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On this episode of the @WhatWorked podcast, Tyler Rachal and Mike Wu sit down with Kelly Feeney and Kelly Snodgrass, Founding Partners at Kairos Studios. Are you interested in learning more about customer operations? Listen to this episode to hear the lessons that both Kellys learned during their time at Uber, Airbnb, and Snap.

We covered a ton of great topics:

• Finding your first job in Silicon Valley
• How CX teams can scale sustainably during hypergrowth
• Their mission to make work work

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Transcript edited for clarity:

Mike Wu

Thanks for joining us for another episode of the What Worked Podcast. Tyler and I are very lucky to have with us two guests today, Kelly Feeney and Kelly Snodgrass, the co-founders of Kairos Studio. Today we're gonna be talking about a bunch of stuff, but both Kellys come from the world of hyper-growth startups. They work at companies like Uber, Snapchat, Airbnb. They've been in the trenches building those companies when they're scaling up really fast and we all know those brands today. 

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Today they lead a company called Kairos Studios, which helps a lot of similarly rocket ship companies with their customer operations. Very lucky to have you guys. Thanks for joining us. Could I hand it over to you to do a little bit of a better and deeper intro of who you guys are?

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Kelly Snodgrass

Yeah, thanks for having us. We're really excited to be here. I'll do a brief intro myself and we'll let other Kelly, the two of us Kellys always confusing, give her intro. But yeah, my background is actually an industrial engineering degree. So a process engineer at heart. But I'm one of those people who has lived many lives in a short 15 year career. So after I did industrial engineering in a manufacturing setting for a few years, I turned into a customer experience strategist pretty early on. Uber was my foray into that and managed to sort of grow those skills working at Snap and a hyper growth company here in London where I'm based now, where I turned into a product manager, something I had kind of hoped for for a long time.

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And from there, I evolved into a psychology aficionado. I've always loved psychology and kind of my foray into management planted that seed, which I explored more formally, finally in 2020 as a leadership coach. And then in the last era of my life, becoming a mother. I think I've really turned into a womanhood champion, full stop. And I've combined all of these skills as a female founder, co-founder with Kelly for Kairos Studio. And we're really looking to see how we can take all of our experiences, all the languages that we speak and create impact on a broader scale, both for, again, hyper growth companies, but also for the future of work as well.

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Kelly Feeney

This is Kelly Feeney. We really like, by the way, being the Kellys. It's really fun in emails. So a quick intro to me. I've spent my career only at startups until I started consulting, and then I started working with a few other types of businesses as well. And always in the customer support and then more general operations area. And I just got very lucky to have landed at companies like Airbnb, spent a little bit of time at Coinbase and then Uber. And from there, a few FreightTech companies and an InsurTech company as well. I worked my way up, I was actually a frontline agent at Airbnb, then became their first member of their trust and safety team. I was just always raising my hands for what we can talk about later, some unsexy projects and realized that I could make a career out of that and realized, okay, this is actually operations and then started leading teams, launching teams. 

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I actually worked with Kelly at Uber and I also worked with her when she started coaching and she was working with me as I foray into consulting. So I was consulting on my own for a little bit, helping, I wore a few hats as a consultant. I was first sort of an interim head of operations for early stage companies, started growing later stage, started launching new business lines. And then we joined forces to launch Kairos Studio. We always had the same life and work values. We want to help support women in the workforce. We talk a lot about how we want to support the underdogs in the workforce, whether that's the customer service teams or other females who are looking for more flexible work. And so it just really naturally happened that we started Kairos Studio this past year. And we're really stoked to be doing projects as a team now instead of individually.

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Mike Wu

That's awesome.

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Tyler Rachal

Very cool and super impressive, honestly, Kelly F. I've known you for a long time. Always been super impressed by you. I'm curious, this is a question for both of you. You mentioned joining these companies, these future unicorns, right? What was your experience like? How did you get a job? I mean, I feel like even getting in the door is kind of hard, right? For those early stage companies, because they're moving so fast and they don't really have these traditional application processes and that sort of thing. So what was that like for both of you? Kelly S, you making a career change and then Kelly F, you've only known this so curious you know what you experienced.

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Kelly Feeney

I mean, to be honest, I was reflecting with Kelly this week and I was like, you know what, maybe I was manifesting before I really knew what that was. When I landed at Airbnb, honestly, it wasn't even that intentional. And all of the best things that have happened to me haven't been overly thought through. There were things that were intentional, but it wasn't intentional that I was trying to get to some big, newly funded tech company. I actually was moving back abroad to Buenos Aires at the time. And so I was like I'm either finding a remote job, and this was in 2011 before that was a thing, or I'm just gonna save a lot of money, then go there, then find a new job. Airbnb was actually hiring remote and I had used it before it was really known, and so I was searching their website and I was like, yeah, this sounds fun to solve customers' problems, while I also get to serve my own life of working remote in Argentina.

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I would say similar things happened from them. Of course, I started to know some people. I landed a role at Coinbase because one of the recruiters at Airbnb was there. I didn't know anyone when I joined Uber, but again, the role just sounded great. And then I happened to land it. So Kelly might've been a little more intentional than me, but I was not.

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Kelly Snodgrass

Yes and no, right? So I think my story probably has a through line of following the breadcrumbs rather than having a very intentional plan, which was similar to Kelly. You know, where it all kind of came to a head is I was working in manufacturing, which is a far cry from where I am now, and they moved me to the Bay Area. And coming from the Midwest, I had no idea what the land of dreaming, like dreamers, right? California is this land filled with dreamers. And I got there and I was only supposed to be there a year and I very quickly realized I couldn't leave. I was intoxicated with this, what was a decade ago now, this culture of feeling empowered enough to change the world. And so I was like, how do I make it into one of these companies? And I knew I couldn't go from working for a massive manufacturing company to working for a tiny startup. 

