[00:00:00] Kathleen Pacini: I've sat through so many meetings with exec teams through my career where we're struggling with a thing and they're like, let's build a training and you're like, great, we can build a training, but. That's part of a solution, not the whole solution.

So helping folks understand that that can just be a moment in time on your learning journey and you have to figure out, okay, so maybe we build the training so that that gives people the intro information, but how are we doing those things in their day to day job?

[00:00:31] Ted Blosser: Welcome to the learn podcast, where we interview top leaders in tech and learn about how they're building the world's most innovative companies. I'm Ted Blosser, CEO and co founder of WorkRamp, the world's first learning cloud platform. Our mission is to help professionals reach their full potential through learning, and the learn podcast is where we can learn from the best leaders at the top of their game.

Please subscribe, leave us a rating, and we hope you enjoy the episode.

[00:00:56] Ted Blosser:  Everyone, welcome back to the Learn podcast. We have an amazing guest on today, Kathleen Pacini. She is a CPO at Patreon. Kathleen, welcome,

[00:01:07] Kathleen Pacini: Thank you, Ted. I'm so happy to be here.

[00:01:09] Ted Blosser:  little fun fact. So Kathleen and I reconnected. We actually went to college together. Santa Clara University go Broncos.

[00:01:16] Kathleen Pacini: That's right.

[00:01:17] Ted Blosser:  we were just catching up on life before in our prep session, so it was great to hear about all the latest in your life, Kathleen.

[00:01:25] Kathleen Pacini: Likewise, it's been a while since we got a chance to connect and it's so fun hearing about your family and career and it's good to connect again.

[00:01:32] Ted Blosser:  Well, I loved how we've converged back into tech, back into the HR and learning landscape. So that's what we'll be talking about today before we jump into Kathleen. Can you give us an elevator pitch on two things? One is maybe we'll start with patron cause that will be easy. And then two, just a high level about what you do at patron.

And then we'll do a deep dive into your career, from the early days.

[00:01:56] Kathleen Pacini: Awesome. Okay. Well, so Patreon is where creators build their business and connect with their fans. So anyone and everyone that Is creative and has art or some type of information that they want to share out with the world. It's the platform that people can do that and then build really amazing connections with their fans.

so they can go deeper and not necessarily be reliant on algorithmic based social media. it's a anti algorithm type platform.

[00:02:26] Ted Blosser:  Awesome. Awesome. Tell us about your role a little bit.

[00:02:29] Kathleen Pacini: I joined a little over a year ago as our chief people officer, I lead our people team that also includes our workplace team. So I've learned a ton about office space and leases in the last year that I had not a ton of experience on prior to joining.

and we really are here to power the people who are building that platform for our creators.

[00:02:50] Ted Blosser:  That's awesome. what's the work styles at hybrid, remote fully in office.

[00:02:55] Kathleen Pacini: We are hybrid for the most part, and we do have some teammates who are fully remote, and then we also have an office in Portugal. So mostly us based in a little bit in Europe.

[00:03:06] Ted Blosser:  Awesome. Hopefully you're getting some trips out there

[00:03:09] Kathleen Pacini: tell us about the scale patron, employees. pretty global in terms of those remote employees too, or what's the population

mostly in the U S from an employee population, but the platform is definitely global. So we're about 450 people, mostly in the U S. And then, the platform though, definitely serves all over. We have creators all over the world and they're connecting with fans all over the world too.

[00:03:31] Ted Blosser:  Awesome. Awesome. that's great scale. And, it's great to see you adopting the hybrid workplace. We'll jump more into patron specifics in later in the conversation. But what I love to do is kind of walk through your career. You have a really unique career. we'll go through that here in terms of starting.

for example,in, a big four company, you were even auditing and you kind of started on the consulting side of the house, but tell us about the early days of your career. And then what I want to hone in on is at what point Did you consciously decide like, Hey, this HR thing might be for me.

[00:04:05] Kathleen Pacini: Yeah. So I started out in accounting. I joined Deloitte off campus. Basically, I really liked my accounting classes at Santa Clara. It just made sense to my brain. And I had a professor who encouraged me to go after it. She said, their firms are all here recruiting all the time. It's a great opportunity.

