#71 - Claire McDonnell and Jennifer Kim on Building an Inclusive Company Culture

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Claire McDonnell, Jennifer Kim and Kat Manalac. Claire is co-founder and COO of True Link Financial, and True Link is a financial services firm that offers money management, investment and insurance products primarily for retirees. They were part of the summer 2013 batch. And Jennifer is currently a startup advisor. Prior to that, she was the head of employee experience and development at Lever. Lever makes recruiting software and they were part of the summer 2012 batch.
And Kat, who you've probably heard on the podcast before, is a partner here at YC.
All right, here we go.

**Kat Manalac** (0:40)
Okay, so we'll just like dive into this and I'll start by saying, you know, I've heard many successful founders, founders of later stage companies like Dropbox, Airbnb say that one of the most important things that they spend their time on as founders and as CEOs is building and scaling good company culture. So culture is this really nebulous concept. And so I wanted to discuss, you know, why it makes sense to think about it at an early stage and how to break this nebulous concept into more manageable kind of action items that early stage founders can put into place. So last year, I had about 50 conversations with founders of early stage companies and the people at those companies who were building culture and D&I initiatives. And so I wanted to introduce everyone here on the podcast to two of the people that I thought were the most thoughtful and had done some incredible work in this space. And so I'll introduce you both.
So first we have Claire McDonnell. She's the founder of True Link. And True Link makes software. It's tech-enabled financial services for older adults.
So Claire, you're at 35 employees now.
And one impressive thing is that they have a woman or person of color who is leading each of the teams there. And True Link has made some incredible progress. Their customer base has grown about 20x over the last three years. And I spent about an hour and an hour and a half talking to Claire's team recently. And it was really clear to me that Claire and her co-founder, Kai, were doing some very intentional thinking about culture and DNI at True Link. So thank you for joining us.

**Claire McDonnell** (2:25)
Thanks for having me. Very happy to be here.

**Kat Manalac** (2:27)
And next we have Jennifer Kim.
And so Jennifer was one of the very first employees at Lever, a company that builds recruiting software.
And she built the DNI program at Lever. And Lever is about 100 employees. 150 Oh, about 150 And they're at close to about 50-50 male-female split in terms of the employees, which isn't easy, is not an easy feat in Silicon Valley. And so she is sort of one of my mentors in a lot of this. She's authored a lot of incredible resources for startups and founders who are interested in learning about DNI and culture and how to implement them in really early stage startups. So thank you for joining us.

**Jennifer Kim** (3:11)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

**Kat Manalac** (3:12)
So I thought, let's just jump in. So why do you think there's so much attention around culture nowadays? In the press, among founders, in blog posts, people are talking more and more about culture than ever. And I've always thought it's been an important thing.
In 1992, for example, there was a study by HBS and the Cotter Institute that detailed the corporate cultures of 200 companies, and they showed how good culture affects everything from long-term economic performance, employment growth, revenue growth, and companies that focused on culture outperformed by a huge amount. So why is this now being talked about more commonly?

**Jennifer Kim** (3:57)
Yeah, I mean, culture can be kind of tricky to talk about, right? You ask fish about water and the response is, what's water? So culture is very much how things are run, it's everything around you, it's how your team sees, it's the lens for everything your team works through.
So what's hard about culture sometimes is that we kind of fall into these two traps. So often we're talking about what's really visible and tangible, or what's really kind of like extreme negatives. So on the tangible front, the common misconception is that, oh, we have a great culture because of this ping pong table, or happy hours, which is great, but it's actually a very, very small part of it. Your culture is all about how you hire, what kind of conversations, what's the energy of the room, how do you make decisions, who gets promoted, right? It's not always so visible. So it can be a little bit tricky to talk about, but, and therefore, you know, hard to manage and sometimes even hard to measure, but it doesn't mean that's not important. And then on the second end, yeah, if you're watching the news date these days, there's a lot of attention on Uber, oh my gosh, how many articles have y'all read about Uber?