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So I found my bridge job, which I guess a lot of people call it now, at Groupon, doing supply chain and logistics for their Groupon goods arm. So that was kind of this bridge into tech, which Groupon was quite big at the time. It was a chaotic entrance. The founder got fired the first week I was there, so it was like a weird time to be at Groupon. But again, sometimes those redirection things are great. And so after six months, I started applying for roles and literally one of them happened to be Uber. I didn't think much of it, like just put my name in a hat and four months later maybe I got a reply. So again, I didn't think I'd gotten the role for quite some time. And somehow I landed the job. My profile was not the typical profile for the role they were hiring. They were hiring management consultants. I was this random engineer turned logistics analyst and yet they took a chance on me. I got through the interview somehow and that was kind of the catalyst for the thing Kelly mentioned right now, then you just start to know people a little bit more as you get further along in your career. So I was one of those people who just got lucky. It felt like at the time. 

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Mike Wu

What was that job at Uber that you got? What was that first role at Uber?

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Kelly Feeney

My first role at Uber was leading a community operations team, so customer service. And then, yeah.

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Tyler Rachal

Or are you saying Kelly S?

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Mike Wu

Kelly S.

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Kelly Snodgrass

Yeah, mine was an operations and logistics manager. So essentially overseeing the driver experience for the city of San Francisco.

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Tyler Rachal

Wow.

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Mike Wu

Got it and I ask because I've always been curious, what are some good entry points for these types of companies? It seems like you both kind of consider yourself a little bit like outsiders coming in.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, it's very interesting to me because Kelly F, I feel like you had this experience as a user of the product, right? And I think that's very valuable, especially like a lot of times with these companies, nobody's used it. So that's awesome. And then Kelly S, you have this engineering background, which I think is just good in general, like problem solving. But Mike, you were saying?

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Mike Wu

I think it's to understand how you can actually get a job at one of these companies. And sometimes there's some intention behind it, sometimes it's just more of an opportunity and you're being opportunistic. But I've always understood, I'm curious just to get your guys' opinion, customer service/customer operations seems like a team at some of these companies that if you are coming from the outside in, that might be a good place to look in terms of getting your foot in the door. What do you guys think about that idea, is that true?

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Kelly Feeney

Absolutely, and I will add that they're mixed with my luck. I grew up in Silicon Valley. I didn't really think about that at the time, but my lens was always towards tech companies. So there was like, you know, I was more inclined to look for those companies, I would say also when I was looking for a role. I absolutely think that joining customer operations, whether it's customer support, success, et cetera, teams, it's such a great entryway into tech.

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When we were hiring for those teams, we would look a lot for people that were in hospitality, just very non-technical roles. And then we knew that we could develop them and eventually send them onto a career path into other orgs in the company if they wanted, or just up a leadership management track as well. So I absolutely recommend that for folks.

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Kelly Snodgrass

Yeah. Yeah, and I think the thing I would add is, and this has happened multiple times to me in my career, is if you can stay focused on the thing you really want. So,a lot of people say they want to work for startups and that's actually not maybe what they want. Maybe what they really want is to create impact. Let the world come and provide you that opportunity in whatever way, shape, or form that you can find it. And for me, the thing I really wanted was to stay in San Francisco with a job I really loved. And Groupon was my route to staying in San Francisco at the time, but it wasn't a job I really loved because I wasn't able to create the impact I had hoped, given the sort of chaos on the inside when I arrived. And I was able to create massive impact at Uber, but I wasn't focused on how I achieved that. I was just focused on what I really wanted. And again, like with consulting, all the transitions I've made in life, it's been so easy when I've been focused on the really high level thing I want and not the way it presents itself in reality.

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Tyler Rachal

That really resonates. I've always found that, and I don't know, not to go on a rant here about, I don't even know, what is the current generation? The current generation entering the workforce, what are they? Are they Gen Z? I don't know.

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Kelly Snodgrass

Alpha, Alpha Z, yeah.

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Mike Wu

Z yeah. No, Alphas already here?

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Tyler Rachal

Gen Z is entering the workforce or whatever. But I will say that that was a lesson Kelly S that I definitely learned too. In the early days of joining a startup, I was so focused on pay. I mean, I was broke, so that was a thing too. I was living in Santa Monica, making like $28,000 a year. It's hard to do that. But I was just so focused on the meaning of going from 28,000 to like 42,000 or whatever it is. 

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And I know it's hard, it's easy to say this in hindsight, but the thing that I came away with, and I don't know if this resonates with you, but I always say, it's dumb to use a sports analogy, but you want to be around the ball, that's kind of my thing. Wherever the ball is on the field, you need people to be everywhere, but it's nice to be around the ball. It's nice to make an impact. And I usually find that however that is, you kind of allow the team to kind of tell you this is how you can make an impact and this is actually meaningful for us. So I really appreciate that. I'm curious, Kelly S when you joined Uber, what year was that?

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Kelly Snodgrass

2014.

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Tyler Rachal

2014, Kelly F, what was Airbnb for you? Must've been 

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Kelly Feeney

Airbnb was 2011 and Uber 2014 as well.

