Harnessing AI to Humanize HR: A Conversation with Textio CEO Jensen Harris

**Stacie Baird** (0:10)
Hey, humans, welcome to The HX Podcast. This is Stacie Baird, and I am excited to have a guest today. We've been doing some solo episodes, but we are on this journey of talking about the human experience of AI, and Jensen Harris is joining us today, who has been in the space for a long time, a lot longer than people even recognize this technology has been impacting their lives. So I was excited to have you on, Jensen, because there's certainly some perceptions around that this is new, and you are certainly going to speak to the fact that this has been something that's been evolving for quite some time, and you've been in it for all that time. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

**Jensen Harris** (0:49)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

**Stacie Baird** (0:51)
Jensen, why don't we just start with your own human experience? Tell us a little bit about the moments in your life that led you to where you are today, and how you got started into this world, and where you've landed thus far. Not that we're ever done.

**Jensen Harris** (1:08)
No, I hope not. So I grew up in rural Ohio. Like I remember when Walmart came to our town when I was a kid. We were in Amish country, and this is like the most exciting thing that ever happened. And there were still town ordinance that said you had to have something like one hitching post for every 30 parking spaces. So Walmart came to town and there were hundreds of hitching posts outside, which gives you some idea of where I grew up. So I was one of those kids who just had trouble getting engaged in school. It wasn't that I couldn't do the work, but I was really bored by it. And after my freshman year of high school, I had a 0.6 grade point average, which for those who maybe aren't having had school in the United States, means I was flunking out of school.
And so I had to go find my people. I had to find a different environment. And I had been writing music since I was a younger kid, probably like sixth grade, seventh grade. I'd written some music that was performed by our local band. And so I got an opportunity to go to an art school. And so my entry to tech was what you expect from most technical co-founders, which is through classical music.

**Stacie Baird** (2:37)
Of course.

**Jensen Harris** (2:39)
So I went to Interlochen Arts Academy. I studied composing. I also performed. And through that, I had an opportunity to just figure out what it meant for me to be able to learn, to be in an environment that was creative.
And at the same time, I'd always programmed computers since I was really, really young, something that I loved doing. And so when I was in college, I was pretty poor. And the way that I was making money was by shelving briefs underground in the law library, these dusty hot briefs, it was like 100 degrees down there. And I was making like 575 an hour, I think. And so I was like, well, maybe I can sell some software. So I built in early piece of software that helped Microsoft Outlook integrate into Internet services in an interesting way during my sophomore junior year of college. And one day I got a call from Microsoft asking if they could acquire my company. Now I had like no game at all. I didn't know what it meant to have a company. So I was like, I don't have a company, I'm just a college kid, but do you think I can interview for an internship? And they were like, sure. And so that was a bad business move on my part, but I was 17 or something. So I ended up working at Microsoft for a summer, loved that, and ended up starting, never interviewed anywhere else, started working right from college, moved to Seattle to be a software program manager. Ended up spending over 15 years there, and thought I was gonna be there for just a few years, but loved it, and there kept being more and more toys to play with. I started out on the Outlook team, I had a chance to redesign that product and quickly figured out what I was most interested in was the intersection between human user interface, how people think about and use software and engineering, the hard realities of getting it done, actually, of actually getting it built. I had a chance to redesign Microsoft Office, the user interface, in 2007, and then took over user interface for Windows and what was at that point a new Surface product, Surface tablet, Surface laptop. As I was finishing that up, I had this sort of realization that where I was working no longer fit me, it no longer fit the kind of place I wanted to work at that moment, the principles with which the team was operating didn't match mine, and decided to start a company.