#ShareYourStory — Mary Fox shares her insight on entrepreneurship, risk, and values
Meet Mary Fox, Head of People Operations and Talent at FR8 Revolution, a startup in San Francisco creating tools to transform the efficiency of the $700bn U.S. trucking industry. After spending the first five years of her career living and working in DC, London and Paris, Mary took up a new adventure in San Francisco where she has been a key part of two early stage startups and served as an advisor for several others. As part of our Lean In SF: #ShareYourStory series, Mary discusses the risks she’s taken and the lessons she’s learned along her journey.
What are you working on these days?
I’m heading up talent, internal operations and marketing efforts at FR8 Revolution. For the past two months I’ve been focusing on developing and executing a plan for recruiting and retaining top talent. This means working with our CEO and COO to ensure that we have a great work environment, awesome benefits, and an efficient and respectful interview process.
We’re a really small team so I’ve also had an opportunity to roll up my sleeves on the product marketing side of things.
What’s the biggest challenge you’re currently facing?
We recently raised an $8.5m Series A round of funding so things are moving fast! At any given moment, I’m thinking about finding talented individuals to join our team, developing a competitive compensation plan, determining a strategy to get FR8’s product in front of our market and making sure we’re keeping our costs down. Everything is constantly changing in an early stage startup, which means I’m learning new things every day. I’m having a blast but the real challenge is forcing myself to allocate time to relax and recharge.
What was the journey like to get to where you are now?
My father is an entrepreneur so I have known from a very young age that I wanted to be in a position of autonomy, but I also very much enjoy being on a team. At the same time, I loved international relations and the idea of borderless commerce. I’ve slowly managed to pull these interests into one career but it wasn’t always obvious that I was making progress.
After years of frustration, a bit of luck and plenty of professional growth, I decided to pursue graduate studies at the London School of Economics. I knew that I had the soft skills to succeed in the business world, but I lacked some of the more technical skills relating to finance, analytics and strategy. Grad school turned out to be a life changing decision for reasons I couldn’t have expected. I learned a lot in the classroom, but the real lessons came from watching the classmates. I worked closely with people from all over the world. Learning how these individuals approached solving problems really changed my perspective in so many ways. I’ve stayed very close to this group of friends and have even traveled the world with them.
How do you define entrepreneurship? Can anyone be an entrepreneur?
It’s important to make a distinction between being an entrepreneur and having entrepreneurial spirit. Entrepreneurs are risk takers who have the capacity to develop a venture that will ultimately earn a profit. Meanwhile, there are plenty of people with a strong entrepreneurial spirit who choose to work for others because they’re seeking less risk in that particular moment. I think the most common reason for this is that they want to learn the ropes before they themselves take on all of the risk. At the same time, you can and should take calculated risk in your career even if you’re not the founder or an executive of the company.
Can anyone become an entrepreneur? Meh. I’m not so sure. I’ve spent the past 5 years paying close attention to successful entrepreneurs and the many, many mistakes they’ve made along the way. The one thing these people have in common is an incredible amount of tenacity and, quite often, they have something to prove. While I think anyone can learn how to become a great entrepreneur, it’s rare to meet people with that extreme level of tenacity. But I do believe that the average person can gain it through practice.
By the way, tenacity…which I regularly refer to as grit…is the number one thing I look for when I hire someone.
What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken?
It depends on how you define risk. I define risk as putting yourself in a vulnerable position — either personally, professionally or financially — in hopes of achieving something meaningful. I suppose the biggest risk I’ve taken was moving to Washington, DC from Kansas after graduating college in 2009. It was the middle of the financial crisis, I had never visited the city, and I didn’t have a job lined up. I literally bought a round-trip ticket and packed two big bags. A week later, I called my mom and told her I wouldn’t be taking the return flight back to Kansas. It was the week that Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon and 9 people on the DC metro died. Talk about a strange week for so many people around the world.
I crashed on friends’ couches for two weeks and then got a waitressing job and a very tiny (but very expensive) apartment. Five months later I got a decent internship. Four months after that I landed my first real job in DC. A year later, I scored my dream job that put me on a great career trajectory. In hindsight, that decision to show up in DC doesn’t feel like that big of a risk. I was really committed to making it work. In the moment, I had no idea that the outcome would be positive, so it felt like I was trying to climb a mountain with an elephant on my back.
Why do you feel so comfortable about taking risk?
Like I said, risk is how you define it. I have never felt the need to take unnecessary risk. When I take a leap, it’s because I’ve prepared myself for the worst possible outcome and have come to terms with that potential outcome. For example, with DC, I knew that the worst case scenario meant taking the flight back to Kansas City. If I missed the flight, the worst case scenario meant coming up with a few hundred dollars to get back home. There was never a risk of becoming homeless and hungry. For me, that was enough of a reason to just do it. In our careers, we are faced with opportunities to take risks daily. The ultimate worst case outcome is that we get fired and can’t find another job. Most people don’t have that kind of appetite for risk. I’m fortunate to be working for a company that encourages calculated risk. For me, it’s the only way to learn and grow.
What is your personal idea of success and how do you measure it?
I don’t think of success as a final destination. I think of my life as an ongoing journey. My goal in life is to be perpetually learning and growing while adding value to something that is bigger than myself. I think I ended up in startup operations because I like creating something from nothing and then pulling levers to continuously improve the outcome. It’s also probably why I love the people operations side of startups. When you give people a new opportunity and then empower them to use their knowledge, experience and creativity to add value — it’s a success for everyone.
If you could go back to any point in your life and have one hour with yourself, where would you go, and what would you say?
Woah! That would be awesome. The only real regret I have is that I didn’t spend more time learning math as a child. I think I would go back to my 7th Grade, 12 year-old self and tell her that everyone learns math in a different way but that it’s ultimately really not that complicated. I avoided math classes in high school as much as possible and then didn’t take a single math class in college. I ended up using Khan Academy to teach myself enough math to do really well on the GRE. I’d show my 12 year-old-self how to learn math in a more intuitive way and would teach her how to ask better math questions. I’d also smack her on the back of the head for saying “I’m just not good at math.”
There’s a lot of talk about millennials these days. Do you think the things you’ve seen in the media are true?
It’s never a good idea to generalize an entire population of people. I’ve surrounded myself by hardworking individuals who are making a real difference in the world. I’ve read that millennials are lazy, entitled and self-absorbed. Sure, I’ve met people like that. We all have. But they’re not all millennials, and not all millennials fit that stereotype. Our world is going through a rough time. People feel the need to blame their problems on other people. I was taught at a very young age that I am the only person who can control my future. I choose to feel empowered and that’s worked out really well for me.
What advice do you have for people reading this piece?
They should share their story. The reason I participated in this piece was so someone somewhere might feel the motivation to keep digging at whatever it is that makes them tick. So often, we get wrapped up in our own insecurities and forget to see that we could be serving as a mentor to people who haven’t yet reached our part of their journey. Also, so much of what we’ve experienced feels like common sense…but it’s not. There are definitely people who can use your story as a source of knowledge, inspiration and motivation.
Need inspiration? Read Ben Horowitz’s book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Whenever I’m feeling sorry for myself, I read a few chapters. I quickly snap out of my self-pity and get back to work.
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