Jevan Soo Lenox on building AI-first cultures & high-performing teams at fast-growth Unicorn WRITER

0:00Jevan Soo Lenox:A great Chief People Officer has to really think about AI in their strategy, both for the people function itself, as well as driving organizational performance and change.

0:13Welcome back to 40 Minute Mentor, the podcast on a mission to raise aspirations and inspire the next generation of category defining founders, all in just 40 minutes. Today, we're joined by Jevan Soo Lenox, Chief People Officer at Writer, a leader in agentic AI for the enterprise. Founded in 2020, Writer helps businesses launch products faster, run deeper financial research and clinical trials. The high-growth startup is backed by some of the best investors in the world, including Bolderton, Radical Ventures, Iconic Growth, Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, and many more. Before joining Writer, Jevin already held multiple CPA roles in hyper-growth businesses, including Blue Bottle Coffee, Stitch Fix, and Innistro.

0:55With so much experience in building people-centric, high-performing cultures across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, I can't wait to dig into his many lessons that Jevin has no doubt learned throughout his career and hear more about his brand new role with the Whiter team. So Jevin, a big warm welcome to 40 Minute Mentor. How are you? I'm good. Thank you for having me, James. The pleasure is all mine. Thank you for taking the time from what I know is a very busy job, so I am incredibly grateful. We always like to warm off our guests with some quick fire questions to start. So if you don't mind, please can you finish the following sentences after me?

1:32Number one, the moment that defined my career was when?

1:36Jevan Soo Lenox:Moving to Shanghai with McKinsey and leading recruiting across 12 countries in Asia. Wow. Okay. That's a great experience, I'm sure, and a big role. So looking forward to hearing a bit more about that in a minute. The biggest lesson I've learned about leadership is? Leading through questions, not answers. Oh, that's good. That's a good one. Thank you. A skill I wish I had mastered earlier in my career is? Giving tough feedback to senior people, especially my bosses. Okay. I'm sure a lot of our listeners will resonate with that one. And if I could change one thing about how companies build teams, it would be?

2:10Jevan Soo Lenox:Embracing and supporting rapid evolution of teams. Love that. Well, Jermyn, thank you. We can't wait to dive into your experience. Your CV is exceptional. So I'm very excited. But I'm going to start like I always do by going back in time. And I'd love to hear a bit more about your upbringing. I'm particularly interested in where this kind of love the people function has come from. Yeah, so I grew up in suburban New Jersey in a little town. I'm second generation Chinese American. And I was a closeted gay little kid in that suburban town. And I was an introverted bookworm. So I think all of that sort of, you know, That sort of puts you, and I was one of the only Chinese kids in town, all this stuff, right?

2:51Jevan Soo Lenox:So a lot of onlys. And I think that sort of puts you a little bit, at least for me as a personality, a little bit kind of quiet, trying not to stand out, but spending a lot of time observing others and actually thinking about what makes other people tick. And so that, I think, kind of wired me to really just be curious and interested about other people, particularly people who are different than me, and what makes them excited, what drives them. And there are all these alternate reality careers that I've actually considered at different times in psychology, in marketing, but you can sort of tell they all come back to this central idea of just humans are complicated and unique.

3:30Jevan Soo Lenox:And how do you kind of crack the code on any individual or group of people? It's so true. It kind of totally makes sense now you've described it, how you've ended up where you are. But I know there's been a lot of hard work, a lot of lessons along the way. So we'll dive into those. You've held five chief people officer roles today, which is incredibly impressive. So do you mind giving our listeners that might not know your CV as well, a kind of whistle-stop tour through it and share some of your personal highlights from along the way? Yeah, my career has had two major chapters. The first was at McKinsey & Company, which is a management consultancy.

