Women in Enterprise: Sarah Arnold at Donut.ai
This series features profiles of some of the top women leaders within our enterprise technology community here in NYC. We hope by highlighting the terrific work, stories, and career trajectories of these women at top venture-backed startups and operating roles will continue to encourage more women to consider careers in enterprise software.
As a follow up to our sold-out Navigate 2018: Women in Enterprise Tech Summithere at Work-Bench with Salesforce Ventures, we are continuing to recognize and amplify these impressive women in NYC enterprise tech.
Sarah Arnold is a Co-Founder of Donut.ai.
What were you doing before this current role in enterprise tech, and how did you get to your current role?
Before Donut I was at a startup here in NYC called Cover that did mobile payments in restaurants. I joined as an early employee to help grow their restaurant base, and then eventually built and led their sales and account-management teams. Prior to that I was at Bloomberg, where I started my career going through their sales and analytics training program before joining a hedge fund sales team there.
While Bloomberg and Cover were very different work experiences, both companies taught me a lot about the value of company culture and building great teams. After Cover was acquired, I went on to start Donut with my three cofounders. We spent the first few months talking to and interviewing over a hundred different people to learn more about their companies and the different challenges they faced, along with what works well for them and what doesn’t, in order to identify any areas we might be able to improve with technology.
What pain point is your company solving, and what gets you excited to go to work every day?
You know when you start at a new job, and there’s this total firehose of information coming from all directions, and it’s hard to know what to learn first or who to meet? Or when you’ve been at a company for a while and suddenly you look around and realize you only know a fraction of the people around you?
That’s where Donut comes in. Whether a company has a full-fledged people ops team, or just a couple of well-meaning founders at a seed-stage company, we’re trying to lower the barrier to creating great culture, by making it easy to connect teammates for important conversations and make sure that new hires get the right info from day one.
We’re accomplishing that by automating these cultural initiatives, from a coffee roulette program to distributing critical info to new hires, and making it all happen in Slack. Our hope is that if we take the administrative process out of the equation — like creating endless calendar reminders and email nudges — that you’ll be able to focus on the thing that really makes culture great: human connection.
That human connection is what gets me excited every day — the people I get to work with, both on our team, and our customers. We have such amazing users who are passionate about company culture and making things better for their team.
What do you wish you had known earlier in your career?
There often is no right answer. If you ask 20 people who are all successful on how to deal with a specific problem, you might get 20 different answers. You just have to make the best decision you can with the information you have at the time, and know that most of the decisions you make day to day aren’t going to make or break you, or the business.
Whether navigating your career or starting a company, it’s easy to get caught up in trying to figure out the “right” decision all of the time, when often what’s most important is to make a decision, move forward, and learn from it.
Give us one piece of tactical advice (small or large), as a page from your enterprise tech playbook — that you would give to another woman considering a career in enterprise tech?
Talk to people on different teams at your company on a regular basis — learn more about them, their roles, what they’re working on, and what their goals are. Think about ways (big or small) that you can help them succeed. This will help give you more context and a better understanding of the business, and make you a better teammate and employee.
At the last startup I was at, Cover, I spent a lot of my time out of the office meeting with restaurants, and our workflow on the sales and customer team didn’t overlap that much with engineering. I made it a point to get to know my teammates on the engineering team better (it helped that our product encouraged going out to restaurants together) and this made me more in tune with the product, and helped give them insight into customer feedback and how the product was being used.
This cross-team connection became so important that after Cover was acquired my teammates became my cofounders. We started a company focused on helping others connect with their team and culture in more meaningful ways. If I hadn’t spent as much time getting to know the engineers at our last company, Donut probably wouldn’t exist today.
What do you love about enterprise tech?
For me, the beauty of enterprise tech is being able to reach a lot of people through our product and have a larger impact than we might otherwise be able to. By gaining one company as a customer, you have the opportunity to positively affect many people’s work lives.
For context, we currently have a 6-person team at Donut, and our Slack bot has made more than half a million intros to date, at companies all over the world, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
What do you wish would change?
More women and diversity, especially in sales and tech! I can’t say how many conferences and events I’ve been to where I’ve looked around and been able to count the number of women in attendance on one or two hands — and all the panelists are men, with maybe that one token female panelist. The Navigate Summit this year, hosted by Work-Bench and Salesforce Ventures, was such a refreshing and invigorating change to that norm, and reminded me that it’s still an issue in our industry.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
Yes! Donut is hiring — we’ll be growing the team and adding even more positions throughout the year, so reach out even if you don’t see the perfect role listed. We’re looking to build a diverse team, and we’re committed to improving company culture, so women, people of color, and LGBTQ candidates are especially encouraged to apply!
Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Our inspiration for this series comes from Digital Currency Group’s terrific profiles of Women in Blockchain — thank you!
Know a woman leader in enterprise technology whose story we should feature?We’d love to hear from you.