It's a great way to learn about how businesses work. That's what I was ultimately interested in. So I, hopped into it. I spent about 8 months in that world and quickly realized it was not what I wanted to do when I grew up. and so I, did a quick pivot, and moved over into a consulting firm where I did.

Team scheduling. So matching the right consultants with the right projects based on their skillset. So early org design, I did not know that's what it was at that point. and then moved into campus recruiting from there, which I absolutely loved and spent a few years focused really on recruiting. And then the 2008 financial crisis is what got me into HR because companies contracted, there was.

bunch of layoffs. I was probably the cheapest person, which is why they kept me. And that's how I ended up working in HR. I just took that on in addition to recruiting.

[00:05:17] Ted Blosser:  That's awesome. So I was talking to a few people earlier in their profession on the HR side,when you said eight months and how did you know, like, Hey, that wasn't the fit for you? Was it just a client engagement you remember back then?

what it was that kind of tipped you off?

[00:05:32] Kathleen Pacini: never been someone who minded long hours or hard work, which there definitely is an audit. So it was not that it wasn't a busy season or anything like that. I just remember looking at what folks more senior than myself were doing. wasn't interesting. I wasn't excited in it. And I loved that it was interesting for those folks.

It just was not going to be the thing that I was really, really excited about every single day. And I wanted to do something I felt was a better lineup for me. I also was always the kid in 2nd grade getting told to quiet down in class and that carried into an audit room where people were pretty focused and I was really more interested in the socializing side.

So, I needed to find something that matched that socializing energy with my work and that definitely landed in the recruiting space.

[00:06:19] Ted Blosser:  That's awesome. That's awesome. All right. We'll talk about, so you land at frontier and then you do, a stint at PWC as well to for a little over two years. Tell us about that time. We'll get into the bulk of your career, which was at, X or formerly Twitter. but tell us about kind of the foray into HR and then how, you knew where you wanted to specialize or where you're starting to get some interest, during that time.

[00:06:45] Kathleen Pacini: ended up at Frontier, spent a couple of years there, and did a wide range of things. I did recruiting for our call centers. a telecom company. So when you pick up the phone, you're Back then, now everything is mostly online, but then you had to actually talk to an agent to get new service set up or you were having issues.

So you, called in. So I did all of the staffing for that. And then I also did, support for our technicians and our corporate employees as well. And I think the most interesting thing I got to do while I was there, I actually got to be part of the negotiation team for one of our collective bargaining agreements.

and. I really enjoyed it, but I also felt the challenge with doing labor relations is that you're relatively boxed in and how you can support your employees. You can't necessarily do creative things because you've got to follow the rules in the contract. And for me, had a great. boss and mentor there.

and he really was like, if that's what you want, labor is not going to be the place that you should spend your career, even though he really encouraged me to stay in labor. And so that's how I ended up making the move to PWCs. I wanted to be able to have a little bit more flexibility, a little more creativity in how we got to support employees from a people team perspective.

[00:08:00] Ted Blosser:  Got it. And then when you got to, PwC, where you put on a lot of different client engagements, in terms of, the HCM practice there.

[00:08:07] Kathleen Pacini: No, so I actually did HR for our employees. So for our consultants, and I supported our audit practice in Minneapolis. And then when we moved back to San Francisco, we did a brief stint in Minneapolis for my husband's job. even though that's where I grew up, we moved for him. then I supported our semiconductor and software and internet teams when I moved back to the Bay Area.

[00:08:31] Ted Blosser:  Well, my wife was there. I wonder if you supported her

[00:08:33] Kathleen Pacini: I may have.

[00:08:34] Ted Blosser:  she was in the technology group, in San Jose. So maybe you supported her, back then. okay. So that was a great stint. thanks for correcting me. I was thinking a client engagements with a big four in terms of consulting, but that was really cool.

You got to, learn how to do this in house. so at that time you shift over into the longest in your career, almost. Ten years at

[00:08:54] Kathleen Pacini: Let's try.

[00:08:55] Ted Blosser:  Yeah, that's, that was a long time at Twitter. Probably one of the longest lasting employees there. Let's just kind of start with a broad question. How was your. time there.

And I love to like dive into different portions of it too. we won't get into the juicy gossip details at the end. I'm sure there's a bunch of there. but more of the core time that you remember,in the heyday there.