4:02Jevan Soo Lenox:I started as a consultant right out of college, working with a pretty wide variety of companies, wide variety of topics. And I just found that I kept being drawn to this kind of topics of people. And all my extracurriculars at McKinsey were in recruiting, were in training, mentoring more junior analysts and so on. And so I moved into what was meant to just be kind of a one-year experiment of rotating into McKinsey's recruiting group. And that turned into two years. This was in North America. And then got asked to move to Shanghai and take over recruiting strategy across the entire APAC region.

4:39Jevan Soo Lenox:So this was 12 countries at the time from South Korea over to India, down to New Zealand and all the major economies in between. And that is where I really started falling in love with the people function because every morning I was working on something different, on a country with a totally different education system, totally different economy, totally different competitive landscape for McKinsey. It was just such a strategic playground, and it was all fundamentally about getting great people in the door and then helping them succeed once they were here. But some pretty really different talent markets, really different local cultures and so on.

5:15Jevan Soo Lenox:And so that was when I kind of got bit the bug. And then the second chapter was jumping into high growth companies, starting with Square when there were about 400 employees pre-IPO in their hyper growth days, which is where I first worked for a founder, Jack Dorsey, which is a good place to start. And first worked with engineers. First, I think time being inside a company and seeing what being at a really mission driven company, really customer obsessed company, what that can do in terms of culture and driving performance. And then I've really taken that with me through a variety of other companies.

5:49Jevan Soo Lenox:I am a bit of an industry hopper. So I went from fintech at Square to Blue Bottle Coffee, Food and Beverage Hospitality, which is so fun. Just, you know, such a hands-on product, really amazing place to build culture. and then off to Stitch Fix and e-commerce and retail. And then most recently before Writer in Citro, which is AI drug discovery. And the last two companies, both Stitch Fix and Citro had a AI and machine learning at their core, trying to really transform how retailers, marketers, merchandisers, stylists, warehouse workers at Stitch Fix do their work. And then research biologists, drug discoverers at Citro.

6:29Jevan Soo Lenox:And so for the last eight years or so, So I've become really passionate about this collision of this new wave of technology and human work. And now at Ryder, I get to be on a much broader canvas because we work with enterprise companies across all different industries, helping them realize value. Yeah, incredible. What a diverse, rich tapestry of a CV. And it's something you said really resonated with me. I feel as a headhunter in the tech space, we're a sector agnostic, business model agnostic. probably maybe 60 % of our clients are B2B, but 40 % are consumer or marketplaces. And we work across different stages and that variety and the different functional expertise and the different geographical search.

7:10I just love that. I think variety really is the spice of life. So I can totally see how in your experience, clearly there's a lot of curiosity there that is taking you to lots of different areas. So that can only make you better at the job, I think that's really cool to hear. I'd like to kind of take you back to that first time you took the step up to being a chief people officer. What helped you sort of settle into that role? Were there things that you perhaps could pass on to our listeners who are maybe sort of looking to make that step up? Anything that you would recommend or get them to think about?

7:42Jevan Soo Lenox:So in the first CPO job, which was at Blue Bottle Coffee, I entered with fairly tremendous imposter syndrome. I was taking this on, you know, still relatively early in my career and had never done it before. I'd never been in a coffee business. There are a lot of haven't done, haven't done, haven't done. And I think the two things that really helped me settle into the role, the first was really building trust and connection with a number of other executives on the executive team. There can be a challenging dynamic if the CPO gets put into a more transactional or service relationship with the rest of the executive team.

8:20Jevan Soo Lenox:You really need to be in a pure relationship with them. You obviously need to deliver the things that you need to deliver, but those relationships, that trust becomes really important, both for your success and also your own sanity. And I was lucky. There were just some really wonderful people on that leadership team. And so rapidly within the first few months, we're working through different things. And I was going after a few strategic initiatives, building that momentum, building that excitement, building that connection, learning from them. I mean, there's so much that I had to understand about the business.