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Tyler Rachal

2011. I was thinking about this as we were going to record with you guys today, do you ever think that you two were a part of something that has already been romanticized in film, but it will continue to be? I think about watching these movies about the old school, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in garages, right? And there's been a little bit, like I know for Uber, there's been that show. But is that something you guys think about is that you were part of a infamous time, a groundbreaking time and you were in the room per se. Does that ever cross your mind? Do you ever think of that randomly?

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Kelly Snodgrass

It's been something I've been trying to forget for the last decade. Because, and I'll say why that is, because it's the most intoxicating feeling in the world, it's more powerful than any drug that exists that I've not even tried. It is truly addicting. 

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Tyler Rachal

Sure. Yeah. Better than Burning Man.

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Kelly Snodgrass

I've not been to Burning Man, I can imagine it's better than everyone says. The feeling of creating global impact that will far outlast your lifetime times 10, it's unparalleled, right? So when you take that next job, which for me was actually still quite like sexy and cool, but as you keep going, you're like, I don't want that level of intensity and yet I can't give it up. It's this really weird, I don't know, two sort of conflicting values to hold wanting to make a really big impact and not wanting to burn out. And I've ended up coaching quite a few people on this, I call it work baggage. The things that you carry from job to job and mine was wanting to make a outsized impact, be in the history books, all that good stuff and I think Kelly and I are now approaching it from a more sustainable way rather than finding another unicorn. So that's my two cents on it.

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Kelly Feeney

The only thing I would add there is exactly what she's describing. Because I was there and she has this feeling, I have that feeling. The other thing aside from the product market fit and like joining out at crazy times, like everyone around you has that feeling. So it's just like, it's very motivating and, like she said, intense because of that.

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Tyler Rachal

No, without a doubt. And as you were saying that Kelly S, I was thinking about how Uber is a verb in our dictionary now. It's like I'm going to Uber there. Everyone, everyone understands what that means wherever you are in the country, which is pretty insane. So yes, you left an indelible mark.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, could you guys bring us behind the curtains of what it was like to be at Uber? I mean, you guys described it was intoxicating, you guys worked extremely hard, huge impact. A lot of us know Uber as passengers in Ubers, and then probably the closest thing is Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the HBO show, but take us behind the scenes. You guys mentioned something about staying up all night trying to service like the drivers that were showing up and having to build SOPs on the spot, what was it like?

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Kelly Snodgrass 

I think that's a good place to start maybe, just like the hyper manual aspect of it.

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Kelly Feeney

And I think that is what also was so unique about Uber from the outside. People may not realize, her and I both had different roles, but all operations roles. And people think of Uber as just like an app. You click a button, but like the magic behind all that was so many people handling operations and logistics. There still are, but at that time it was like 10 times the amount of people doing that. So yeah, it was hyper manual, everything from all of us including Tyler know, reviewing drivers licenses and getting them through the funnel like all of that was manual at first Getting drivers signed up just everything.

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Kelly Snodgrass

One good specific anecdote I have is, you know, it was a loosely regulated business model when we started and it became more and more regulated as we were there. So one week on a Friday, we got a message saying the local California government has put in a rule that every vehicle must be inspected before it's allowed to be on the road effective Monday. 

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Tyler Rachal

Oh, wow.

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Kelly Snodgrass

And so essentially, this is Friday at like four o'clock. So if we don't figure out how to do this by Monday, we have no drivers on the road on Monday. And everybody uses Uber to get from A to B. So all of a sudden, everybody in California is relying on us to figure out a solution to this problem. They don't even realize it yet. So, we do as Uber employees did, we figured it out overnight, essentially over a weekend. On Sunday we had vehicle inspection stations, pop-ups all around the state. And on Monday you had relatively speaking continuity of service. So it was like things like that behind the scenes, you didn't realize what it took to get an Uber and maybe get annoyed at why it costs so much in times, we do as well now, right? Like we used to get credits for Ubers when we were there. So that was a nice perk. But yeah, it is a significant operational challenge and the process to scale that company on a global level was like a monstrous task that I think we pulled off with relative ease, just given again, it seemed impossible probably at the time, but we just kept going.

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Kelly Feeney

And another sort of anecdote that I can remember of like the chaos was, obviously we were competing with Lyft. Back then there was actually a few other competitors. 

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Tyler Rachal

That's right. Those lift Uber wars. That was like Coke/Pepsi.

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Kelly Feeney

Yeah. We were constantly having promos, drivers specifically. We were looking to drive more supplies so there were constantly promos. Some of them were led by city teams. So I was in Southern California. So Kelly's team might've had different promos than we had. But then some were HQ driven. And I was working managing customer support. And then by this time that I'm speaking of those pop-ups that Kelly's talking about, there were some that were still pop-ups and some that were an actual brick and mortar. We had a lease, so we were managing in-person teams. And I was at this partner support center, as we called them, and just hundreds of drivers came into our San Diego customer support center and we were not sure why.

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It turns out that they had launched a new promo, not communicated anything to us. And so all these drivers are expecting to be paid. And then we realized, okay, I think it was, was it Thursday, Kelly, that there was some day where payments got approved.

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Kelly Snodgrass

Yeah, Mondays.

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Kelly Feeney

And so all the drivers came in and were like, where's my payment? And so the good news was, it was very frustrating, all of our reps were not very happy about that. Because from their end, it's like, it's very simple. Just communicate to us what's going on and also don't mess up the payments, have a process for that. But every time that something like that would happen, what was so great about working at Uber was we would pretty quickly spin up a process to prevent that from happening in the future. And then, we were so connected globally that that would get distributed globally very easily. So maybe that another event like this may have happened in Paris and they would have sent us their playbook or their SOP so that in the States we could prevent that as well.

