Guest: Rachel Pike, COO at Modern Treasury
Payment operations startup Modern Treasury is not afraid to do things in “our own weird way,” says COO Rachel Pike. Its values statement is a 150 word essay, it has gone viral by writing about nerdy ACH payments minutiae, and it has an unusual rule for quarterly internal reviews: No slides. Instead, departments have to write one to two page essay, which are packaged together and then shared company-wide, and with the board. In previous jobs, Rachel laments, she and her coworkers would waste time “pushing pixels” around 50-slide decks. “It [the essay] actually takes more thinking and less hours to put together a summary of, ‘where have we been?’” she says.
In this episode, Rachel and Joubin discuss the state of San Francisco, the value of tradition, hunger to learn, the Draper Fisher Jurvetson split, the opportunity cost of staying put, HIPAA and startups, two-entrepreneur households, career transition coaching, “try before you buy” hiring, learning to be remote, the downside of grasping, and fixing inequalities in compensation.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why Rachel doesn’t like talking about herself (01:20)
- Job-hopping and the Bay Area (02:38)
- Early adopters vs. brilliant innovators (05:16)
- Why Rachel left academia (07:44)
- “I got a phD in startups” (10:24)
- The “nights and weekends” gig at AngelList (14:05)
- Describing startups to aliens (16:50)
- Four years at Grand Rounds (18:28)
- What makes Modern Treasury “modern” (21:51)
- How she got hired as employee #1 (24:16)
- Advice for wannabe early-stage startup workers (30:18)
- “Wonder is contagious” (32:00)
- “Do it right the first time” (35:09)
- Hacker News and other growth levers (38:20)
- The excitement of scaling (40:49)
- Advisors and quarterly planning essays (44:02)
- Forced prioritization (49:20)
- Hard feedback (51:50)
- The working with Rachel doc (54:19)
- How Modern Treasury does comp and bonuses (57:21)
- What’s past is prologue (59:43)
- Who Modern Treasury is hiring and what “Grit” means to Rachel (01:02:00)
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