How to Scale: 3 Tips from VTS’s Jess Scott on How to Go from 200 to 1,000 Employees
Remember when, in movies from the late 1990s, characters who were looking for a job would leaf through a newspaper's classified section to see who was hiring?
Jess Scott has been running HR teams and talent acquisition teams since then. "You would circle in red pen the job they're going to go apply for. That's how you applied!" she says, laughing. "Sending emails, especially with attachments, was still a very new thing."
While the industry has changed a lot since then, especially with the data and technology that allows for more predictive control of the process, the fundamentals of how to build a solid team have remained the same. And Jess has been leaning on those fundamentals as she's helped scale VTS, a leasing and asset management platform for the commercial real estate market, from a couple hundred employees to more than 1,000.
We sat down with Jess, who is currently VP of Talent at VTS, to hear more on how she's done it, as well as how she got her start in the industry and what she's learned along the way.
Finding a "real career" in finding people
Jess was a theater major in college when she realized that she couldn't commit to pursuing a thespian's life.
"I dated an actor very seriously in college who was eight years my senior, and I saw his life, and I was like, 'I can't live that life.' Temping forever, not knowing where your next gig is going to come from, it just seemed too erratic for me," she says. So Jess added a sociology and education major and planned to teach, but that didn't quite work out, either.
"I student-taught and found out that I love kids, but I couldn't do that all day!" she says. She got an internship at a retained search firm and figured she'd be there for a little while—and was surprised when she found it really interesting.
"I didn't think 'finding people' was a real career," she says, smiling. "But I was learning how to build an org chart, how to interact with managing directors, how to woo people, how that whole process works."
Jess later joined a search firm, then went in-house at MTV to help build their first internet team. "I got the startup bug then, and really learned about all the moving parts of being an HR generalist," she says. She worked there while she got her master's in industrial and organizational psychology. From there, she went back and forth between agencies and startups before finding her way to VTS.
Why VTS
Jess first heard of VTS from a friend who suggested she come over and consult for the growing company. But Jess stayed because she really believes in the product and the people.
"What we're building makes so much sense. It's so intuitive," she says. "Real estate isn't going anywhere. It's actually a lot sexier than I thought it was going to be!"
The opportunity to run talent acquisition at VTS checked all of the boxes Jess was looking for in a job:
- An opportunity to make an impact
- The chance to work with founders she believes in ("our founders are really good people with really good moral compasses," she says)
- A formal commitment to DEI and ongoing learning and development
And since joining, her expectations have been met. "I've never worked somewhere where our values are truly who we are," says Jess. "We don't talk about culture fit. I think that's so subjective and kind of antiquated and has all sorts of unconscious bias and all sorts of things that creep in. We think about it as: are you a values fit? Are you going to be a good peer and member of our community? We've created a really wonderful work environment, and as we scale, we've been able to keep the things that make us special top of mind for everyone."
Embracing exponential growth: 3 tips for other managers doing the same
As the VP of Talent at VPS, Jess's days are filled managing her 14-person team, directly overseeing a few executive searches, and planning for the future of the company, from hitting next quarter's head count to building a production-driven environment that more systematically manages talent across the organization.
After seeing her team through the pandemic, says Jess, she's more focused than ever about building "true, deep, authentic relationships" and learning how to support and motivate her teammates, both at work and in their personal lives. "I really care about what I do, and I really care about my team, and I want to see us win," says Jess, who adds that her team now has even better unity and cohesion than they did pre-pandemic.
She's now able to channel that shared motivation and dedication into her biggest professional challenge to date: making sure that her team can meet the talent demands of a fast-growing company.
And she has three tips to share on how to do just that:
- Adopt new tools and techniques. Jess is an intuitive manager at heart, but she knew she'd have to step outside of her comfort zone to build something truly systematic and scalable. And now, "we use data to better predict capacity," says Jess. "We know how many jobs we're going to be able to fill based on past performance, broken down by product, engineering, and business, which take different amounts of time." She invested in cleaning up her team's data and building the infrastructure to better predict and track hiring needs. "We're very metrics-driven now. We had to totally rethink and reimagine how we were doing things, because what had worked wouldn't scale."