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Tyler Rachal

That's super cool. And also I don't want to give the two of you PTSD, but I am curious for several years, did you two do anything on New Year's Eve? Cause when I think about Uber and crazy stuff, I think about New Year's Eve for a couple of years there. That was insane. It was like no drivers, so expensive people. I imagine customers and drivers losing their minds. Is that fair? Would you make any plans or would you just be like, I'm just going to stay at home with my laptop open and like a glass…

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Kelly Feeney

I wasn't allowed to be at home. I had to be in the office.

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Kelly Snodgrass

They had a strategy for that. is the thing. Uber had a strategy for everything. Did you do workation, Kelly?

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Kelly Feeney

No, I did not do workation. But, really quick on New Years, depending on the size of your office, ours was kind of small. We were actually required to work in the office past midnight. And then the second year that we had to do that, everyone was frustrated about that. So they let us bring a plus one and we had food, we couldn't drink, but we had food and we had little hats and we had a countdown. 

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I will say, there was definitely some incidents that would happen there, but we overprepared.  was sort of like doing a pre-mortem, which obviously not scalable to require all of your team to be in the office on New Year's, but it worked very well. I was monitoring everything in case there was an incident that someone wrote in about. I would have had my team have to respond pretty urgently. And there was barely ever anything because of how much we prepared and how much we communicated out to drivers about things. But yes, I spent quite a few years in the office.

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Kelly Snodgrass

It's another strategic sort of initiative and process because New Year's was the biggest spike you ever had, but in San Francisco we had music festivals and any sporting events that were big, like playoffs and things like that. The concentrated volume of people at a certain time in a certain place, you approached it the same way, relatively speaking. It was more intense on New Year's, but honestly, the second New Year's I had, it wasn't that big of an issue. The first year was a bit more intense. So like, again, Uber learned quick. It wasn't one for making the same mistake twice. Once you had an inkling of how to be successful, you playbooked it, you rolled it out globally and you were done and dusted, things were good to go.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, no, I mean, you're absolutely right. That was always my experience as a customer, but also my previous company was a vendor for Uber. And so I was always just super impressed, I was always reading Techcrunch and you'd see this article come out like, Uber is so bad because of XYZ and the speed with which Uber would respond was always just really impressive to me, the caliber of people. 

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One other last little PTSD. Kelly S, I can't help but bring this up, because you made me think of it, was, Uber, all their battles with the various city governments. I think about this one year at South by Southwest where we get off the plane and I fire up the Uber app and I'm seeing no cars. And I'm like, refresh, refresh, refresh, like must be broken, whatever it is. And then all the hubbub, like actual chatter, not internet chatter, this is people talking, waiting for their cars, was like, hey, Uber, Lyft, it's all been banned. I think someone should almost make a mini documentary about this. The city of Austin banned Uber, they banned Lyft. And then I think they banned, there was that one I'm forgetting, there was like a small competitor that was there, whatever it was. 

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Kelly Snodgrass

Yeah, Get Around I think it was.

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Tyler Rachal

The wild thing was, they gave those contracts to like six local companies. So these local companies built their own like Uber competitor. I don't know, that was such a wild time. So I can only imagine what that was like for you guys.

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Kelly Snodgrass

Well, I'll just say what motivated us in many ways is the DUI rates in cities that didn't have Uber or when they banned it in Austin, they would spike. It was such a bad thing for society from a safety and accessibility perspective. And I will say I was in Vegas when we launched Vegas. I helped prep for that because that was one of the last ones to go. And you know, every city eventually said, okay, we see the data, we see why it's compelling, we see why it's making our city safer. But some cities had to see the data rather than other cities just went along with innovation.

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Kelly Feeney

Some cities just had a really strong, the taxi industry had a really strong choke hold on the city.

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Tyler Rachal

Yes. My dad was actually a limo driver, if you can believe it, in Vegas for a while. So that union is very strong. Switching gears here a little bit. So you're at these hyper growth companies, both at Uber. And I'm curious, as you think about Kairos and what you're building now, when I talk to people that are thinking about starting their own advisory consulting business, I like to ask them what is it that you've done in your career that you think you could then turn into basically an advisory, whatever you want to call it, playbook, product, service, that sort of thing. So question for the two of you, as you think back to your different experiences, what are the common things that come up as you're working with your customers, your clients, things that you were in the room to do, and you built out those processes in literally snap a finger, and now it's effectively a service for you?

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Kelly Feeney

Broadly speaking, we spent some time narrowing this down as well, because Kelly and I could sort of do this with our eyes closed, probably with any company, but we wanted to put a little bit more organization to it, and we productized it a bit as well. So we've sort of broken it into three sections, the what, the who, and the how. So what do we need in place? We need some content management, some tooling, some systems. Who do we need, and what is everyone responsible for? So we do a lot of org design work. And we are really proud of our workshops and leadership development training that we do as well. And then how do we actually create these scalable operations through workflows and processes, the right operating model and getting the right rhythm with your cross-functional relationships.

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Kelly Snodgrass

Yeah, and I would say because I'm the process engineer, I mean, I actually, a coach, I'm all these, again, I love it all, but I think where I have found myself landing over and over again is process optimization. And specifically within that, I think there's a formula that a lot of companies skip steps on. And so I think of it as SSOO. So you should first streamline, then specialize, and then you move into the optimize and outsource. Aas companies are like, we want to outsource. It's like they jump to that last step and whatever that means, right? Like automate even could be a version of it, outsourcing or automation. 

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Tyler Rachal

Yep, we know this.

