Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs, and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types.
Founder's Field Guide is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all of our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:46)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of Oshanose Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:12)
My guest today is Roxanne Petraeus, co-founder and CEO of Athena, a modern compliance platform for businesses. Roxanne's background is pretty incredible. Before starting Athena, she was a Rhodes Scholar, served in the US Army and worked at McKinsey. In our conversation, we covered the lessons Roxanne poured over from her military career to building a business, how she's trying to make compliance training not suck, and the woeful state of funding female founders in BC today and what can be done about it.
Far from a boring conversation about compliance, this was an incredible discussion with one of the best founders I've met recently. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Roxanne Petraeus.
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So Roxanne, this is going to be so much fun. We're going to talk all about the business that you're building now, but also about your personal background and a number of topics that you're passionate about. I've been really excited to do this since first hearing about your business because I remember seeing what you were doing and just thinking how much I wish that this had existed to solve a pain point of my own running a business a year ago when we were dealing with it. Maybe just to set the frame for the audience, you could give the sort of thumbnail sketch and we'll dig in on some of the details of what you're doing now and sort of the path that got you here.

**Roxanne Petraeus** (3:58)
Thank you so much for having me. What we do is compliance training and I would understand if anyone's reaction is, no thank you, that sounds very boring. But what we've done is completely reimagined it, asking the guiding question, how would you train if you actually designed it to be effective versus just check a box or provide legal cover, these sorts of things.
Anyone who's been in the workforce for some time has had this experience of getting an all caps email telling you that your, say, sexual harassment training or cybersecurity or anti-bribery, your training is about to expire and you need to go through an hour of just an incredibly painful experience where the slides seem dated and from the 1990s, the scenarios make no sense, the best case scenario, and sometimes they're just downright offensive or insulting and you click through as fast as the program will let you. And then at the end, you get a certificate, some PDF that lives somewhere for a year or so until you have to do it all over again.