8:49Jevan Soo Lenox:that those relationships really start sort of settling you down and calming you down. And then building your own team. When you take the CPO job, particularly at high growth companies, you're often building the team pretty tremendously. By nature, the function often hasn't kept up with the growth. You're coming in to set the foundation for this new chapter and so on. And early on, it's stressful because you're doing a lot yourself. And it's also pretty lonely, actually, right? And you're trying to figure things out. And so on both dimensions, these lateral relationships with the rest of the executive team, and then the relationships with your own team and building your own leaders, those become really important, I think, for your success.

9:28Thank you very much for sharing. And in your opinion, what makes someone a truly great and impactful CPO? What are some of the most important skills that you need to hone and exhibit?

9:39Jevan Soo Lenox:I think the most impactful CPOs fundamentally think about their job as driving business results and priorities through people and organization. And I have this sort of little inside joke that I'm one of the less warm and fuzzy chief people officers out there because culture and morale is to win. And it's not actually just to exist in isolation. You know, it's not an intrinsic good. You know, you're a for-profit company and you have a board and investors and down the road, you know, public market soap folks, right? You're accountable. You're here to do something, right? And so I think you need to think about the fundamental outcomes of what you're doing as driving that overall business success.

10:22Jevan Soo Lenox:And I think that the skills that become really important to that, first, I would say, really translating the business strategy and focusing on what matters most into your own people priorities. There's so much to do in the people function, and it's a pretty wide and vast array of pretty disparate things. And when you're joining a high growth company in particular, you can just look at the mountain of stuff and get pretty overwhelmed pretty fast going into month four of this job. So this is me coaching myself, actually mentoring myself, but you have to really zoom out and think about what really matters most right now.

10:56Jevan Soo Lenox:And again, if you use the business goals and priorities as that lens, that can help you really focus in the right way. The second I would say is pattern recognition. And that can show up in a bunch of different ways. Obviously, as you're more experienced, you've just seen more things go well and go wrong and can drive off of that. It can be patterns across companies and organizations, across businesses. One of the fun things for me now that I've done so many different industries is I see patterns that are sometimes unexpected because I've been in very vastly different environments, but I see commonalities around organizational challenge or commonalities around people and culture and how they develop and so on.

11:35Jevan Soo Lenox:And being able to rapidly recognize those patterns, ascertain implications from them, see around corners, helping your CEO see around corners is a real superpower for this role. And the last I would say is truth seeker and truth teller. So I think if you're doing this role right, people really see that you will say the hard things to other leaders, particularly to your CEO. They will seek you out to give you those truths because they know that you will wield those truths with good purpose and impact. And others will seek you out to hear those truths, So it becomes this virtuous cycle if you do it well, but it's not easy to find that balance.

12:18Yeah, brilliant points. Thank you very much for sharing. And the CPO is clearly a very impactful, strategic, there's a lot of variety to it. It's a great role, but it's also difficult. And I think it's important to share the harder parts. So we'd love to hear your take on what those more difficult parts of the role are and what have been some of the biggest challenges you've had to face and overcome over the course of your sort of career as a CPA?

12:43Jevan Soo Lenox:I told one of my former CEOs that being the chief people officer is like being the rain gutter for the organization. That everything flows through you, right? It sort of funnels in and everything kind of comes through you. And if you're doing it well, beautiful, pure rainwater flows out. And then you're left with all this kind of detritus because you can see kind of all of the hard things, all the rough things of the organization, that takes a toll. It takes an emotional toll, to be honest. You see the hardest things across the entire organization. I've had CEOs say to me, you probably see the most comprehensive view of the company next to me as CEO because of the nature of the role, but it's often a lot of the toughest things.

13:29Jevan Soo Lenox:So that I think is challenging. Being in this role means there are going to be times where you are very disliked and there are always going to be employees that fundamentally see the people team as out to get them, right? Only representing the company's best interests. And you are the fundamental symbol of that power, of that hierarchy. And so I think over time, I've become accustomed to and more resilient to the fact that people project that apprehension, the past resentments, fast scar tissue onto you. But it's tough. Sometimes I will actually I get into a human conversation with people. I'll say, I'm just another human being.