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Kelly Snodgrass

And yes, you know this well. So really there's four steps to me to actually get to this outsourcing or automation point depending if it's a human solution or a tech solution. And every single one of these steps in the process is equally important. And I so often see people skip the streamline and the optimize and just go for the specialize and the outsource. And ultimately the change management kind of falls on its head and things have to get rolled back. So I think that's another piece of value we found in our advisory.

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Mike Wu

Is it common for steps to get skipped in the SSO, especially the S in S?

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Kelly Snodgrass

Yeah, the first one is the most common one. So streamline and maybe I can take it to the tangible. So when I first joined Uber, every single Uber driver had to come to a physical office in person in the city of San Francisco, the heart of San Francisco to get on the Uber app. Not efficient at all. And there was loads of processes that we did in person with them that essentially every single city did differently. So San Francisco did a different to Boston, did a different to Denver. Some of that was because our governments were slightly different, but some of that was just because we did it different naturally.

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So the first step is to streamline how everybody is approaching getting a driver on the road with obviously some variation for market specific changes. Before you can even start to specialize the function and maybe hire people specifically to do one component of it, right? So we actually hired onsite contractors to do aspects of it for us alongside the managers as a next step, because we streamlined and then we specialized. And once we specialized, we could then optimize to say, OK, what's the best way to do this from a North America perspective? Finally, working with product and third party vendors to automate and or outsource the components that we could.

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Tyler Rachal

That's so brilliantly put for both of you. Love that. And we're vigorously nodding our heads because we experienced this with our business. I experienced this when I was a large BPO vendor working with the likes of Uber and other big companies all the time. We would get these companies and they would say like, we have this huge backlog and we're losing our minds. And the common thing that I always saw was like the gist of what they were saying is they're like, look, we're an engineering company. We don't want to be a customer service company. Here's the problem, you handle it. And then the vendor would fall on their face and everyone would wonder why that happened. Now, the version of that for Hireframe, we're doing typically more smaller teams, more specialized roles, typically like an individual that owns an entire function. But so much of what we're doing is that education to say, hey, person who's looking to ultimately delegate or offload this, how much have you done this process yourself? How much do you understand it? Made changes to basically streamline. And then I love your reference to specialization. That's always where you want to get to. And then finally, at the very end, you can outsource it, but that resonates a lot.

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Mike Wu

And we don't, as an outsourcing vendor, Tyler and I enjoy our position in this kind of context. But we don't always know what's going on behind the scenes. Like what does streamlining look like? What's going on, where are we at? We try to ask questions to kind of educate and qualify If we're like a good fit. But we actually have Kelly Feeney here today. I met Kelly through a customer-vendor relationship. Kelly, you were at Next Trucking. I'm curious, reflecting on that experience, SSO and then O being Hireframe, the outsourcing company that you worked with. Did you follow the SSOO or did we skip some steps? I don't know from our perspective.

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Kelly Feeney

We definitely skipped some steps, but I would say it was a little bit of an outlier. I think Kelly and I, if we were to look at my role at Next Trucking as a project, we would probably say, yeah, you're not ready to outsource yet. However, you also don't have anyone internal at the company to do these tasks and you need manpower, womanpower. And so I came to you knowing that I wasn't following SSOO, but I also came to you guys specifically rather than going to a really large vendor because I knew you guys were partnering with me on the SSOO.

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So yeah, that was actually, that's a good little story to add to this. That job, again, just going back to how I sort of made a career out of raising my hand for unsexy projects, I was hired for something that I didn't end up doing for like almost two years. So my role started because I thought I was starting some sort of temporary strike team project, like, hey, Kelly, look at this mess and figure it out. And then it turned out to be a way bigger problem than just like, here's a quick analysis of what's happening and start doing this one thing differently and we'll fix it. So I realized pretty quickly that there was no product solution yet for what we needed to do. So I came to you guys and was like, all right, I think this is how many people we need, but we're going to do it and figure it out. And then we, I think we doubled the team. created a 24 seven coverage team for this task.

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And it was so great to work with a smaller, I guess you could call you guys more like a boutique, vendor over at Hireframe, because I needed that collaboration. Exactly what you guys were saying, I was the only one running that function, which we didn't even know was going to be a function of the company. And so outsourcing in that case, it was more hands-on than I would say what we're helping people with at Kairos now. At Kairos, it's more like, let's help you scale

and then let's send this to the vendor and they can pretty much self-manage the task. This was me actually working with you guys to manage this team.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, and I'll give some kudos, serious kudos to you, Kelly F. I've known you for a long time, but it was great. This particular project you're talking about, I think it was just a tremendous example of everything that you're really strong at. You are just wonderful and maybe this is your curse as well. You're really good at being directly in the fire. You just have that ability to, I think, of get shit done, for lack of a better expression. You're really good at managing a lot of different stakeholders and egos, to be frank, as well. And then just kind of, you're great at doing the V1 and iterating from there. I hate to use another expression, but it feels appropriate. Building the car while you're driving down the road. These are your superpowers. So yes, I will return the favor. We really enjoyed working with you as a vendor and having you as a customer. You’re a wonderful customer because you're so willing to kind of get into the mud with us. And that's what makes a really great successful relationship. that's awesome. 

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Kelly Feeney

Thank you.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, and we were talking about the idea of impact earlier in the conversation. I mean, the impact you had on that project, Kelly, I think was tremendous. You were faced with a really challenging situation. I don't know if there was another company, Aside from Hireframe, that would have partnered with you on this. We scaled up 50 or 60 people in a week or two. And it was, I remember it was between Christmas and New Years too. And then the backlog, the impact was millions and millions of dollars. That's what we'll say in a very short amount of time.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, talk about being around the ball.

