rather than super generic 'pleasure-to-teach' style feedback?
Oh my gosh, this is like, the only thing I think about. One of the things that we’ve done and what’s so cool about AI - because I’m new to product, but with AI, the reality is everyone is new - one of the things that we’ve found is that ultimately you need some amount of source input to then enable the AI that’s generated to be relevant and personal. The trick we’ve found is the easier we can make it to create input data, the better.
So we present the human with really simple drop-downs prompting - do you want to give feedback on a meeting or a project? We then have very simple templated questions and they can answer some or all of them - is there anything this person can start doing or stop doing. We’ll then put this into a really nice professional piece of feedback that then gets the benefit of being personal but to the end user actually feels quite easy. They don’t have to worry about making it sound good - that’s our job. In terms of a roadmap, we’ll also be working on for each member of the company what’s expected of them and their role so can also help end users personalise feedback that’s even more relevant to each employee.
Who are the Tandem team?
We’re tiny, but mighty. It’s me, and I work on product. We have an incredible data scientist who in addition to working on features works on AI, a full stack engineer, a front end developer, and someone who is responsible for growth.
And how do you guys work? Is it quite distributed and remote? Do you go into an office?
Change is one constant. In terms of software development, we work in one to two week sprints. Every one or two releases we do a Retro to modify or get better. That sprint cycle works well. For the rest of the team, we also work in sprints every week. We use Linear (unpopular to say in Australian but it’s a competitor to Atlassian’s Jira - sorry but it’s like, really good!), and then we do a zoom-out once a month. Honestly, we try and spend as much time trying to get data from our customers and what we can confirm about their usage.
Have you noticed a shift in the types of customers you’re attracting in terms of the first early users and testers versus who you have now?
In the beginning, I think we got it horribly wrong. We had targeted companies that were a little bigger, which isn’t a problem but the issue was most of them had just rolled out a big performance review process. So the idea of HR being like - “just kidding! We’re gonna do this instead..” No one wants to do that. They don’t want to expend social capital and be like, just kidding. It’s not to say bigger companies couldn’t work with us, and it would be amazing. Change is already hard, getting someone to walk back something. Interestingly though, we are seeing some of those companies come back to us.
But that’s been an interesting one, but certainly in the beginning when our product really sucked, people with nice review software were like okay, we’ll give it a wait. I can certainly say the companies that have been the most successful have been where someone from the leadership team, ideally multiple, are really bought in. And the other are companies where it’s part of managers’ jobs to give and receive feedback, so those companies that are really making that investment in them and expecting that behaviour are also doing really well.
So when it came to the pivot - is that the kind of thing where you go and have a conversation with whoever led the investment round? This must be a pretty scary moment to go and have that conversation.
At the time, it felt really scary and overwhelming. It was like, the company is not doing well, and had not been doing well. There was no signs of improving. We felt down on ourselves - to fail at something, or not fail, but just realise, we’ve been chasing something for a couple of years and not making it work.
We also had to let go of a couple of team members because when you’re pivoting it’s not like all of these people doing these jobs can stay on. It was a real rock bottom low. The investors were amazing, especially given at that time so many of them were dealing with startups that were not doing well and not getting funding. It’s a credit to them - they basically asked for our thinking, and said ultimately, we back you. It’s a reason to build relationships. I never felt like I was getting investors, I felt like I was getting partners.
Who are you most close with?
All of the major investors and most of my angel investors I talk with once a month [MP readers: angel investors typically support early stage businesses and entrepreneurs by providing capital, usually in exchange for some ownership of said business]. I also picked them because I wanted to hear from them. So, yeah especially during that time period. Blackbird, Flying Fox, Treble Capital… honestly all of them I was in close touch with, and I still am today. That made a huge difference for them to voice support, and they also pushed back. We’ve had lots of times when we’ve said hey, have you thought about this and challenged an idea. We wouldn’t want people just…
‘Yes’ manning.
Yeah. So, it was such a crappy time. The word 'pivot' is such a misnomer.
Pivot is very balletic. Maybe a better metaphor would be… nervous breakdown, followed by a phoenix rising from the ashes?
It’s like, cleaning up our stool. Here’s poop, and I’m going to scoop it into a barrel. And then I’m going to roll up a pile of poop, and dump it out. Which incidentally, was my first job, so I could ride horses.
Has there been a time that you’ve had to listen to your gut instinct, and/or has there been a time that you had a gut instinct, overrode it, and regretted it?
Both - so many times. I think actually - the way I think about gut and brain is I definitely feel things quite physically, and that used to be really overwhelming and it still can be.
But I’ve started to realise is whatever I feel in my gut doesn’t have to be right, but it needs to be considered. Knowing we needed to pivot - it felt like something was wrong. So then it was like, let me talk to people who know the business and let’s start unpacking … there’s something here. And there was.
Our sales were down, we were having to invest more and more time into the training business, we weren’t seeing the signs on the manager software stuff, and it was like let’s really think through and create a runway model and get advice from those investors about what they’re seeing, and how much runway they think we’ll need. Knowing where we are. And then I got all the data and a really rich picture.
What my gut had initiated turned out to be true, but it was really important to understand the data picture because it wouldn’t have helped me coming out of that decision, or I might have had regret, or I might have waffled.
This has been very insightful. Thank you!
Lauren Humphrey on … her 3 favourite books
“Maybe You Should Talk To Someone” by Lori Gottlieb
“It’s a book about therapy, and the author wrote it about her own journey and also anonymised, her patients. It’s brilliant, it’s profound. To get to watch people in their own journeys, I learned to much about what I need to work on.
“Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver
"It taught me so much about my biases and it is beautiful storytelling.”“Cloud Cuckoo Land” by Anthony Dooer
This unique novel spans different centuries and worlds featuring five protagonists who find solace and hope in a book about a utopian paradise.