NYLP: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod, a podcast on new startups, businesses, and openings in the New York City area. I’m Hal Coopersmith, and in this episode, we are talking about human resources. To say the least, it has been a hot topic recently as businesses realize that they need to create an environment that is supportive of all employees. We spoke to Sarah Sheehan and Toby Hervey, the co-founders of Bravely, and they think that they have the solution to creating a workplace to off-the-record coaching. Here is Sarah Sheehan describing the role of Bravely in light of the current environment.
Sarah: What has been sort of splashed across the media recently is this idea that there are some companies, where people haven’t been able to go and trust HR, which I think is eroding that trust even further from employees. I’m not sure that I would say that it’s fair, but by design, HR has always aligned with the company in a lot of ways. So it’s not naturally the first step for employees to go right to HR, even their manager, right? Typically, you’ve probably done this yourself. When something comes up for you, you go to a friend, family member, trusted colleague to get their take on the situation. What if you could go to an expert instead, and that’s really, again, where Bravely steps in.
NYLP: Sarah and Toby believe that companies should and will realize the importance of HR investment. Here’s Toby describing how businesses are beginning to think differently about this type of investment.
Toby: I think we’re actually at this turning point of companies being able to better recognize the ROI of HR investment, because we have improving analytics around people functions and an increasing adoption of pulse surveys, or just regular surveys in general, or better understanding the impact of people-related decisions and investments on the ultimate bottom line of the business.
NYLP: There is a lot of ground to cover here, and not surprisingly, a lot of topical discussion. So, let’s go to the interview. Stepping onto Launch Pod, we have Sarah Sheehan and Toby Hervey, the co-founders of Bravely. Welcome Sarah and Toby.
Sarah: Hi. Thanks for having us.
Toby: Yeah, happy to be here.
NYLP: So what is Bravely?
Sarah: Bravely is off-the-record confidential coaching for employees that are facing stressful moments at work.
NYLP: Stressful moments at work. It seems like there’s a lot of that in the news these days. Did you see all the news stories and say, “We’re going to make this company,” or did you see something going on before and said, “Maybe we should start this company”?
Toby: Yeah. It was more personal than that, and the original idea was before a lot of the current headlines that we see today. I was at a health tech startup before that was focused on urgent care on demand called Pager. It was an app, where you could get a doctor to come to your apartment. You could video chat with a doctor, chat with a nurse. One day, a friend from college called me, and she was having this total freak-out moment at work. Tough conversation with her boss. It didn’t go well. She left her job and didn’t love her relationship with her boss, was wondering if she should leave, find a new job, go to HR, and she just called me to half pick my brain, and half, sort of, try to figure out what first step to take.
In that conversation, I joked that she needed Pager for HR. She needed HR urgent care. I think we realized that people have these stressful moments at work, and they’re not sure where to turn for a first step, and there was an opportunity to build a better solution to connect somebody with a real expert and somebody who could help them shape their thoughts, structure their thinking, and build the confidence that they needed to go forward. So it all happened before the headlines, but since then, we’ve only been validated in the problem that we’re trying to solve.
NYLP: Right. Your timing seems absolutely perfect right now.
Sarah: You could say that.
NYLP: So, why are companies having breakdowns in communication or these sorts of situations? Why is Bravely needed?
Toby: I think it stems from just the fact that workplace is as “professionally oriented” as they might be … and I just made air quotes … they are still people, right? And people who have to have difficult conversations that are uncomfortable, that are awkward. You’ve got people with varying backgrounds, varying skill sets and comfort levels in those relationships, and everybody needs different levels of support to tackle something. That’s just frankly uncomfortable and hard to say. There’s a lot of talk about radical candor and giving tough feedback and real time feedback in the workplace.
But it’s really hard to do, and just deal with yourself to tell somebody something they don’t want to hear or to present yourself in the right way when you’re nervous about coming off wrong. It’s just a very human thing. We saw an opportunity using technology and using experts to help people get that additional leg up of support that they might need.
Sarah: Yeah. Nobody likes conflict.
NYLP: What size companies are you targeting?
Toby: We’re mostly working with companies that are in the 200 to 500 range, right now, of employees. A lot of them are Series C, Series D. They’re in a rapid growth state. A lot of organizational change, a lot of early employees that are sitting in a different organization than what they saw when they first joined. New management structures, employees getting layered over, increasing size of HR and people teams, and they’re important partners to us in the work that we do. So, basically, just companies that are fraught with these difficult conversations and conflict, and a lot of growth and change and dynamism that we can help with.
