It’s Human to Grow!
“Do one thing every day that scares you.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
When we set out to codify our values at Human Ventures last year, it wasn’t even a question what our number one value would be. Unanimously, our team settled on “Growth”. Individually and as a company, we live and operate by the missive: “If you’re not out of your comfort zone, you’re not growing.” Whether we are hiring new team members, recruiting founders, we are consciously on the lookout for people who understand that the key to success is to seek new talents, skills, environments and learning curves.
Over the past year, the team has explored new ways to incorporate this core value “growth” into the everyday rhythm and culture at Human. Today, I’m happy to shed light on two key initiatives that I developed and launched as VP of Network this year for Human Ventures.
Human Founder DNA Program
As an early stage startup studio, we are in the business of investing in Humans first. We also understand that building companies from the ground up is hard work — it takes superhuman strength, knowledge, and passion. For this reason, we built a unique, proprietary program to provide our founders every tool available to achieve their full potential and purpose and to help them along their company building journey. We call it the Human Founder DNA Program. Every founder who comes through Human moves through this program, because, as our CEO Heather Hartnett says, “A company can only grow as fast as the person leading it.”
So how does it work? At launch, we partnered with an expert founder coach Peter Shallard to develop a unique founder-focused program that incorporates proven methodology, in person one-on-one sessions and evidence-based research. Over the course of several (entirely) confidential sessions, founders cover a broad range of topics including work and leadership style, traits, characteristics, goals, motivations and values. As Shallard notes, “Startups demand exceptional levels of focused cognitive performance — creativity, sheer hard work and more — from their founders. A founder with supercharged mental insight about their own traits, habits and idiosyncrasies will be better equipped to make critical partnering and hiring decisions in the early days of founding a new startup.”
In addition to sessions with Shallard, the program leverages personality tests that are built on proven bodies of research, providing founders a deeper understanding around why they operate the way they do and terminology to communicate this with co-founders and team. Shallard again: “A founder who knows themselves deeply, who has used psychological tools to explore their own psyche, will be more aligned, decisive and confident in their ability to execute quickly.”
Many investors you meet focus on a handful of core traits: grit, resilience, coachability. At Human we believe that these are deeply important; however, we also recognize that the founders who build the most lasting organizations, who go the farthest and who surround themselves with the highest caliber talent have incredible self-awareness. When we invest in founders, we are optimizing for highly self-aware individuals who are willing to do the hard, introspective work to ensure a healthy team and environment. Our Founder DNA Program provides even more tools in a founder’s toolkit to bring the best version of themselves to their companies.
Human Ventures L&D Program
In addition to founders, Human Ventures is committed to the ongoing growth and development of our employees. Starting in January, we launched our Learning & Development Program, offering each employee up to $1000 to investigate a new personal or professional goal. The breadth of the interests and passion were no surprise given the remarkable Humans on our team, but it has been a true inspiration to witness colleagues achieve new heights. Stay tuned for a later update on our collective learnings, but as a teaser, I’m happy to report that we have a master storyteller, two improv whizzes, one drone pilot, one master negotiator and more in our midst.
“All growth starts at the end of your comfort zone.”- Tony Robbins
There is a well-known maxim that you are an average of the top ten people you spend the most time with. If that is the case, it’s a privilege and honor to work alongside incredible founders and team members who are constantly striving to grow and stretch beyond their comfort zone. 2018 has been a year of growth at Human Ventures, and we’re just getting started!
Know an incredible founder who would resonate with the Human Ventures growth mindset? Feel free to introduce them to me directly alessandra@humanventures.co.