[00:09:16] Kathleen Pacini: Yeah, so I joined Twitter 2013, and I originally joined to support our platform engineering team. We were about 1400 employees at that time. we were still private. We had not gone public yet. and, Really zoomed in. I had about 300 employees that I was supporting, partnering directly with one of our VPs of engineering.

And it was the first time that I had ever worked in tech and the first time that I had ever supported engineers. And so I had a lot to learn, and spent a lot of time asking questions and writing things down in my notebook that I had no idea what they were talking about, because it was. It's extraordinarily technical and I would Google it later, but, it's how I started to just kind of understand what they did and get a better stronghold into supporting that team.

[00:10:08] Ted Blosser:  So you were the HR and I love to dive into the HR BP practice, especially we have a lot of guests on who support engineers, but it's hard to support engineers because like the ass are actually kind of different than let's say a sales rep or a customer service rep.give us a little bit of deep dive into what you recommend in terms of being the best HR business partner to a technical organization.

What did you learn, during that time where you're like, this is how you run a great HRBP org for a technical organization.

[00:10:38] Kathleen Pacini: I think it matters about being tech, this probably applies to non tech as well. And anyone who's been on one of my teams is probably going to roll their eyes when they hear me say this, but to be a great business partner, you have to understand what your business does. And I know that sounds so table stakes, but for a lot of people.

They are thinking that the only part of their job is understanding the people side, but understanding your metrics, understanding attrition, getting ahead of org design decisions, and those things matter. But if you don't understand what your leaders and what the team that you're supporting are trying to do day to day, you're going to make recommendations that folks just think.

Why are they even suggesting this? It doesn't line up with what we're trying to do. They don't understand what I need to do, what my objectives are. And so I really encourage my teams to learn and know, I speak engineering at a basic level. I always say it's introductory. but knowing that made it so that sitting in leadership meetings and other things, it wasn't all going over my head.

I was able to actually understand the different pieces of what was happening in my team. So.

[00:11:44] Ted Blosser:  Was there North star as a leader running the HRBP function that you optimize for? Was it retention? Was it performance or literally how many lines of code people were pushing out the door across the org?

What was your North star you optimize for? when, helping manage the Android,

[00:12:04] Kathleen Pacini: it changed so many times throughout 10 years. I was there because we went through so many different phases. you know, 1400 employees total when I joined. I think we were only in. 14 or 15 offices. And within two years of being there, we were in 29 offices and we were about 4, 000 employees.

And then by the end of the time I was there, we were almost 8, 000 employees. So different phases throughout my time, we definitely had different North stars. during high growth periods, it was. How are we setting folks up for internal mobility and retention opportunities and trying to help support our TA partners and making sure that they were getting what they needed to fill recs as fast as possible.

in times where we had gone through reductions in force, you know, in 2015 and 2016, it was how do we line people up with different opportunities, keep them excited, even though they're working. A little worried about the stability of the business. and then back into a high growth phase for us during COVID and almost doubling our technical team during 2020 2021.

[00:13:07] Ted Blosser:  remind me again, did you cross over outside the engineering org? if you did, what was that like when you crossed over into the business side?

[00:13:13] Kathleen Pacini: I did. So I spent most of my time on the tech side, but, moved from platform into our consumer space. And then, throughout the years, eventually took on leading the entirety of the tech team. Then took on the entirety of our international team, then the whole global team, including the business side rolled in and then, also took on our talent management organization.

[00:13:34] Ted Blosser:  Wow. Okay, cool. I'll ask one more question about the Twitter, experience. And I do want to focus in on how everything's going at Patrion. So obviously in the news, when Elon bought Twitter renamed it X, you were still there, you were running everything still like we won't get into

the juicy gossip or details, but maybe the question I want to ask is like, what did you learn?

Personally, from that experience, you were still at the helm. what would you impart on the audience from what you learned from that experience?

[00:14:05] Kathleen Pacini: Yeah, we were in a really interesting period of transition even before the acquisition. So we had gone through a CEO transition four months prior to that. So we were just kind of getting our feet underneath us with our new CEO. And then the deal came through. Obviously not a normal M& A. If you followed it in the news, you know, there was a intention to purchase.

And then. no, thank you. I don't want to, which then led to some litigation. So not a normal, here's how we're building handling deal team transition type work. But I think the most important thing is. You have to be honest with your employees and with leaders about what you don't know. And it was a really, really difficult time because we had built the company with culture of transparency.