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Kelly Feeney

Yes, it was Millions. In a very short amount of time. I will say in that situation, we were like doing the SSOO together. I thought let me just get a, I wouldn't even call it a V1, like a V.5 of what I think the process is. And then worked with you guys to actually say, okay, what are we actually doing? What's this process? How do we streamline it? Then we did specialize from there and we actually were able to then bring in people from other parts of the company to specialize as well. So at Kairos, we do similar work, but we're a little more focused on working with teams that aren't really in a crisis mode. When I came to you guys, I was like, I have no one at this company and help me. I'm in a crisis, please help. 

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With Kairos, we're trying to help people when they're ready to scale. They probably feel like they're doing a really great job and they are. They've got a lot of talent. It might just feel like a house of cards operation that's going to fall at any moment. There's a lot of single points of failure. And they're like, okay, we know we just raised some money or we just closed a lot more clients and we know we need to scale. We're to double our business. How does that actually look and how do we do that in an efficient way and hopefully can they save money as they double their business on the customer service side. So a little similar, but different work that we're doing here at Kairos.

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Tyler Rachal 

Yeah. On that note, do you have a way, a framework for how you look at fast growing startups? I realize that someone who's building AI robots is going to be different than someone who's doing like another marketplace type play. But I know Kelly S, we talked about Uber going from one employee to a thousand and then the difference between a thousand and fifteen hundred. How do you bracket these companies and what they should be thinking about.?

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Kelly Snodgrass

Yeah, I think, I mean, there's a lot of points of inflection of when you have to adjust how you operate pretty quickly. I think the first one that I can speak well to is around 75 to 100 people. You're raising series A, series B sort of stage. And here you had a company that was completely operating without any structure pretty well. Everybody is a generalist, know, rough, everyone can do everything a little bit. And all of a sudden that's just not working anymore. So I've come into companies at that stage as well and, you know, formed enablement teams, formed these sort of shared services style teams that allowed these other roles to specialize and develop people on a more technical or soft skill level, whatever they need, whichever side, to allow the company to grow more effectively. 

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I think the next big one is at around a thousand people. There's obviously many in between, but the one that I think is a precarious moment, again, the most precarious, because all of a sudden your culture stops scaling. So that's your operating model at 75 people and at a thousand people your culture doesn't scale all of a sudden. So you have to be really intentional about creating that culture of continuous improvement, creating that culture of championing your customer. You have to educate and foster it and not just assume everybody will do that anymore.

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Tyler Rachal

Totally. Yeah, Mike and I always talk about how you get to a certain point as a company where, and I don't mean this is going to sound demeaning, but it's not. But for a lot of people when they are the 1100th employee, at that point for that person, it's more of a job than it is this life changing thing. They're like, maybe I'll come to Uber and cut my teeth here for a little bit and I'll propel me to somewhere else. And I was employee number four for the company that I was at before Mike and I started Hireframe. I had a hard time relating to those people that would come in later that were BPO veterans. And they're like, Hey man, I'm just trying to get that last push before retirement or whatever it is. I'm like, but this is the mission, we are here. I had been drinking the Kool-Aid for far too long. So I totally get, I totally get all of that. 

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 I'm curious because you both have talked really passionately about Kairos being something much bigger and this place for women, people of all backgrounds to feel empowered and get the experience and opportunities that they deserve and are fit where they're trying to go. And I'm just kind of curious, as you both look back on your experience at these fast growth companies and now also being business owners. How have those experiences shaped what you're thinking about with Kairos? Like what is something that is burning in your mind, as Kelly S to kind of borrow what you were talking about is like that. How can I make a larger impact on the world? Where does that come from the two of you?

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Kelly Snodgrass

I'll tee you up, Kelly, because I think you could say a lot about this, but just before we got on this call, I sent Kelly a screenshot from a community we're a part of. It was two anonymous posts, and it's a great community. Called the Old Girls Club, if anybody's listening, highly recommend you join. Two women just saying how disenfranchised they are with the world of work. These are all people in their 30s, probably and above, mid-career professionals, successful, ambitious women. And they're so disenfranchised because they've worked so hard to achieve their dream and it's no longer feeling like something they can access through traditional work. And so I was just, I told Kelly, I was like, A, I want to solve this problem. I feel so bad that people are feeling this way and feel disempowered. I hate that and I want to change the world in that capacity. But B, I'm so glad we're working on this together because we do both hold the same passion for it and I'll let Kelly speak to the vision because I think she articulates it well but yeah that's kind of the motivation for it.

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Kelly Feeney

That's funny. also both think each other articulates things better than the other a lot. So it's great to be a little more business besties in that sense.

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Mike Wu

Same.

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Tyler Rachal

Like looking in the mirror. When Mike says stuff, I'm like, you're so good at talking. That's why I'm like, say like dumb stuff like that.

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Mike Wu

I'm always like Tyler you gotta you gotta talk more.

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Kelly Feeney

I was like, I'm glad Kelly's taking this one. Yeah, exactly that. And I've definitely felt that in a few roles. I think I started to feel that in a few of my consulting gigs as well when I was solo. I brought a few people in, but it wasn't Kairos. It was like me as an individual selling myself. And it's just not the way that the world needs to be. It's not the way that you need to work. And Kelly and I are both, what I mentioned earlier that we're both super aligned on our own values. So it was very easy for us to say yes to each other about Kairos because we both knew that work needs to be a place where you still have time and energy and excitement about your life outside of work. And also like Kelly's really great about having lots of projects that she's passionate about. Some of them are very clearly work stuff, but it comes from her passion about supporting women and things like that and her coaching background. 

