The following interview is a conversation we had with Barbra Gago, CEO and Founder of Pando, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $7 Million Raised to Build the Future of Career Advancement

Barbra Gago
Of course, happy to be here. 

Brett
So to kick things off, can we just the quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Barbra Gago
Sure. I would say that I’ve been a serial early stage operator throughout my career. I’ve been in pretty much b, two b tech the whole time, joining companies pre series a and working to build the initial foundation for scaling up and usually sticking around until maybe series c and two 3400 employees. I’ve been working at the intersection of, I would say people and sort of teacher of work, definitely focused on disruptive technologies and category creating products. So early in my career I worked on marketing automation as that was becoming a category. I did some work in enterprise social networking for those that remember tools like Yammer and then recruiting people, tech people, analytics, and most recently in the collaboration space. 

Brett
Who created the marketing automation category? I feel like that’s heavily disputed. I’ve had a few founders on who claim that they created it. Who do you think created marketing automation? 

Barbra Gago
I think it was a community effort back then. Eloqua and Marketo were probably the biggest leaders, Eliqua being on the enterprise side and marketo being more SMB and a lot more savvy, I would say on the marketing front. And then there were tools like Pardot that got acquired by Salesforce and some other small ones. So I would say it was a joint effort because were all trying to educate the market on this new thing. The winners were definitely, or the loudest would probably be Eliquah and Marqueto. 

Brett
Nice. We just had Mark Organ on a different podcast, the founder of Eliqua, and he was talking through his journey there and then we had someone else on who know they also created it. So I was curious what your inside view there is, but that’s super interesting. And then just to brag or name drop a little bit for you, just because I think the audience is going to be aware of these companies. You’re head of marketing at Culture Amp, VP of marketing at Greenhouse, and then most recently CMO at Miro. Is that correct? 

Barbra Gago
That is correct. 

Brett
What was it like making that shift when you went from a marketing leadership role to founding your own company? What was the biggest challenge that you faced when you made that jump? 

Barbra Gago
I feel like I was pretty prepared, to be honest. Not that there wasn’t challenges, so I’ll get to that. But I think as a CMO, there’s a lot of pressure to understand so much of the business if you’re focused on driving revenue, of course, and so really understanding the buyers. And because I also worked for companies like greenhouse and Culture amp, I learned so much about the people, space and how to recruit. And I think recruiting is definitely one of my superpowers and something that I brought into Miro, for example. And so I think having that exposure to best in class tools and processes like that have given me a lot of experience and then really working, rolling my sleeves up with founders. I mean, I joined Greenhouse when were, I think I was the 13th hire. Miro was pre series a. 

Barbra Gago
There were more employees at that time, but I’ve been really operating at kind of ground zero for so long that I think a lot of that savvy of what we should do and what we should focus on and how to think about the company and marketing and branding early on also was helpful. I think the biggest challenge, like, I’m a solo founder, so that comes with a whole host of challenges, I would say. And I think that my biggest hurdle is really being comfortable leading and hiring for roles that even if I was close with our vp of engineering, or more so technical, because my husband’s an engineer and we talk about all these kinds of things, hiring roles and building parts of the business that I didn’t directly oversee before has definitely been probably the biggest areas of expansion. 

Barbra Gago
So having the business side pretty comfortably under control. But then, yeah, I’ve rebuilt my engineering team a few times, actually. So I think that’s been one of the biggest challenges for myself. 

Brett
Why do you think it is that there’s not more cmos that go on to launch companies? And maybe I could be wrong there, but just in the podcast we’ve interviewed, I think something like 400 founders now, and it’s not very common that you have a cmo go and start a company. It’s very common to have someone in cybersecurity who’s a practitioner, they go start a company or an engineer, they experience problem, then they start a company. But it seems like there’s not a lot of cmos. Is that just my limited view of speaking with founders, or do you think that’s accurate? 

Barbra Gago
I think it’s pretty accurate. I would say that I have always wanted to be a founder. It’s been my dream. I feel like I’m in my dream job. It’s so hard and I love it. I’ve always been very entrepreneurial. I think for me, I didn’t start a company sooner because I really wanted to learn as much as possible. And I think Miro was really a great opportunity for me to get a better sense of the PLG and sales motion kind of combined. And that was really exciting because before it had mostly been sales driven or marketing driven. And so that was a great added perspective. I don’t know. It’s hard because marketing is a really wide type of function where you can be more on the brand side or more on the demand gen side, or now more on the product led growth side. 