14:11Jevan Soo Lenox:I do sort of, you know, occupy an advantage point of certain power and certain influence and so on. Right. But at the end of the day, I'm just another person trying to do right. And so I'm not saying I always do it right. But I think it can be really hard when you get put in this position where it feels, You know, it feels people are, don't think of you as a human being, candidly. It's a CEO as an agent of bad things. And I think, you know, as a result of those earlier sort of points, your ability to keep empathy over time becomes hard, but really vitally important, right? You know, I say to a lot of my team members, when we're doing something hard, we're sharing something hard, but if you didn't care anymore, that would actually be a bad thing.

14:54Jevan Soo Lenox:I don't want you to lose your empathy. I don't want to lose your heart. That's really important. But keeping the empathy means you feel bad and you get hurt sometimes, but losing it makes you not effective at your job. And all of that, I think, just combines. I feel like I'm scaring off every possible GP blogsters listening to this podcast, but it's a lonely job. Similar to the CEO job. Again, CEOs have told me this, right? Because you don't have a peer. It's hard to confide in and build relationships in the same way that other C-suite execs can with each other, right? They know that you occupy a certain seat and you have a certain relationship with the CEO and so on.

15:31Jevan Soo Lenox:And so a great piece of advice that someone once gave me was just, if you know you can't find that, you have to find it elsewhere, right? And so it's unsurprising that you see a lot of really strong chief people officer networks. I've got a really amazing cadre of chief people officer friends here in the Bay Area in particular, because we have to form that community for each other right we have to sort of buck each other up that's so true thank you for being so honest and i think actually it's really important other people that are either just starting their careers in the people function or progressing to the stage you're at they hear the reality of what it takes it is lonely and but it's also incredibly impactful rewarding you've had an incredible career but actually getting the right mentors around and getting peer mentorship it's one of the most common things we talk about on this podcast is actually so important so you don't fillers alone and as a before a company was acquired I was a bootstrap founder for 12 years and it was incredibly lonely at times and actually it was only when I started looking outwards and talking to other founders of search firms that I actually started to feel okay others are in this boat with me we can learn from each other I know someone I can call when I need to vent so it's really important so thank you for being so open.

16:40How have you seen the CPO role evolve over the years? I mean this must have sort of changed a lot especially as you've moved between different industries. I'd love to know what is more important now than it used to be and what still remains the same.

16:54Jevan Soo Lenox:I think what remains the same is what we talked about earlier, right? Really thinking about your role as driving business results and the components of supporting your CEO and doing that and doing your own work. I think what's different is technology. So when I first got into this, you kind of thought about your HRIS and maybe a few other ancillary tools kind of thing. And then I think over the last decade or so, not to date myself, there's been a proliferation of HR tech and innovative vendors and companies that are really making various aspects of the HR tech stack and the HR experience much more consumer grade, if you will, right?

17:38Jevan Soo Lenox:For end users, driving analytics and insight in a much more powerful way. So that's all been great. And so I think, you know, over the last five to 10 years, a great chief people officer has had to really lean into that and think about technology as an enabler. And now with the advent of AI and this being on, you know, everyone's sort of top of mind, a great chief people officer has to really think about AI in their strategy, both for the people function itself, as well as driving organizational performance and change. And we're still relatively early days on this, right? I think all of us are doing our best, sharing ideas and so on.

18:10Jevan Soo Lenox:But I think this role is going to be completely transformed in the next several years. It's already in the process of doing so. And again, everything we've talked about, I think, remains true. But how AI suffuses all of it and becomes one of the first things you think about in any organizational decision will be very, very new relative to what it felt like years ago. Yeah, totally. And what better place to work, given what you've just said, at one of the fastest growing AI companies. I mean, it makes total sense. As you mentioned earlier, you're four months into your role at Writer and you were hired as the business's first ever chief people officer, which must be an honor, but also come with a bit of pressure.