NYLP: 200-to-500-employee companies. They’re large companies. Presumably, they have HR departments, with more than one person. Why aren’t people able to go to the HR departments?
Sarah: Well they are, and we see ourselves as a partner to those HR teams. What has been sort of splashed across the media recently is this idea that there are some companies where people haven’t been able to go and trust HR, which I think is eroding that trust even further from employees. I’m not sure that I would say that it’s fair. But by design, HR has always aligned with the company in a lot of ways. So, it’s not naturally the first step for employees to go right to HR, even their manager, right? Typically, you’ve probably done this yourself.
When something comes up for you, you go to a friend, family member, trusted colleague to get their take on a situation. What if you could go to an expert instead? And that’s really, like again, where Bravely steps in.
Toby: And something that we’re trying to solve is, HR is structured fundamentally, institutionally to represent the company’s interest, right? That’s their job. It doesn’t mean they don’t care about employees, and they can’t do good things for employees, but from a very cynical point of view, good things for employees are good for the company. What we represent is … There’s a nuance here. It’s a really good resource for employees, but we’re not always on the employee’s side. We are impartial. We are neutral, or I should say our pros are impartial or neutral, and our methodology is impartial and neutral.
And so, we can give a perspective that the HR professional can’t necessarily give. But we’re not also blindly encouraging the employee and driving them to do whatever it is that’s on their mind, or whatever emotion they’ve infused into the situation, or whatever crazy expectation they’ve set for themselves by being impartial, where something that doesn’t exist today that can take a step back and give an objective viewpoint on whatever stressful moment or issue is at hand.
NYLP: What is the purpose of an HR department? Should we have smaller HR offices? What do you see as the fit in a human resources department that cause your company to exist?
Toby: Companies should be investing more in HR than ever before. They are important partners in supporting business leaders around people needs. They should be working on strategic org design, supporting new first-time managers, with proactive training and learning and development programs. They should be looking at their people analytics and what drives performance and helping teams optimize and grow and build. They’re very important internal stakeholders. I think we’re actually at this turning point of companies being able to better recognize the ROI of HR investment, because we have improving analytics around people functions and increasing adoption of poll surveys or just regular surveys in general, or better understanding the impact of people-related decisions and investments on the ultimate bottom line of the business.
So, companies should be investing in HR. We expect them to continue investing more in HR, and that’s a good thing for everybody.
NYLP: They should be investing in HR, but that means pro company, in your words, right? It’s more-
Toby: Yeah. The employee interest and company interest aren’t always at odds, right? There are certainly circumstances where they are, and that’s where the objectivity really comes in handy. But a lot of times, the HR team wants to build an awesome place to work for everybody, and the employees want to do great work, and all of that is nicely aligned on the path forward.
Sarah: Yeah, part of the problem is that, again, people are afraid to come forward sometimes. It may just simply be because they’re an introvert. They don’t know how to go and talk about whatever is on their mind, right? We see ourselves as a way of helping to drive more interaction with those management teams or HR teams.
NYLP: So, how does Bravely work?
Sarah: The experience now is we’ll partner with a company, and they’ll offer Bravely as an added resource or benefit to their population. Employees are, when they come to our platform, they’re able to sign up with their own personal credentials, so they use their personal email. They’re no longer attached to the company. They log onto our platform. They tell us a little bit more about what they’re facing. We have different categories of issues like workplace relationships, policies and procedures. They select whatever category they’re facing an issue in.
And then very easily and seamlessly, they schedule themselves with one of our pros for a 45-minute phone conversation, where we walk them through an interest-based approach to conflict, if they’re facing some sort of relationship issue, or coaching them with communicate effective communication skills to help prepare them to go forward and have whatever conversation they’re preparing for.
NYLP: What are the issues that you help employees work through the most?
Toby: We see a lot over the map. It’s a lot around performance-based conversations. I want to communicate my personal objectives, my goals to my manager, and make sure that I’m on track to get promoted this year and I’m doing all the things that are expected of me. Or there’s something more time-sensitive like a performance review coming up, and we’re actually running this campaign this month, all around performance reviews, given January is the biggest month for them. We get a lot of, “I’m not getting along with my boss,” or, “I’m not getting along with this important person that I have to partner with, and I’m looking for ways to improve the relationships.”
“Things that I can do to improve my communication and just so I can make this relationship better, because it’s not going anywhere.” Or they want to go and talk to HR or talk to their boss about a troubled relationship.