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And so when we started Kairos, we both made a decision that this is our top focus for now, but there's going to and there has to be room for the other things in our lives. And I haven't had a lot of jobs where that was the case in the past. So that was one of our very first things that we didn't even need to discuss. That was just a given. And then to use that as a place where we can support other women, maybe they want to have children and they need a more flexible work situation. I don't yet have kids and I still want that situation. So it can be a place for all sorts of people, but we really want to support women having value-driven and engaging work in the workplace.

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Tyler Rachal

Well put by both of you. And what I'll say is obviously, first of all, I'm the one of the men here on this podcast. So I’m not going to do something really dumb and start to mansplain. I will just I will connect personally with what you just shared in two ways. One is, my wife is going to murder me for this, but I will say that and this is not me just making this up for a story. This is really true. Before going into record this podcast today is my wife's first day back from her second mat leave, we just had our second, same time as Mike had his first. And so today is day number one for her back in consulting full time. And literally as I was about to go grab like a power cord or something for this podcast. And I'm in the garage, by the way. So now she's taken over the guest bedroom as her office. Again, rightfully so. But as I'm leaving her, she's literally sobbing. And unfortunately, you know, I'm like, hold that thought because I got to go record this podcast, but I'll be right back to support you. But yeah, it's just as a witness to it, there's just so many emotions. And I think that there's just this feeling of being pulled in a lot of different directions. And you two put it so well, which is just like it's work doesn't work, I think, for most mothers. 

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And it's a shame. This is where I'll make the other connection.My mother was a bad-ass, I'm sure everybody feels that way, but I really do. She was a partner in a private equity firm and this was in like the seventies and eighties when they'd be like, you're applying for what job? She was able to hold her own in those times and worked and had five kids and just did it all really. Right.  And now I see that passed on, I have three sisters and two of them are moms as well. I always find myself thinking about my mom and she passed away when I was very young. But what would she think of Christine and what would they talk about as it relates to work? I'm just, I'm always curious about that. I think about her and how she had an MBA from HBS and she was just this badass. And what a shame it would be if she had to leave the workforce entirely and was never able to contribute because she obviously had so much to contribute. And yeah, anyway, so that all just resonates, not mansplaining, just connecting here.

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Kelly Feeney

No.

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Kelly Snodgrass

No, it's so nice to hear and it sounds like your mom was an amazing role model to all of your whole family, right? And maybe beyond your family.

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Tyler Rachal

Without a doubt, yes.

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Kelly Snodgrass

I mean, that's what motivates me in many ways, because what Kelly and I are doing is different, right? And it's not easy to be different. I will put my hand up on that. Being an entrepreneur, innovating and how we're working, you have to really, really back yourself. And what helps me do that is twofold. One, so many people around us are like, I want to do that, but I don't have the confidence to do it. And showing people that the way we're approaching work can be successful is what motivates me to keep going because like I believe it can be. And the more people who are willing to sort of fall on that sword and be the trailblazers, the more people who will follow. But the second even more broad thing is the next generation so no matter women, men, whatever, all of the children today, Gen Z will be the first to tell us that the way we're working isn't working right? 

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Tyler Rachal

Without a doubt.

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Kelly Snodgrass

They're they're gonna help usher this change in which I'm so excited about but I want to show to my my daughter: You can be whatever you want to be even the the many models that are out there today aren't the ones you have to choose but you do have to find the right people to partner up with. I think that's key. And you two have found each other and Kelly and I have found each other. That really, really, really helps because it's a lonely road doing it on your own. And, you know, this morning I was like chatting to Kelly about some imposter syndrome, things that we all feel. And yet when you feel it on your own, it's an echo chamber that can really stop you in your tracks. Cheers to partnerships and cheers to changing the future of work.

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Kelly Feeney

The only other thing I would add on to that is on the note of what Kelly was saying of it's really hard to do this on your own. I think all of us probably get naturally asked by people for advice on starting consulting or, I want to go off on my own. It looks pretty cool from the outside, like I started my own business, it sounds great. It is really hard. And I will say that  there's a lot of people going out to consulting now, some of them, it might be more temporary until they go back to a full-time role, which is totally fine as well. But with Kairos, what we're excited to do is like Kelly and I are excited to do that hard work. It's great that we have each other so we can send these voice notes back and forth and we have our doubts. But then we can create enough business where the folks that we bring on to help on projects, they don't have to do some of the work that maybe they don't enjoy doing or feels more challenging. So that's what we're really excited to do as well. We like taking on that challenging role.

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Tyler Rachal

I definitely feel like I talk to a lot of people that are interested in consulting, but they don't know where to start. And they're so intimidated by even just, a great example is not even going out and selling. Someone will say, hey, someone actually in my network reached out to me and asked me to do this project. And they're like sitting there, they're like shaking, they're like, what rate do I charge? Should I charge $5 an hour or 500? I have no idea.

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And you can tell that there's a lot of logistical things and tactical things they're trying to figure out. But at the heart of it is probably that imposter syndrome, where even if you are so accomplished and you've done so many things, you're still sitting there you're like, am I worth, you know, two hundred fifty dollars an hour, five hundred, a thousand, whatever it is you are. And you just have those doubts. And I'm glad you two found each other. Mike and I definitely share that as well. It's like literally I'm screenshotting him sometimes like, hey, someone liked my LinkedIn post and it's just, he's like, yeah, like let's go. So it's just so, so helpful. I will say, I do like to call this last segment of our show. It's an opportunity to do a little bit of an infomercial for your business. So imagine, what's the guy, the famous guy, was it Billy, Billy, what was it Billy Zane or something like that? You know, I'm talking about the infomercial King anyway.

