Christie Kim | COO Interview, Persona

In this special edition of our "From the Founders" interview series, we hear from Christie Kim, who is employee #3 and COO at Persona. Read on for more about her journey of joining Coursera at 75 people and LinkedIn at 15K+ employees, before going back to startup land with the decision to join Persona (now at 200+).

E: To start, can you give a quick introduction of yourself and Persona?

C: I’m Christie Kim, the COO at Persona. Persona is an identity infrastructure startup based in San Francisco. That’s a bit of an industry term, so to give a little context, what we really do is help businesses verify their end users’ identities, which enables them to fight fraud, stay compliant, and ultimately build better relationships with their customers by ensuring trust and safety on their platforms.

As COO, I oversee the business side of things, which includes your typical go-to-market functions such as sales, marketing, and post-sales, as well as other business functions like legal, people operations, and finance.

E: I’d love to talk more about your background specifically. Prior to Persona, you were at LinkedIn. I’d love to hear more about what caused that decision to pivot from big tech to joining as COO and employee #3 at a startup.

C: So before I was at LinkedIn, I was at Coursera, which was around 75 people at the time. I knew pretty quickly from juxtaposing my experiences that I wanted to be somewhere smaller. I found it was very important to me to move quickly, which is impossible to do when you’ve reached a certain size and are operating at a massive scale. I was initially thinking a company more the size and business stage of Coursera — 75 people, found product market fit, still working on exciting problems and moving quickly, but also thinking about scaling and those kinds of problems.

To be honest, I didn’t think I’d do anything as early-stage as Persona. When I joined, we had a ton of ideas, no information, and much less product market fit. But my sister told me, “you should meet with Rick. He had a huge impact at Square and is the kind of guy who has what it takes to build something.” She told me it was just him and his roommate, and I thought, “well, that’s not even a company yet!” But I decided to meet with them, and it was clear straight away that they really were very special and unique people. I'm sure everyone is biased that way toward their founders and leadership team. But I really feel that way.

E: I’m curious — you had this experience at Coursera going from employee 75 to 200, then moved to a big tech company. Regardless, both are still very different than joining as employee #3. I’d love to know what kind of things you had to unlearn about your other experiences to start this experience with fresh eyes.

C: Good question. I don't know if this is a perfect answer, but it's the one that definitely sprung to mind. At LinkedIn, we had such a great brand. Everyone knew us, even internationally. Even at Coursera, we had very strong brand recognition, so I was used to there always being some kind of awareness.

One thing that became very clear very immediately with Persona was that no one knew who we were. There was no “brand recognition.” The team intellectually knew that, but at the same time, it was still an eye-opening experience for people to just be like “we have no idea what you do.” Even after we signed two of the largest e-commerce brands in the world, people still don't know Persona. This is partly because of what the product does, especially being on the fraud side where there are some inherent limitations. But that was something really different for me, and I think it has helped me remember not to take that for granted — and now I’m always ready to explain Persona and tell our story, and not assume folks know it.

The other thing I would say is that speed is so important in small companies. And it actually becomes even more important for you to maintain that mindset as you grow. I’m not sure if I was “unlearning” so much as I just had never done this before. There were so many things I had never done, and what I realized pretty quickly, and what I think our whole team early on believed, was that we just need to do, learn, and get better fast. There’s no one who’s going to magically come and anoint that our plan is perfect. We just need to act, and if we make a mistake, we will redo it and learn from it. But you have to keep moving forward all the time — you cannot stop.

E: Is that type of work something you’ve always felt drawn towards? It seems like a founder type mentality to just try things and see. Is that something you stumbled into and you were open to trying, or did you always know that you were drawn towards this kind of work?

C: It’s something I’ve always felt drawn towards. This isn’t to say that I'm good at everything I do or that I enjoy everything equally. But one thing I have noticed about myself and the early team is that you have to be biased toward action to build something. Or at least, you're going to be a lot happier if you're biased toward action and okay making a mistake.

Now we're at about 200 people, and I can tell it's scary for people to ask questions because they feel like so many people are watching them. Part of me really understands that natural human reaction. But the other part of me feels like you have to ask questions, especially in the beginning, to set yourself up for success. So I'm always trying to encourage people to not be afraid of making a mistake or looking like they don’t know something.

I joke about it with Rick and Charles — they're both like, “it's kind of interesting how you're never upset that you made a mistake.” And I'm like, “yeah, because I make so many all the time!” I know I can't possibly be perfect all the time, so I just think, “ok I learned that, gotta do better next time and move on.” I'm not too hung up on the mistakes we make. From observing startups, I've learned that the biggest mistake you'll make is not doing something, wanting to be perfect.