- Be vulnerable with your team. "Scaling is hard!" says Jess. "You're flying the plane and building the next version of it at the same time. As a leader, it's important to be vulnerable with your team, as it allows them to ask questions. It's about creating that space to make mistakes or to not know."
- Ask for the help you need. "If you don't know how to do it, it's okay to say, 'I don't know how to do it!' and get resources to help you," she says. "There are things that I just didn't don't know how to do, like how to assess whether assessment tests are going to make our top of funnel better." In that example, Jess got around that by partnering with an outside firm to come in and help lead a six-month process to restructure her team's processes and set them up with the metrics-based approach that's currently driving a 33% increase in capacity.
Looking to join Jess's fast-growing team? Check out VTS's open roles.
Chainalysis: Announcing Our Series B
Below is an article originally written by PowerToFly Partner Chainalysis, and published on February 12, 2019. Go to Chainalysis' page on PowerToFly to see their open positions and learn more.
Reflecting on how far we've come and where we're going - as cited in Fortune, Coindesk, and the Accel Blog.
One of our company values is "radical gradualism." It reflects the combination of our big ambitions— to build foundational technology for the reinvention of the world's financial system— with our insistence on debating every important decision along the way. We are thoughtfully and deliberately paving the way for the responsible use of cryptocurrency among governments, financial institutions, cryptocurrency businesses, and consumers. This is no small task. That is why we are excited to announce that to further our mission of building trust in blockchains, we've raised a $30M Series B led by Accel, with participation from existing investors.
We have come a long way since we announced our $16M Series A in April 2018. We:
- Continued to grow our data advantage. We now support 85% of the top twenty coins by trading volume.
- Deployed Chainalysis KYT (Know Your Transaction), our real-time anti-money laundering and compliance solution for cryptocurrencies, and now have over 100 financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges signed up to use it.
- Expanded our coverage beyond Bitcoin to include Ether, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and stablecoins to better analyze the funds involved in money laundering schemes, track contributions to ICO scams, and identify other forms of illicit activity in both Chainalysis Reactor, our investigations solution, and Chainalysis KYT (Know Your Transaction), our compliance solution.
- Broadened our support of global investigations with Chainalysis Reactor and have now tracked billions of dollars of stolen funds.
This is just the beginning. Illicit activity will continue to increase in absolute terms as the industry grows and as institutions prepare to transact in cryptocurrency. We will use our new funding to grow our global footprint, double down on our data, invest even more in new cryptocurrencies and multi-currency support, and continue to improve our compliance and investigation software. There is significant work to do in preparation for regulatory clarity and the institutionalization and mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency.
Growing our global footprint
Although we've had feet on the ground in London for a while, we are excited to officially open an office there. As our second European office following Copenhagen, London will act as our hub for European business as well as anchoring our research. We will look to double our headcount there, tapping into London's deep talent pool. The city is optimal for its proximity to top universities that increasingly recognize cryptocurrency as a technology poised to reshape the way people exchange value across the world. The office will position us to work with the major financial institutions and cryptocurrency businesses based in that market, as well as European governments. It's also convenient that our newest board member, Accel's Philippe Botteri, is based in London!
Additionally, we expect to continue to grow our business in APAC. In particular, cryptocurrency businesses founded in the region are quickly adopting anti-money laundering (AML) technology like ours in order to compete in the global arena and engage with users in the U.S. and Europe, and we expect this trend to continue. Cryptocurrency is borderless by design, and our technology can be used seamlessly across the world, regardless of local or international regulations.