Barbra Gago
And there’s so many dimensions and so many avenues to what marketing is and can be that I think that most cmos kind of fit into one of those categories, and I don’t know that they all want to be founders. I think many of them have worked for ceos and founders, and it’s been really challenging to make arguments or cases for how you want to invest money or what you’re going to do and all of that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I don’t know. All I can say is that I’ve always wanted to have that job, so I’ve been just working my way to it. 

Barbra Gago
And I think I do feel like marketers would be set up to be very strong ceos, however, because the good ones at least, are deep in customer engagements, customer pain points, understanding, spending time with customers, understanding how to position and sell the product, hopefully holding theirselves accountable to revenue generation directly, which is something that I have always had tied to my personal compensation. And then on top of it, there’s a lot of cross functional collaboration, just given the type of work that marketing is. So I feel like they would be prime for that role. I don’t know why exactly they’re not. 

Brett
And from those three buckets, or like, the two buckets that I hear people talk a lot about would be product marketing and demand gen. And like they said, cmos will typically fall into those categories. And it sounds like you have a third category there. What type of CMO would you hire or did you hire which of those buckets? 

Barbra Gago
I think it really depends on what your business model is. I am a little bit of a unique CMO or was because I actually had a degree in fashion. So I have this whole brand kind of design side, but then I’m very left brain in terms of systems thinker and a little bit technical. So I was really good at demand generation, but also kind of creating community and connection with customers. And I think that it’s product marketing, demand gen, and maybe PLG kind of fits into that more revenue based bucket. And then there’s also the brand CMO, the one that’s like, I would say big consumer maybe. If you think about like a beauty brand or something like that. I think it really depends on what kind of business you have and it does really matter that you get the right one. 

Barbra Gago
I think if you don’t have experience with marketing and you don’t know if you have product market fit, product marketing is a great first step because you need somebody who can look at the product and translate it into language that makes sense for buyers. If you already have that and it’s a matter of scaling, then you have demand gen. Or I would say demand Gen also kind of intersects with building categories in a way because it’s a lot of educating of the market, a little bit of product marketing as well, of course. So I think it really depends on what your business model is and also what stage of growth you’re at. 

Brett
And to switch gears, let’s dive a bit deeper into the company. So can you just give us the high level overview of what the product does? 

Barbra Gago
Sure. So Pando is, as you mentioned, a career progression platform. And basically what we’re introducing is this concept of just in time promotion. I think that performance reviews, similarly to how we used to do development, is very much a waterfall process that for some employees and some companies only happens once a year. And that’s a really bad process if you want people to develop and grow and you want to have an impact on their development as they go. And so we’re really focused on killing the paradigm of performance reviews and making employee performance agile and predictable to the point of really having a real time sort of understanding of where folks are at, using a lot of the same tools that you would see in a performance system. 

Barbra Gago
So feedback and goals and evaluating your employees or evaluating managers, but doing that in a much more structured and iterative. 

Brett
Way just to visualize what it looks like. Could you maybe talk through the oyster case study that you have and the reason I’d love to chat through that. One is we had Tony Jamis on our other podcast, Unicorn builders. We just did a newsletter about that interview. So our listeners are going to be very familiar with Oyster. So could we maybe talk through that? 

Barbra Gago
Yeah. So I feel like Pando is actually like Oyster’s kid’sister. I always say this because they’re like our big brother, our big sister. We’re both in the people space. And I think philosophically there’s a lot of alignment. So Oyster, I think the thing that I love about Oyster is that they’re very philosophically aligned with how you think about employee performance. And Mark, who is their chief workplace officer, and he also was the head of people at Envision. So he’s very well versed in leading and building distributed workforces. He actually gave a few talks within Oyster as they were rolling Pando out to also help educate their whole employee base around how performance kind of typically happens and what they’re trying to do. And I think that he gives this analogy of like a coach. 

Barbra Gago
And I guess my husband is playing a lot of tennis, and I have got into tennis too now, so I’ll use tennis as the example. But the idea is like, if you’re a professional athlete, you’re getting coached and you’re getting critiqued and you’re getting feedback after every match that you play, probably after your training sessions even. And you’re really kind of looking at what you need to do to improve and reflecting and observing, but you’re doing that on a regular and continuous basis. You’re not waiting till the end of the season to get and give all of your feedback. And so they’re distributed, of course, across, I don’t know, 80 countries or something like that. 

Barbra Gago
And I think the other really important thing is that because they’re remote and distributed, Pando creates a structure and transparency that gives everybody clarity no matter where they are. So obviously, a lot of their employees and team members have never met each other. You might have never met your manager. Of course, you work with them. But Pando really helps create a clarity and structure so that individuals understand what’s expected of them, what they need to focus on to get to the next level. It provides structure for managers to be able to drill into specific competencies. So I think that’s the biggest differentiator. So we’re looking at performance in the context of specific skills. So if you’re a tennis player, it might be like your forehand or your backhand or your deck player, whatever it is. 