Sarah: Yeah, I would say like the overall theme is there’s a lack of confidence usually, and whoever we’re talking to, and they’re coming to us to help organize their thoughts and sort of get that injection of courage to go forward and really tackle whatever they’re facing.
NYLP: So, let’s tackle the problem where you’re having a struggle with your supervisor. How does Bravely assist?
Sarah: Well, first of all, the first portion of every session is all about collecting as much information as we can from that employee and getting as much of an understanding as possible about what’s happening. We also try and assess the outcomes that that employee is trying to avoid. If you’re coming to us, and at all cost you want to make sure that this doesn’t create more of a challenge for you, we need to understand what “more of a challenge” means. From there, the interest-based approach to conflict is all about helping that employee understand how the other person involved is feeling in the situation or really, like, from their perspective, what’s going on.
A lot of times, employees come in or people come in, and they’re really wedded to whatever stands they have or how they’re feeling. It’s very difficult for them to consider that there’s actually another person involved, and there could be other reasons for them behaving the way in which they are, and that’s usually like an “a-ha” moment in these sessions, because it starts to break down that stubbornness in people when they start to really think about this other person and how they could be feeling. We’re never prescriptive in our approach there. We’re really asking probing questions and trying to get that person to determine the best path forward for themselves.
And once they reach that decision, then we put an action plan together. That’s where we can give them a little bit more feedback on, “You sound a little aggressive. I’m not really sure if this will be accepted,” or the person may perceive you as coming across as defensive or whatever that might be. So we try and put a positive spin on everything, so that when they go and actually have that conversation, it produces a positive outcome not just for them, but for the other person in the organization at large.
NYLP: Sounds like therapy for work.
Sarah: Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it.
Toby: Yeah, and we don’t pretend to be any sort of mental health-based service just for clarity, but yeah.
Sarah: No legal advice. We’re not mental health … yeah.
Toby: Right, but we joke that we are kind of like job therapy or helping people get to root causes, understanding the why of different things that they’re feeling or experiencing. You know, as Sarah said, just putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes.
NYLP: So who are the people on the other end? Who are the people that are helping the employees?
Sarah: Our pros.
NYLP: Your pros?
Sarah: Yeah. They are all former existing HR business partners or certified coaches. We’ve had tons of sessions this week, which has been really exciting for us to see the incredible feedback that we’re getting on the people that we’ve hired. I mean, of course I would say this, because I’m a founder of the company, but they’re incredible people, all of whom we’ve put through a thorough vetting to not just make sure that they have the chops, but that they have other qualities like high EQ, and that they’re able to deliver tough feedback in ways that these individuals can really receive and accept.
Toby: Yeah, and what’s interesting beyond the baseline credentials that we’re looking for, like HR and coaching experience, like relevant certifications from organizations like the ICF, reference checks, and third-party verifications, and all that to make sure that this is a great crop of people. We probe them to make sure they’re high EQ, and they understand, and they can demonstrate empathy, and they’re somebody you want to talk to you about your issues. And frankly, one of the profiles that we’ve seen is really clicking with this whole experience, are seasoned business leaders, like people who are operators and maybe in a sales role or maybe in an office role, whatever it is.
And then we’re really interested in the people side and started to explore coaching and people career development, learning and development-like functions. There’s something about that having been in the trenches, having been a director or having been a manager of a team, much like Sarah, and seeing both sides of it and really being able to be objective and help somebody with something very constructively.
NYLP: How are you finding them?
Sarah: So, it’s been very exciting for us, because in the beginning, it was all through our own networks. My career started in HR. I know a lot of really fantastic HR leaders, business partners, but then we started to, again, look outside that profile and attract certified coaches, people who have really solid business backgrounds. And so, all of that was through referral of this original network. And then once we started to get more press, we just had an influx of people who are interested, also whom are just … some of them blow my mind, like, the credentials that they have in their interest in Bravely. So far, we haven’t actually had to go and seek out any of our pros, which is pretty fantastic.
NYLP: And how many pros do you have now?
Toby: We have about 30 who are active and doing sessions now, and with all the inbound, a healthy crop of folks that are ready to go.
NYLP: And do you get the same pro every single time?
Toby: You can if you choose. If you’ve had a session, you can request the same pro for any follow-up sessions that you have. But in your first experience, we actually match you with the right pro based on the type of organization you’re at, your role, your issue. We find the right person who’s set up to help you.
NYLP: How often are people using Bravely when they’re in the company?