The truth is, startup land is an ecosystem. It’s not a clean-cut situation or a business in a vacuum. It’s about the timing, the product, your investors, your competitors — so many things you can’t control. So you have to just do and then learn as quickly as possible.

E: That’s great advice. There's no existing playbook with a lot of this. You're not at this company where they've tried many years worth of experiments, so I love this mentality of not being too upset about the mistakes. You mentioned that Person is at 200 employees now, and you joined as employee #3. You've raised a lot of funding over the years. I'd love to know — when you think about the last 4 years at this company, what have been some of the biggest turning points?

C: There have been so many on the product side. It’s pretty amazing to see how much we’ve built and shipped. So much of that is a testament to Rick and Charles' leadership and being able to build a world-class product team that moves so quickly. We had one product when we started, and today we have close to 10 that customers are using. So I really feel proud of the fact that we've built this incredible platform that can all be used modularly, but also better together.

Other milestones in my mind often have to do with our customers. We’re pretty young, and we’re in a very sensitive space that deals with incredibly sensitive data. One thing I'm really proud of is when we started working with some of the largest enterprises by revenue in the world, they were shocked that we had done so well in the security review. I'll just never forget that. Getting a technical win and getting praise from their product, engineering, and security teams saying, “your team has built something really incredible and it actually will solve our problems.”

E: That’s really affirming. Especially since you've seen it from the beginning, you've really seen it build from the ground up. I want to ask about Rick and Charles specifically, as they've been with you in this process and you've mentioned them a couple times now. There was clearly something there that resonated with you. I'd love to hear from your perspective, as someone who decided to join as employee #3, what it was about them as founders that made you want to join.

C: They are really, really smart. And I actually didn’t even fully understand that before I joined. Partly because I can’t really evaluate their skills — I’m not an engineer, which they both are by training. So maybe that wasn’t even really the direct reason I joined. But I think that kind of intelligence is what made them so clear-eyed about it, and that’s why I joined. They were so clear-eyed about what it would take to build something from nothing and how much of that involves building an incredible team and culture. And they were very honest with me from the get-go about how challenging it would be. How maybe if we couldn’t find product market fit, the best thing for us to do would be to close up shop and not try to force something just because we wanted to say that we were a Silicon Valley startup. That level of honesty and their ability to prioritize the people that they were asking to take a huge risk in their careers and lives really surprised me because they’re both first-time founders.

They're both younger than me, so I definitely had a little bit of a prejudice thinking, oh, maybe they won't care about other people on the team that aren't founders. That's something I've heard a lot and have observed a couple times up close. I was worried that they would want to recruit all these people, build this team, and then run employees into the ground. But Rick and Charles were so honest and so genuine about wanting to build a really healthy, inclusive, and caring culture. Most importantly, they have always been fully in the trenches with everyone — never leaving anyone to burn the midnight oil alone or expecting others to work harder than they do.

Another thing that really struck me about Rick and Charles is that they were both really excited about having people with completely different skill sets from them. There is a very genuine appreciation and respect for that, which you don’t always see with technical founders who are building a technical product. But for both of them, they were just like, “Well, we really want to build something that works for our customers.” And to their credit, since day one they have never wavered from that.

You see it when you meet them. They’re very transparent and authentic individuals, so I never really doubted it. Their customer centricity and deep appreciation for other functions that are not their own are a huge reason why we have an incredible culture — one of caring and respect for all these different people who are all contributing to building this company.

E: That’s great. Something we hear often is how important having a sense of clarity is, and I love that’s what you noticed right away in them. I have one more question for you here, and it’s now hearing from your own perspective — I think many people have been in similar positions where they debate either starting their own company one day or joining as an early employee at a startup. From your experience, what’s some advice you would give them?

C: I think my advice is a little unorthodox because the advice I was given was very focused on the TAM, the product, the business opportunity, the investors, etc. Of course, all of that is important and should be considered when you’re considering an early-stage opportunity. But I really do think it’s about your level of comfort and your desire to work super closely with the rest of the early team and how aligned you are on values.

I remember saying to Rick, “I don’t know anything about this market. I’m coming from a completely different market.” And he told me, “I think you can learn it. But what you probably can’t learn or change at this point is what you think is important in a company, in a culture, in the team you’re building. And that’s what I want to see — if we’re aligned. And that’s why I think you should join.”

I can’t overstate how right I believe that was. Don’t underestimate, especially if it’s early stage, how much time you will be spending with these people. So much stuff comes up that isn’t even related to the business or product. It’s about how you treat each other and how you make decisions about other people. Even if the market size is huge and the opportunity and product are the best, it’s probably going to be painful for you if you don’t have those other things, like alignment in value and desire to build the same kind of culture.