Doubling down on data
Our core objective is to organize the world's blockchain data and make it accessible and useful to governments, financial institutions, and cryptocurrency businesses. We are doubling down on our investment in our people and technology that builds our understanding of how and why people use cryptocurrencies. Specifically, we are building a team that is focused on attributing more services associated with criminal activity, including darknet markets, scams, ransomware, terrorist financing, and sanctions evasion.
Our investigations and compliance software are only as good as our underlying historical data. It's like Netflix building a catalogue: the new shows are great, but they also need the classics for a complete collection. Chainalysis is the only company that has been systematically collecting information that links real world entities to blockchain transactions since 2014.
We analyze new cryptocurrencies far in advance of launching them in our products. This year, we'll prepare for coins that we expect to launch in 2020. We maintain rigorous standards on our level of data coverage before we make new coins available in our products. This ensures fast investigations and accurate risk scores for our customers.
Investing even more in new cryptocurrencies and multi-currency support
We know it's critical for our customers that we cover the most widely used cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency businesses need to monitor the breadth of coins and tokens they support, and investigators need to trace across multiple blockchains. That's why we overhauled our infrastructure and completely rethought how to best support multiple cryptocurrencies in our products. Now we're prioritizing the cryptocurrencies that have significant market share or are particularly meaningful to our customers. Last month we announced our expansion into stablecoins, with Paxos and TrustToken as our launch partners for Chainalysis KYT for Stablecoins. Stay tuned for additional coins and tokens rolling out over the next several months.
Continually improving our compliance and investigation software to create the fair marketplace for the responsible adoption of cryptocurrencies
We believe cryptocurrencies' open ledgers can actually set the standard for "regtech" once overarching regulation is in place. By harnessing technology like ours, regulators, compliance departments, consultancies, and Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) can gain unprecedented insight into how and why people move money across the world. In addition to this transparency, blockchain compliance technology can screen transactions in real time. This visibility and velocity means cryptocurrency can, in many circumstances, help identify underlying risks better than in traditional financial markets.
In other words, we're ready to help governments, financial institutions, and cryptocurrency businesses enforce and comply with regulations across jurisdictions. That said, we are always improving Chainalysis Reactor and Chainalysis KYT to help our customers navigate a world in which cryptocurrency is more clearly regulated and therefore more mainstream. We're focused on making our powerful software easier to use and releasing advanced features for even more insight and control.
Blockchains' potential to bring positive change is broad, ranging from streamlining remittances to serving the underbanked in the U.S. and abroad. But there is a long road ahead before cryptocurrency fulfills this potential. Building trust— among governments, financial institutions, cryptocurrency businesses, and consumers— is the most vital step in cryptocurrency's transformation into an invaluable technology that protects our safety and enables greater prosperity. We believe this radical transformation is best done gradually, and we're looking forward to this exciting next phase of our company's— and our industry's— growth.
We're growing! Check out our 25+ open roles here.
7Park Data Acquired By Vista Equity Partners
Below is an article originally written by PowerToFly Partner 7Park Data, and published on December 11, 2018. Go to 7Park Data's page on PowerToFly to see their open positions and learn more.
We're thrilled to announce that 7Park Data has been acquired by Vista Equity Partners
This achievement could not have been realized without the remarkable efforts of our dedicated team, the trust of our partners, the belief of our investors, and the support of our deeply valued clients.
We founded 7Park six years ago with the goal of delivering tremendous value to data owners, by transforming their raw data into analytics-ready assets, and data consumers, by providing critical insight needed to make better decisions.
Today, extracting value from raw data is a challenge faced by every company in every industry globally. Our partnership with Vista will enable us to help companies execute their critical data initiatives on a much larger scale – by opening new markets, developing new products, and accelerating investments in our team and technology. As we scale, we will maintain our relentless focus on delivering value to our clients and partners.
We are energized by our opportunity ahead and look forward to realizing our markedly bigger vision for the next phase for 7Park.
Lastly, we're incredibly fortunate for the success we have had to date. Thank you to all who supported us through this journey – onwards!
-Alex and Brian, Founders
All About Peloton
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