Sarah: We always say that we’re not a longitudinal coaching platform. So, when you come to Bravely, it’s not to talk about on a weekly basis how you develop your career. We’re here for those moments, those stressful moments that I talked about in the beginning, where you have a problem it needs to be solved in the short term, and you turn to Bravely to help you. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have multiple sessions to talk about a particular issue, but we want people coming to us to help solve an acute problem that needs attention right away.
Toby: Yeah, so, sometimes that takes two or three sessions. If you have some sort of tough conversation you’re preparing for, you may want to debrief after that, and we’ve seen that a little bit. We’re early to really know what repeat behavior looks like over time and how frequently people are having issues that are Bravely worthy. So, we’ll have to get back to you.
NYLP: What do you think is the right amount of Bravely interaction? Obviously, if 100% of the company is using Bravely, probably not a great sign for the company, if they’re having lots of stressful moments, and if 0% are using it, probably not so great either because there are stressful moments that inevitably pop up. And so, what do you think is the right amount?
Toby: Well I would say if it’s being used 100% of the time, then we have really actionable insights that we can give to the company on an anonymous basis. We never reveal the individual content of an employee session or reveal any identifying information, but we do provide totally de-identified insights back to the company that help them inform new policies, decisions, implementations around people practices and culture. So we would prevent that company from ever getting to 100%, because we’d intervene. If there’s 0% engagement, then we’re doing a bad job with marketing, and we’re not doing enough to make it understood how we can be helpful to employees, because every organization, no matter how healthy they are, has people who are nervous or intimidated about a difficult conversation.
And so, there will be some baseline utilization all the way. Somewhat analogous examples like EAP, employee assistance programs, which are very centered around personal issues that might be affecting your workplace. So, like, personal finance stress or substance abuse, those see less than 1% utilization across the industry. So somewhere in probably the upper single digits or like lower teens or lower tens I guess is probably where it will end up.
NYLP: So how are you going to get engagement within the company?
Sarah: There’s a couple ways that we can do that. Right out of the gate, we partner with companies, where we’re sending emails obviously to employees to try and get them to activate, and then once they’ve activated, they’ve switched off the company’s email, and now, they’re onto their personal email. We talk all the time about like how we can support these employees through exposing them to the different ways that they can use Bravely, right? A lot of this obviously has to be done over email, because we can go into the companies and try and have these 10 poll events there, but there’s confidentiality involved here.
So, for us, we want to make sure that we’re always protecting that employee, and there’s lots of different touchpoints along the way once they’ve come to our platform that we can try and engage and interact with them. But so far, honestly, and I feel like I need to knock on wood right now, but people really respond to what we’re putting out there. There’s nowhere for employees to turn. Like I said before, typically, people go to their friends, their family, their colleagues, all of whom sometimes give them the wrong advice. Pour gasoline on and they already bring fire.
This is a new opportunity for them to get rid of that stress that we can all identify with. I always joke that work stress is like childbirth, even though I don’t have children yet. You forget the pain of childbirth just like you forget the pain of work stress. And like everybody always looks at me, goes, “It’s true,” because usually you can’t sleep. You can’t stop talking about it. You’re constantly trying to ask people to help you figure out what to do. Like, “Should I go forward? Who should I talk to about this?” It’s something that sort of permeates every aspect of your life until you solve it.
And so, for us, once employees know that they have access to us, the once that need us, they come forward.
Toby: I think, too … I like to cater to the nerdy start-up podcast audience. Over time-
NYLP: Cater to them. They love it.
Toby: Great. We think a lot about how to make this a higher frequency product, right? Like if this is an issue, you know, somebody has a stressful moment once a year, once every two years, whatever that cadence is, how do we serve them in between those stressful moments? And how do we turn Bravely into something that accompanies you throughout your work life and makes work better and easier for you? And you can imagine we have lots of long-term ideas about how to develop the product in that way.
NYLP: Do you want to share any of them?
Toby: I think it’s probably too early.
NYLP: Too early? You just teased that Toby.
Toby: We’ll come back. Yeah, you got to keep them wanting more.
Sarah: Yeah, that’s the fun part. It’s like thinking about all of the potential possibilities.
NYLP: How much does it cost a company to use Bravely?
Toby: It depends on the size; it depends on the needs of the company, but we charge between a $5 and $8 per employee per month. So, they pay that subscription based on the size of their population, and that’s it. It’s very simple.