Barbra Gago
And in Pando if you’re an engineer, it might be frameworks and foundations or code delivery or how you’re working cross functionally. And then those competencies are the way then that you evaluate performance. So you’re ranking specific skills instead of the person generally. And you’re doing that on a skill by skill basis, which can be done anytime and also in a contextual way, which is you’re a level four engineer. I’m going to give you feedback on frameworks and foundations that is defined by every level. So you’re also giving fair, sort of equitable feedback. So they really care about making sure the system is fair. They care about making the process ongoing and iterative. It’s really part of building a human centered type of business and company. And I think that they’re a great example of not doing a performance review. 

Barbra Gago
So they have kind of like an in the middle model where they do every six months. It’s more like a calibration, and you need to have been assessed across your dimensions over the last six months at some point, and then you can level up. So they still do a little bit of a cadence, but it’s not like a review in the traditional sense. And their goal, of course, is to get fully continuous. So we’re working with them on that. 

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Now, I’d love to dive a bit deeper into the category creation part of the interview. So, from day one, did you think or did you know that this was a category creation play? 

Barbra Gago
I’d say yes, because when I joined greenhouse, were in ATS, and that’s the category that all of these ATS tools fall into. But at the time, and I don’t know if anybody remembers this company, but there was a company called Jobvite, and the whole category of products, like all of the products before greenhouse really were like, you just submit applications and then recruiting wasn’t even that strategic. They just go through applications and then they go to the hiring manager and they’ll just give you a stack of resumes. Like that was recruiting and that was the process and greenhouse was introducing a methodology behind the process to make recruiting more of a cultural thing, to make the organization good at recruiting, to give it structure, to make it more equitable, to have transparency. 

Barbra Gago
And so because of that, were like, okay, well, we’re not an ATS because ATS suck and they don’t add that much value. So we can’t call ourselves an ATS. So I was trying to create a new category. At one point, it was like recruiting optimization. And ultimately, we kind of rubber banded back into ATS because at the end of the day, companies already had a budget for an ATS. So creating a new category when they already had a budget for an existing category didn’t really make sense because then where’s the budget for that new category? And so what we ended up doing was, okay, change of strategy. Now our goal is to make this category way more valuable. And so the work from a marketing perspective was not around building and making a new category. 

Barbra Gago
It was like, how do we make recruiting a really high impact, high value organization within the company? And that’s where we spent all of our time and resources to train and educate the market and people who ended up getting promoted and getting better jobs from the work that they did using that platform. And I think that Pando is similar to that, which is every company, because of even compliance, has budget, has some need for sure to do, quote unquote, performance reviews. Like this is definitely something that companies have to do. And to be honest, the category is, I would say, still a little bit flexible. Like, career progression is a new paradigm of how we’re thinking about it, and it is not performance reviews. And so that’s why it does make more sense to think about it in this way. 

Barbra Gago
And so a lot of the marketing and the thought leadership and really the methodologies that we go out to the market with to help them understand how all this works is anchored in that. At the same time, the market has changed. Obviously, last year and the year before, everything is rallying. Everybody’s hiring, everybody’s spending ungodly amounts of money to recruit people. And it was an employee market. And career progression, I would say, is like the luxury thing. Like everybody wanted career progression. They wanted just in time promotion. Like this was the thing that made total sense because all the employees were demanding it. And now that the market has changed, we’re still advocating for this and still kind of building the foundation and laying the foundation for that, but also now positioning slightly more in the traditional performance review space. 

Barbra Gago
But maybe now it’s like performance that doesn’t suck, or we obviously can do performance reviews way faster. So I think that’s the interesting thing about category creation and also positioning and how you sort of have to adapt to what’s happening out in the world. 

Brett
How do you think about the difference between category design and positioning in LinkedIn? I see a lot of people battling and fighting about those two. Is category creation just like the same thing as positioning? Or what is that difference? Or how do you think about that difference? 

Barbra Gago
I think that positioning is a constant evolution. I think that a category is something that ends up in g two crowd or software advice or the obvious thing on the spreadsheet of budgets of every company. Like, this is a category that everybody knows they need, et cetera. So, like, performance reviews sort of fit into that bucket or ats or CRM, things like that. So I don’t think that categories are as flexible. Like, once they’re created, they have a decent amount of longevity and sort of stance, because now you have so many other companies that are in that category. Sometimes if you create the category and another company can take it over, and it’s okay, because then it’s like a real thing. 