18:48So can you share a bit more about Writer as a business? What made you want to join the business at this sort of stage? What does the business do? And then we'll maybe talk a bit more about what your actual role entails.

18:59Jevan Soo Lenox:So Writer is an agentic AI platform that helps enterprise companies realize tremendous ROI through AI. We particularly specialize in complex workflows, reinventing workflows that create business value. And we deliver in our platform things that really matter to enterprise companies, privacy and security, the ability to observe across the platform what activity is happening, advanced controls, roles, and permissions, the things that you think about when you're a larger company and you really want this tool, this platform to be widely used, but you also need to manage that in a thoughtful way and to have visibility into it to really ensure that you're harnessing and driving the best business outcomes kind of coming out of it.

19:46Jevan Soo Lenox:And I joined because when I was first starting to get to know writer and hearing about this relentless enterprise focus and looking at the broader market, there are companies going after the consumer side. And then there are companies that are going after very specific niches of industry and function. But there really weren't a lot of folks who were, A, thinking about this sort of specific enterprise approach and really building for that from the start and creating a broad platform that would be able to really realize these increasingly complex cross-cutting workflows where some of these niche solutions that may do amazing things in kind of one portion of the organization will not sort of easily integrate or expand across.

20:31Jevan Soo Lenox:And that really resonated for me. I started my career at McKinsey working with large enterprise companies and seeing them from the inside and understanding what is challenging for them. And so immediately kind of clicked for me as this is a huge opportunity. The talent bar writer is just tremendous. I've been lucky to work at a lot of high talent places and writers at the top of the top. Just incredible people at every level, masters of their craft, very, very self-driven, high bar for themselves, and very mission oriented. just wanting to do amazing work for our customers and the humans that populate our customers.

21:06Jevan Soo Lenox:And I have a mandate. You've mentioned pressure, a good amount of it. I have a mandate from our CEO, May, to do a couple things. The first is to really bring the Protestant platform into writer's people function and to build on it for obvious reasons. We got to eat our own medicine, right? If we're telling our customers and helping our customers about the great, amazing value that we can create for them. We have to shine a light and show the way within our own functions, which we're doing so. And so I'm early days in that, but the people function really want to integrate that in and also really help our customers think about their AI transformations.

21:42Jevan Soo Lenox:I think one of the funny things, but more and more organizations are realizing this is AI is actually underneath it a people problem because you have all these amazing tools and sure, it's going to reshape how organizations are designed and head count ratios and so on, right? But there ultimately are still people that need to use the AI to be successful. And how you drive that, how you think about transforming how organizations work and how they coordinate and how agents work side by side with humans. These are really complex, fascinating, interesting organizational problems. And so to be at a company that's at the heart of that and asking me to lean into that is just incredibly fulfilling and motivating.

22:21Hassan, yeah, what an amazing opportunity. And I'm sure you're doing a brilliant job. I guess there are going to be people listening to this a bit like May. May realizes she needed to bring in a chief people officer and hired you. There'll be founders listening to this, probably getting inspired by some of the things you're working on thinking right now might be the time for me to make a big hire in the people space. What advice do you have for them? And what are some of the signs you've seen where companies really should be getting ahead of this? What are the typical telltale signs?

22:49Jevan Soo Lenox:Yeah, so the classical model is scale and complexity of organization, but I think things are getting reinvented. And so fast, it's kind of harder to use some of those metrics of like, oh, it's this, you know, a few hundred employees. You definitely need a TP-Ball store exactly at that phase and so on. But it still is a thing. I would say if you have a people-heavy business model where you have a lot of delivery orientation and so on, and having someone who's really strategic about that earlier on can be valuable. So again, what's the connection of people and organization to the heart of the business?