There was no such thing as. It's too hard of a question to ask a leader and in all hands, which blessing and a curse sometimes, but we went from being very open and honest with employees to not having a lot of information, either because we just didn't know, or it was part of litigation and so we couldn't talk about it.

And so we had to spend a lot of time saying. We don't know how to answer that question. And it was very, very difficult. And people thought you didn't know how to answer it and you're just not willing to. And so I spent a lot of time coaching my teams on literally saying things like, I wish I could share that.

I don't even have the information or in times where we did have the information and we just couldn't share it. Also saying that, I do know the full, Context here, but because of where we are in the case, we're not able to discuss that and trying to give people as much information, even when you're giving them nothing was very difficult.

But I think that's the best way to build and keep trust is just being honest and being willing to say, I don't know.

[00:16:01] Ted Blosser:  Yep. I could imagine that time where probably all your North star KPIs were just out the window engagement, employee happiness. It was just survive. Right. And you had to probably change your whole mindset

[00:16:12] Kathleen Pacini: Yeah. I mean, we didn't know where was the deal going to completely fall apart and we were going to still be independently run organization. So. Did we want to retain everyone? were we going to end up in a spot where we were owned by Elon and we had no idea what his desires for the organization were?

And so it became this really hard thing where even as you were trying to retain your own team, as people got offers and they said, I'm nervous about what's going to happen. You had to say, I get it. You got to do what's right for you and your family. And So many times as a leader, you'd be trying to convince folks outside of that, why staying, what the opportunities looked like, what growth looked like for them at the organization.

And we just didn't have the ability to do that. And so you had to completely switch your posture.

[00:16:57] Ted Blosser: Hey, everyone. I want to take a quick commercial break and tell you about the company that produces this podcast. I co founded WorkRamp back in 2015, and our mission has always been the same, to help professionals reach their full potential through learning. As part of that mission, we built the world's first learning cloud, an all in one platform for your employee, partner, and customer learning needs.

If your company is looking for a learning management system, also known in the industry as an LMS, We'd love to talk to you. You can reach us at our website, work ramp. com, or you can even email me directly at Ted at work ramp. com and I'll get you in touch with our team. Hope you're enjoying the episode and back to the show.

[00:17:41] Ted Blosser:  Let me ask you an interesting question. HR transform a few months back and. there was someone on stage who was talking about how. HR leaders are people too. They also need support. They're like doing a riff is awful, but it's also tough for the HR team members to do it. and that was, the context of the conversation.

And the reason I want to bring this up is I want to see if you had tips on, you went through probably one of the most tumultuous times an HR leader could experience, where. what do you recommend to HR leaders? what is their outlet when they go through very difficult times where they also need the support as well?

So I'm assuming you don't have many people to talk to about this. You were kind of the last line of defense,for the company. Do you have any tips to HR leaders who again are kind of struggling with a lot of weight on their shoulders from. Tough experiences. And again, that could be rifts. That could be acquisitions that could be just,overwhelming issues internally.

Any tips you have coming out of that experience on how you stay sane,

[00:18:40] Kathleen Pacini: staying I'm not sure I totally stayed sane through that process. We're gonna be but I had a great set of peers around me through that process that I was able to lean on. my, dear friend, Julianna Hayes led our FPNA. And finance organization. And so she was seeing an in the mix on a lot of the same things that I was, which made it, we had shared context and we could have those conversations and support each other.

and also I have a amazing husband who was like, this is a moment in time where you've got to be completely leaned into work and was able to help pick up things at home. so that I was able to. balance work more than home for a little while while we were going through that. And so I think just find your people that are going to help support you and don't feel bad about asking someone to drive your kid to soccer or this or that.

it's a moment in time and sometimes you just have to recognize that you need help and it's okay to ask for it.

[00:19:33] Ted Blosser:  Yeah, that's great advice here. Totally right. Like my wife is at a big tech company that was, just having looming layoffs and just having that outlet at home to talk through it is so key. And as many a dinner conversation, just walking through it and having her, have an outlet was key. So last big topic I want to talk about. So you shift over to patron amazing company. you all are doing some great things, very high level question. What is the type of. People, or you're trying to build their, give us some background on how you're trying to build the best people, or in all of tech,

[00:20:06] Kathleen Pacini: we're a pretty lean team. So I love that from the perspective of it gives people the opportunity to do a bunch of things that are outside of their core day to day. And so I really have leaned into trying to help the team kind of have a major and a minor. what are the things that you're spending the most amount of time on your major?