NYLP: So, $5 to $8. Let’s say I’m a 500-person company. That’s a pretty significant investment, I would imagine on a monthly basis. How do I know I’m getting an ROI on that investment, a return on investment, in that money that I’m spending on Bravely?
Toby: We provide anonymized reporting that shows utilization, satisfaction and responses to a few survey questions that we have in the app. We ask questions about the impact of Bravely on the individual employee’s circumstances, what they would have done instead, which is the best practice we’ve borrowed from the health tech telemedicine world, and we produced these anonymized reports that companies have to understand how people are liking and using Bravely.
The other thing, too, is we work with companies to include questions in their regularly scheduled and on-going culture surveys about Bravely to also measure the impact that just having the platform available has within the organization and trust in leadership or commitment to transparency and open communication. So there are a few ways we go about it. We’re not perfect at it yet, but we’ll get there.
Sarah: Yeah, I mean, you can imagine. We’re having very intimate conversations with employees, so they’re sharing with us how they’re feeling about their job, about their tenure at the company. So we’re able to deliver back to these leaders, you know, “X percentage of your employee population has talked to us about potentially leaving”. If you think about us, we do follow up. We try and understand what the outcome was post-session, so we can deliver that information back, which is all around employee retention, which is top of mind for every CEO. It probably, I would say, is the one thing that they think about.
That’s something we can definitely deliver on and that our pros are trained to look out for and improve on.
NYLP: And you’re able to monitor who would leave and who would not leave?
Sarah: To certain extent, right? So if you’re if you’re holding a session with someone that’s coming forward and saying … like I’ll give you an example. We had a young lady who works at a well-known media company come to us, and she was about to take another job offer, because she had not been given the promotion that she was promised. And for her, she loved her job. She didn’t want to leave. It became so clear to the pro on the other end of the phone that it’s like she is an A-player who wanted to stay, but had, for whatever the reason, didn’t have the courage to go and ask for what she had been promised, and was willing to leave because of that, was willing to leave the company just to avoid the conflict, just to avoid the uncomfortable conversation.
We were able to coach her and talk her through like what that conversation would look like. It’s not the ultimatum that she walked into the conversation thinking she would have to give. It was packaged in a way that really highlighted why she loved her job, why she didn’t want to ever leave, and that the accomplishments, she felt that she had achieved over the course of the year. She went and she had this conversation her boss who immediately went and got her the promotion that she asked for, the raise that she deserved and promised her even more down the line. What became also clear in that conversation was is that there was a hiring freeze at the company at the time that there were a lot of budget constraints that were pretty public.
When we started talking about those things with her, she was able to think differently about her boss. She was able to see him in a more human way and understand that he probably had a lot of pressure on him as well. And so, when she went into that conversation, it was all about like, “I’m going to give him this gift of information that I’m going to walk out the door, and he has the opportunity to save me,” and he did it. We still exchange messages with her to just check in, and we produced this incredible outcome for her and the company.
NYLP: That is fantastic. Is it always employee up to a supervisor? Or is a supervisor able to give anonymized feedback to direct report?
Toby: That was actually one of the biggest surprises that we learned upon launch. We always saw it as managing up, going to your boss or going to HR about something that you were facing. We have had about 20% of our sessions so far. Our managers are preparing for conversations with their direct reports. They want to give tough feedback, or they want to give recommendations on how to improve. They’re often first-time managers, they’re relatively inexperienced, or again, in sort of like changing cultures, and they’re not sure where to start, or they don’t want it to land the wrong way, or they don’t want to demotivate their employee. So that was something that we were surprised by after we rolled out.
NYLP: I saw that on your website. 26% of a manager’s time is spent helping direct reports deal with conflict. Where does that number come from?
Toby: So, the last really comprehensive study of conflict at work was actually done in 2008, so now 10 years ago, and it was this global study around the cost of conflict in the workplace. It estimated that conflict costs US workplace is $359 billion a year, and that includes absenteeism. You have people calling out sick, because they’re avoiding issues with their boss. Employees reporting that they had seen people leave because of unresolved conflict in the workplace and the amount of time that managers and employees spend resolving conflict. The average employee spends up to three hours a week resolving conflict in the workplace.
And again, managers are spending up to a quarter of their time dealing with these types of issues.
NYLP: That is incredible to me.
Sarah: It has to have gone up. That number has had to have increased.
Toby: I mean, it’s 10 years, so it’s probably higher.