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Kelly Snodgrass

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Tyler Rachal

So imagine it's like someone walks in like an infomercial and it's always in black and white, right? And they're like trying to carry some groceries or something like that and the fall falls down, whatever it is. What's that version for Kairos in terms of what if somebody's pacing around their startup office and they're like, this ain't working, we have to figure something out. Who are you guys looking to talk to and what's the best way they can get in touch?

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Kelly Snodgrass

The Kairos Studio visual, which Kelly alluded to earlier, is imagine you have built a beautiful house of cards. It's like 500 cards big and you've gotten every card to balance perfectly and it's all working. And then somebody comes along and says, you need to take that card out down at the bottom. Are you confident that you can do that and not have it all tumble down? Or what's the domino effect of doing it? Right. So I think it's when people feel like that's coming or it's happening. Don't do it on your own. Well, you can do it on your own and deal with it. But if you worked with someone like us, you could take that out confidently and know it wasn't going to topple in a way that was catastrophic. So that's my visual for it.

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Kelly Feeney

We have some good tangible examples of what that feels like in a company. Some are very, they seem simple, but they have really intense impacts within your company. I've had plenty of jobs where I felt like early stage companies, I was like, how do I go out of office? My peer Kelly here can't cover for me because there's too much work or there's not a good documented process. So in those cases, we're both people that would create the process so that we could do that. Or your time to onboard new employees is like months long and it's a job that shouldn't need to be that long. Or there's just like you can't actually track some of the metrics that you need to because your process is not streamlined. People are using different systems of tools or maybe you don't even have the right system or tool. So there's a lot of tangible examples of that. But I would say if you're on a customer operations team, you're getting to that point, like you really feel a lot of that tension internally and you're like, know there's a better way. I know we need to streamline this. Maybe you're a leader that has some experience and you have a vision. You think you know how to do that, but you need some extra hands on deck. And so we can come in and help you.

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Kelly Snodgrass

Another good one that I've experienced before is like the spreadsheet that keeps crashing. Your master spreadsheet that has maxed the number of rows is like something's going wrong, right? Like there are these things that like it works, but one day it won't, right? And  just we've done it so many times now and we really find a lot of joy in solving these really hard problems. Like the bigger the house of cards, the better. And it's not like necessarily a long process either. It's just about getting really specific about what needs to be done and just mitigating the risk and making the key and critical changes that you need to do. So we're not looking to sign people up for years long change. That's not our goal. It's how quickly can we get this done for you so we can move on and make this type of impact somewhere else, like zero to 99 impact somewhere else, not the 99 to 100 impact.

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Kelly Feeney

And we also really love, we have this like train the trainer approach. So we want to come in and help develop your team. There are some instances where we might recommend that a different leader or a specialist for some sort of org comes in once we get to the org design part, but we are huge fans of being able to promote from within. So that's in our ethos as well.

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Tyler Rachal

Love that. And I will say that I can't emphasize enough the value of doing that with people like yourself that are outside the organization. The thing that resonates with me, you're talking about the house of cards and not being able to go on vacation. You're telling me, by the way, workation is not a solution for all of this. Just everybody workations all the time?

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Kelly Snodgrass

No. No.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, you guys mentioned that earlier. I'm very curious.

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Tyler Rachal

I think about as founders, it's that little thing that's in the back of your head that makes it hard to fall asleep at night. Like, you know it's a problem and it doesn't matter how great your business is on paper, everyone's like, you have such a great business. This is so cool. The world's your oyster and you're like, but I know that somewhere behind the scenes there's duct tape holding these two things together. So yeah, the ability to have two people like yourself that can come in and are third party, but you've been in the trenches before and you're able to identify these things fast. And I love the fact that you're not trying to basically say, let's like work with you for forever. Let's maybe train you how to handle this going forward. So that's super cool. Mike, you were gonna say something.

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Mike Wu

I was thinking one metric, I haven't thought about this consciously, but the metric is how many vacation days we can take in a row or like in a year. And that's just grown over the years. Like in the beginning it was zero. And then now, we feel comfortable taking paternity leave. So that's kind of a cool way to think about it. Because the House of Cards, we've plastered it with glue. It's been somewhat solidified. We're still working on it, but it's got some glue holding it together.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah. Kids and life partners don't love workation. I don't know if that's been your experience, but I've floated that concept several times by Christine, my wife, and maybe she'll warm up on the hundredth time that I pitch it. No, I'm just kidding. This has been incredible. I really hope that somebody out there listens to this and they get inspired. That's like the first and foremost thing that I'm hoping for. Or also too, that you two get some potential customers from this would be amazing. So, on that note, what is your preferred channel? Do you guys prefer that they reach out via your website, find you on LinkedIn,?

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Kelly Snodgrass

I think our website or LinkedIn, our emails are our last name at KairosStudio.Tech because we're both called Kelly. So yeah, just feel free to drop us a line wherever you can find us really. All are open.

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Mike Wu

Awesome, we'll add your contact info in the show notes for sure and people please do reach out, know, the Kellys are fantastic, their experience is unmatched and we've worked with them. So thank you so much for doing the podcast and appreciate you guys doing this.

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Tyler Rachal

Yes, thank you guys.

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Kelly Snodgrass

Yeah, it was lovely to be here. Great chatting, yeah.

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Kelly Feeney

Thanks guys, this has been fun.

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