And then what are the things that you're spending? A little bit of time, but maybe is completely outside of the scope of what you would do. So I think a great example is, I've got someone on my team who leads our early career recruiting programs. they had a little bit of bandwidth, and so they hopped in and said, I can help redo our onboarding.

Program and what happens for employees in that first week. And I was like, great, hop in. You've got ideas. Let's go. so really trying to build a team that gets to learn a bunch. That's how I learned at Twitter. We were always. Probably a little bit understaffed, a little bit behind where the business was growing because of how quickly we grew, but that meant that you got to do things that weren't part of your everyday job description.

And I got to learn a ton and I want to give people those same opportunities.

[00:21:16] Ted Blosser:  that's great. When you think about, I love that analogy of major and minor. if we want to double click into that a little bit, do you have like a breakdown of, Hey, your time should be, I'm just making this up. 70 percent on your major, mostly. 30 percent of your minor, or maybe it's 20 percent of your minor and 10 percent on anything else you want to learn for the team.

Almost like your, Google 20 percent time. what's your model around the specifics around how you have your team manage their work?

[00:21:42] Kathleen Pacini: I think it changes depending on how long you've been doing this. So if you're earlier in your career, I think it should be more like your first couple years of college, where you're taking a little bit of everything. You maybe haven't even declared your major and you're learning about what's going to be interesting.

What do you want to do with your career? and then as you progress and you spend more time, like I've got some of my team who leads our talent partnerships, or. They're spending most of their time focused on that. And maybe they're only down to like five or 10 percent things on their minor. So it should shift over time for sure.

[00:22:17] Ted Blosser:  Cool. That's very cool. Well, given this as a learn podcast for L and D folks as well, too.what's your view on learning? And it could either be, here at Patreon or even, when you were at ex formerly Twitter. give us your take on l and d in organizations today.

[00:22:33] Kathleen Pacini: Yeah. It's one of the hardest jobs because I think I've sat through so many meetings with exec teams through my career where we're struggling with a thing and they're like, let's build a training and you're like, great, we can build a training, but. That's part of a solution, not the whole solution.

So helping folks understand that that can just be a moment in time on your learning journey and you have to figure out, okay, so maybe we build the training so that that gives people the intro information, but how are we doing those things in their day to day job? And so I try and think about learning from the perspective of what are we doing and what are those little snippets that bring.

The learning moments back into what's happening. So not relying on once a year, Oh, we did a training. And so we're okay with that. You've got to have it be an ongoing drumbeat and constantly talking about those things.at Patreon, we actually give our employees a learning stipend every year, and they don't have to do something.

That's a hundred percent dedicated to their job. As long as it is something that. You can make a reasonable argument is applicable to Patreon, then you can do it. And so I was actually spending time with one of our ERG leads the other day and she said, I don't know what I should do. And walked me through some of these things that she'd spent her time on.

And I said, I think you should take a class in Photoshop. I think that would actually be super relevant to what you do. They, lead some of our community work. I was like, that would be a thing that would make a lot of sense for you to know how to do and spend time with creators as you're supporting them.

So she's going to take a Photoshop class this year with her learning stipend. So finding those like fun ways to round out your skillset is a great use of company money from my perspective.

[00:24:22] Ted Blosser:  That's awesome. And if you could rank your number one program you would give to, people leaders, and you mentioned onboarding earlier, revamping onboarding, leadership development is a hot topic lately. What's the number one program that you would say, Hey. Make sure this is well built, well staffed, that you get the highest leverage out of.

[00:24:42] Kathleen Pacini: think onboarding, honestly, because it's the moment that you move from our employee or someone's going from a candidate spot to an employee. That's a big transition. So they were excited enough to sign that offer letter. It's the first moment that you really have to say, this is how you're going to be successful at Patreon.

This is how you're going to be successful at whatever company. And giving them that little moment before they get sucked into all the day to day things that are going to pull them in 15 different directions. You only get those like two, three days. That depending on how much time your company spends on it to really get them the tools and the tips and the tricks of how to navigate and be super successful, we are in process of completely overhauling our onboarding because it doesn't meet those needs right now, but they will meet those needs by the end.