NYLP: So, it’s been in the news. We alluded to this at the beginning, but what about these larger conflicts that have been popping up, that people haven’t had an opportunity to address? How does Bravely help with those larger conflicts that we’re hearing about that people just haven’t had the confidence to address?
Toby: You’re talking about harassment, discrimination?
NYLP: Absolutely, all of that, right? Like, it was below the surface, and now, it’s become a major issue.
Toby: A key in those situations is a Bravely Pro is helping an employee understand their options in those scenarios, much like a traditional organizational ombudsman, which a lot of large enterprises will offer to their employees. There are these off-the-record private resources for escalating issues and getting a little bit of guidance on what to do. We help employees navigate what those options are. One option might be doing nothing. Another might be going directly to a potential perpetrator or harasser. One option might be going to HR, and it’s walking through the different pros and cons of those in the eyes of the employee.
Again, Sarah said earlier, we’re never prescriptive about what to do. The idea is that, 7 out of 10 victims of harassment don’t go forward, and if you have a human-to-human conversation where you can vet the individual circumstances of your issues, get context from standard EEOC definitions to the company policy that we also have in our system around harassment. You can get guidance on what’s going to happen with each of those options, and going forward, the idea is information is power, and hopefully, people go forward.
We also do offer an opportunity to anonymously escalate those issues to management, and we’ll package up exactly what the communication will look like. I’d have the employee sign off on what information they want presented to their company leadership.
Sarah: If you have gone through any training around harassment, it is made perfectly clear that the minute you report … Even if you’re not reporting, the minute you mention an instance that could be viewed as harassment or discrimination to a senior leader or someone in HR, they’re required to immediately activate an investigation around that. And so, a lot of times, employees knowing this information just, they stay frozen. They’re not sure whether to, you know, if they talk to their colleague, “will that get passed on?” It creates this environment to continue to stay quiet. Our intent, in particular around harassment discrimination, is to, because it’s such a sticky situation, we never offer any advice around this.
But we’re trying to make them feel like they have all of the knowledge that they need to make an informed decision. What we have seen is that they decide to go forward after having this conversation, because it’s like we’ve pulled back the curtain. The clouds have parted for them, and they understand what an investigation entails, what constitutes harassment. Not everyone can be fired because they said the wrong thing or made a mistake. And helping people really understand that you can go and have a conversation with someone and say, “I felt like that was inappropriate,” rather than like going straight to an attorney, right?
So, it’s helpful, and I think it’s just important for people to have all the information, and that’s what we’re trying to provide.
NYLP: So let’s say I’m the company, and I’m getting this anonymized data, and I’m seeing a lot of the same issue pop up. What’s to say I’m paying the Bravely bill? Say, you know what? You give me the real data, or I’m going to fire Bravely.
Toby: We would walk.
NYLP: You would walk?
Sarah: Yeah, fire us.
NYLP: Fire you? Why? I mean, because that’s a hard decision to make. I mean, this is your income. You’re giving me looks right now, but say, this is a lot of money for you guys for a big company and one of the …
Sarah: Well I’m pretty sure we’d be sued, because our terms state that we will never share any of the information that’s discussed in a Bravely session.
Toby: Right.
NYLP: You will never share?
Toby: Some of our brand values are we never break the trust. We act with integrity, and we mean that, right? It’s a tricky balance sometimes, but that’s a no-no, right? You can’t share anything that’s identifiable. If the trust is broken, the platform is dead, and why would anybody come back to us? That’s a key part of our value prop, and we’ll never compromise that, and no client is worth it.
Sarah: Never.
NYLP: How are you getting clients?
Toby: Through aggressive direct sales.
Sarah: Charm.
NYLP: Charm.
Toby: We’ve had a lot of inbounds, which has been great, from companies with like 300 employees, just their head of HR dropping an email like, “Hey, I’m interested in learning more, which was kind of something we thought we’re going to have to hustle harder to get those kinds of connections.” Sarah and I have been in the start-up world for a long time and-
Sarah: We’re very fortunate. We have a lot of people that, number one, believe in us and have been super supportive since the beginning, and have just sort of like opened their they’re Rolodex, so to speak, to make introductions for us, and we ourselves know quite a few people.
Toby: We’re also part of a really great group called People Tech Partners. It’s almost like a mini HR tech accelerator that we love. And so, over the last few months, we’ve been going through their program where we get connected to over 60 heads of people and HR leaders who give us product feedback. They roll out Bravely in their own companies and work with us on case studies, and it’s been really great. They have some amazing companies represented, and they’ve been a really good partner to us.
NYLP: But it’s hard to find 200-to-500-person companies and do that sales cycle. That must be difficult, as easy as you’re depicting as it is now.
Sarah: Yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but it’s definitely … right now, the climate lends itself to people being more open to having this conversation.
Toby: We think Bravely gets … almost increases in value as the size of the organization increases, right? You’ve got large enterprises with thousands of employees, where management is less attuned to the needs of their people. There’s more hierarchy and complexity, but also, a structured process around stuff like performance reviews that we can help people navigate. So we see a very powerful and high impact potential for Bravely in those larger organizations, and we’ve like zeroed in on the 200-to-500 spot, because they’re the early adopters. They are really forward-thinking about people and culture and benefits, and it’s a starting point for us.
NYLP: What are your backgrounds? How did you find your way into this world?
Sarah: My career started in HR, and I worked at Sirius XM. Before it was Sirius XM, it was Sirius. Coach, and then I moved onto Gilt, and at Gilt, I had the great fortune, like you do sometimes at early stage companies, to try my hand at something else, and I pitched myself to help launch a new vertical, which was called Gilt City. It was basically our high-end answer to Groupon at the time. I went from working in HR to working in sales and that really took off. And over the course of the next couple of years, I grew, the company grew, and I was managing a very large team in a very large revenue goal attached to that team.
All my years in HR sort of crystallized in that role, because all the talk around employee engagement and retention, I thought I understood it, but once I became a leader of a team and had to figure out how to hit my revenue goals and actually keep … and it was a sales team. So, as you can imagine, the two are directly connected. Any decline in productivity hits the bottom line the next day. And so, I just became really interested in understanding like how you get people to come forward and talk about what’s going on before they leave, because I had employees that I thought were happy come to me and say, “I’m leaving.” I’d be like, “What?”
And so, that’s a lot of information, but that’s sort of like why this is such a perfect fit for me, because I’ve always been so interested in it.
Toby: I almost fell into startups by accident. I studied policy and government in undergrad and intended to be a diplomat or work in the public sector and was increasingly disenchanted by the promise of working within a large bureaucracy. I accidentally ended up at Gilt right out of school in an internship and immediately loved the personal agency that came with the start-up world, and I loved the intensity and the rush and the various smart people that were all around me just trying to like build something meaningful as quickly as they could. I was addicted to the adrenaline associated with that. So, I went really early stage after that and had a few short stints at different early stage companies.
And most recently, before Bravely, I was the first employee at the health tech startup Pager that I mentioned earlier. We raised $30 million in venture capital. We expanded to four states, team of 60 odd people, and a few hundred doctors and nurses in the network. So, it was an opportunity to really build, build, build and get to be part of a company from the ground up. So the addiction continues.
NYLP: Well, speaking of raising money, you guys have raised some money from venture capital firms, how did that come to be? Particularly, because you’ve raised money from one of our alumni, Charlie O’Donnell.
Sarah: Yeah.
Toby: Yeah, at one point, I think Sarah and I started meeting on nights and weekends and brainstorming, and we debated a lot whether we’d built this business on our own or with investors and partners. We just saw how big this opportunity was and how urgently this problem needed to be solved within workplaces. A kind of unique perspective, given Sarah’s background and also personal affinity for the problems that we’re solving, everybody in our life and our friend group in the eight years we’ve known each other, is always going to Sarah with Bravely issues. We saw like a really unique aligning of the planets, and actually, at that point, the Uber story had broke, and Susan Fowler’s post had broke, and that I think intensified our urgency.
We were like, “We got to raise money for this thing. We got to get Bravely in the hands of as many employees as we can, as quickly as we can.” And so, we started at mid-June, after we rolled out this consumer-facing pilot, and we closed in less than three months, which was pretty amazing. We got tons of rejection along the way. So, I’m making it sound like it was very rosy, but it was constantly existential.
NYLP: Well I wanted to talk about the rejection. Who didn’t see this getting on board? What were their issues?
Toby: Number one was whether companies would adopt it or not, like whether they would buy, and we just had to find the right crop of believers.
Sarah: Yeah, there were lots of rejections along the way, but I think that … I mean, this sounds so cliché, but it helped us in the beginning. I mean, Toby and I have heard each other pitch the business now probably like-
Toby: Thousands of times.