[00:25:29] Ted Blosser:  That's awesome. Can't wait to hear anything unique that you're thinking about throwing in there, or is it all secret?

[00:25:35] Kathleen Pacini: I don't think it's secret. We're really in the development phase, but I'm thinking about it from a perspective of how do we kind of. Move folks from that, you've gotten a relationship with a recruiter and now how do we transition them into having a relationship with the people team versus feeling like the people team is just a thing that I go to if I have a problem or I need help with benefits, how do we become a resource to them going forward to help them be successful?

[00:26:01] Ted Blosser:  That's a great way to view it too, right? As usually you think hiring manager,is the consistent one, usually across the recruiting and hopefully they land on the same team by the time they're there. But a lot of people don't think that people team could be a really good conduit.

Start the HRBP relationship early. a great conduit between the student and your hiring manager could be different by the time you land there. So it's great to have that direct relationship with a people team. I love that. All right. we're at the stage where we're going to go into what we call the learn rapid fire round.

I'm going to ask three questions, love one to two line answers each, just to get to know you a little bit more before we end the pod. But the three questions, I'll start with the first one. What's your number one resource for learning like a book, blog, et cetera. What's your favorite resource for learning?

Um,

[00:26:51] Kathleen Pacini: Okay, the book I always recommend to everyone is called Thanks for the Feedback. it's written by, two professors at Harvard, Stone and Heen. Everyone can get better at taking feedback, but it's all about the art of receiving feedback and it's not, all of the examples are not work examples. Some of them are life examples or parenting examples and It's relevant in terms of how you set expectations, how, you know, when it's the moment to share feedback or recognize that your kid doesn't want feedback right now, so hold it and you can have a different conversation later, a hundred

[00:27:28] Ted Blosser:  work environment and kids. Okay. I'll have to check that out.

[00:27:31] Kathleen Pacini: it's a great one.

[00:27:32] Ted Blosser:  Next one. Your number one piece of career advice, maybe to people earlier in their careers. You've had an amazing career so far, but what's your suggestion to people earlier in their career?

[00:27:43] Kathleen Pacini: be curious and be open to doing things that are not in your job description. I have fallen into a whole bunch of career growth moments that. Probably should not have been. Anywhere near what I was doing. I think a great example is, in 2020, Twitter got hacked and I somehow ended up on the team of folks involved in completely resetting every employee's credentials because I offered to help not a thing that usually would happen in a people team, but it was, Amazing.

I learned a ton. Why not just offer to help and get in there?

[00:28:16] Ted Blosser:  You're reading up the Okta documentation,

[00:28:18] Kathleen Pacini: Oh yeah. I can like walk you through a whole zero trust security reboot. Now, if you need to, not a thing that a lot of people from people teams do.

[00:28:26] Ted Blosser:  People teams need to know those, security around credentials. all right, last question I'll have, if you could retire tomorrow, what would be that first skill or topic you would go learn?

[00:28:37] Kathleen Pacini: it's a little bit of a cheater answer, but I'm hoping you'll let me have it. I would love to go get my coaching credential. It's not something that I've been able to fit in between work and kids and life. But, if I wasn't fitting work in and I was just balancing kids, then I think I could do it, but I do love what I do.

And getting to do that, with a little bit more formalized training would be excellent.

[00:28:59] Ted Blosser:  Well, you probably have all the hours, knocked out already. Now you just

[00:29:02] Kathleen Pacini: I don't know. Can I retroactive those? If I can,

I'm good to go.

[00:29:05] Ted Blosser:  I mean, you probably have more coaching hours than 99 percent of coaches out there. So,all right. Well, Kathleen, this was great learning more about your career. lots of great tidbits that you shared with us.

I appreciate you coming on the learn podcast.

[00:29:20] Kathleen Pacini: My pleasure. Thank you for having me. It's been so fun to reconnect and have a little bit of a different life experience than the last time we saw each other, which was our undergrad days.

[00:29:29] Ted Blosser:  For sure. For sure. Well, thanks again for coming on and we'll talk to you all soon.

[00:29:33] Kathleen Pacini: Thanks, Ted