Sarah: Thousands of times. But with every rejection, you really do have to just resolve to move forward and believe in what you’re building, and that’s really hard to do when you’re meeting with people that you admire, and you get really far down the line and then the final answer is no. And so, that was really challenging for me in particular, because I want the yes. I’m very competitive. And honestly, the way that things shaked out for us and the investors that we ended up finally closing our round with, I believe are the perfect fit for us. It was one of our investors’ birthday this week, and I sent him a note, and I meant it. I’m so thankful that that’s who we have behind us, and they’re the right investors.
Toby: But it sometimes it happens in the most unexpected ways. I think you would be okay with me telling this story, but I basically went to meet a good friend of ours who we worked with that Gilt, who is now a venture capitalist, very early in our fundraising process. My mentality going in was like, “This is friendly, right?” I’m picking his brain. I’m like, “How to even start this thing?” He grilled me. He was asking me all these hard questions. I was like flubbing all of the answers. It was a nightmare. I swear to God, I called Sarah on the way out. I was like, “That’s like the worst meeting I’ve ever had,” and it was with my friend. I emailed him-
NYLP: So you thought.
Toby: Right. Well, I calmed down. I emailed him, and I was like, “Thanks for that.” Now that I’m thinking about it, and not so emotional-
Sarah: And not just that.
Toby: I now have a list of like the 10 questions I’m going to get from a VC that I need to have really tight answers to.
NYLP: What was one of them?
Toby: Oh God. That’s a great question.
Sarah: I think it was like mainly questions around the market size.
Toby: Yeah, I just didn’t have good numbers about … Oh, a lot around like how the buyer is going to budget for this, and what the approval processes look like internally for whatever … I had no idea. I hadn’t really even spoken to that many heads of HR people at that point, right? And anyway, so, I email him. We have a brief exchange, like, all good. Two weeks later, he emails me and says, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about your idea and talking to a few people. It’s really interesting. Why don’t you come back in?” And that person was Byron Ling who is at Primary Venture Partners, and Primary led our round, and Byron is on our board, and they have been really great partners to us ever since.
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, the day that Toby called me, if someone said, “They’re going to bet money,” like if they would be a part of your round, the answer would’ve been, “Absolutely not.”
Toby: I was like firing things … I’m a moron.
NYLP: So what is this sales process like? What is that approval process now that you’ve figured out the answer and convinced at least one person?
Toby: On the company side, it’s a mix and it varies per organization. Sometimes we’re selling into a CEO or COO who has a few HR business partners. That tends to move pretty quickly. Sometimes we’re moving ahead of people who needs to convince their CFO that this is worth the investment. Some companies have more legal scrutiny than others. So it really varies, and I’m not sure if we could put a pin in any sort of unifying themes or trends in that. It’s pretty custom to each organization.
Sarah: Yeah, it’s a very personal sale believe it or not. I think that it’s a forward-thinking leader that can look at Bravely and say, “I’m not afraid of this. I actually understand fundamentally that the health of my organization can be improved by implementing this or offering it,” and it’s really about that individual that we’re talking to him whether or not they are open-minded, because we’re asking people to change their way of thinking.
Toby: And introduce a new behavior.
Sarah: Yeah.
NYLP: And you’re based in New York.
Sarah: We are.
NYLP: What is the advantage of being based in New York, for your business?
Toby: Well we launched here so that we could be on the New York Launch Pod.
NYLP: That’s wonderful to hear, even though it’s a flagrant lie, Toby.
Sarah: Right. New York represents so many different industries. If we were on the West Coast, it would be all tech. Here, you know, we were talking earlier before. I think we were on air about your career in advertising before this. There are just so many other organizations that we can reach here in New York that we wouldn’t be able to, I think, in any other city. It represents so much more than just the tech world, and I love that, because Bravely can honestly be used by any company anywhere in my opinion, and New York has an unbelievable makeup in terms of variety and industry.
NYLP: That is a wonderful note to end things on. How do people find out more about you and Bravely?
Toby: They can check out workbravely.com. They can email us directly at Toby or Sarah at workbravely.com. Toby@workbravely.com, Sarah@workbravely.com, with an H. We’d love to hear from anybody who has questions or is interested.
NYLP: Well Toby Hervey, Sarah Sheehan, thank you for stepping onto the New York Launch Pod and sharing your time with us.
Sarah: Thank you, Hal.
Toby: Thanks for having us.
NYLP: And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod, you can follow us on social media @NYLaunchPod. You can visit us at nylaunchpod.com for transcripts of every episode, including this one. If you do leave a review on iTunes and Apple Podcast, it is greatly appreciated and does help people discover the show.
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