Barbra Gago
I think that positioning is and should be something that’s a lot more fluid because it’s about the changing dynamics of the market, of the buyer as the company evolves, as the product evolves, as it solves new solutions. These are all ways that it will be positioned. And I think it’s really about, that’s like connecting the dots between what your go to market strategy is, who you’re targeting, how you’re going after, and winning those customers. 

Brett
It sounds like you had to change the positioning there a little bit to focus on that more established line item and category. Long term, though, do you envision that career progression would be that line item that would replace performance reviews, or what’s that high level thinking and what’s that high level objective for five years from today? 

Barbra Gago
I think, yes, 100%. I think that paradigm will definitely change. Like, performance reviews will completely dissolve. I mean, the more remote teams get, the more levels and comp and all of these things become more transparent. It’s almost like this stuff becomes a little bit more transactional. And so that career progression platform, in my mind, is something that you go into an organization, you work there for. However long you work there, you develop your skills, you level up, and then you take your profile and your evidence and all of your things to the next company, and you continue to use and build on that. 

Barbra Gago
So I really want to build kind of the ecosystem where levels are sort of a bit more standardized and calibrated so you can go from company to company with that kind of context, but also have more validation around the work that you’ve done and the skills that you’ve built and what that looks like. 

Brett
What are the signals a founder should look for to know if it’s a category creation play or if they should make their way into an existing category and take that challenger position? 

Barbra Gago
I think there’s some signals. I guess it depends on what kind of product it is. I can speak more towards b to b because that’s where the bulk of my experience has been in. So larger companies will go through rfps to evaluate technology solutions, and they’ll go and they’ll collect, I don’t know, five or six different organizations and they’ll look at all of them. If you’re not getting in those and you’re not getting requests for those, that’s one signal like people don’t know you exist or don’t think that your product fits into that category. 

Barbra Gago
I think if sales cycles are taking a long time, or if you’re having a hard time figuring out who the buyer is, or they’re having a hard time figuring out who the buyer is or who would be able to influence or make a decision on that purchase, I think those are some of the things, I guess so. 

Brett
We recently had Godard on, the CEO of G two, and he was talking about his number one piece of advice for founders who want to create a category is to go join forces with your competitors and then approach the analyst firms and say, hey, we’re all together here in this category. We want to see it created. Is that something that you’ve seen work at Pando or any of those other roles that you’ve been at where you kind of work together and collaborate with competitors? 

Barbra Gago
We did not work together with our competitors at Miro, but we did get visual collaboration. This was like a fight with the analysts. Yes, to get visual collaboration a new category, and it does require other competitors. And I think we talked about that a few minutes ago. Just in terms of having competition in the space is a signal that it is a category. And the more there are new companies that are cropping up saying that they’re doing the same thing is better for you. Of course, it’s easy for him to say that. I don’t know what companies would rally with their competitors to go talk to g two crowd or whatnot, but we definitely did spend a lot of time with them making the case as to why this is a category and eventually it became one. 

 

Barbra Gago
But no, we definitely didn’t partner with our competitors, but maybe we should have. 

Brett
What would be the number one piece of advice you’d give to a founder who’s looking to create a category? 

Barbra Gago
I think. Don’t get too stuck on it. If it doesn’t work, you have to be able to let it go if it’s not working. And so if people aren’t picking it up, if it’s not getting traction, if there aren’t competitors, if other people aren’t referring to that as a category or mentioning it. Like at greenhouse, when we tried recruiting optimization and we did events and we did content, and I think a couple of people might have started using it, but it really wasn’t sticking, then we just let it go. You don’t want to spend more time than you need trying to put a square in a round hole. 

Brett
Final question, let’s zoom out three to five years from today. What’s that vision for panda? What does it look like? 

Barbra Gago
I think my goal is really to create an ecosystem within the organization where people are kind of leveling up at their own pace, and it’s within a framework that is trusted and fair and equitable, but really optimizing what we talk about as employee lifetime value. So looking at not being in humans, it’s actually very human centered in terms of the design, but really being able to optimize the potential of individuals. So this gets into having more career coaching within the context of the organization that probably will be through some kind of AI. I think the broader community of standardizing levels and having portable profiles where the work that you’re doing in one place is sort of meaningful and usable at other places. Really getting into sort of predicting what’s going to happen in your workforce. 

Barbra Gago
So a lot of companies are struggling with succession planning and where they have gaps in talent or skills, and really being able to sort of forecast what’s going to happen in the future with the current employees you have and the pace of growth and the velocity of growth, and where they’re going to end up in six months or twelve months. 

Brett
I love the vision. All right, I know we’re over on time here, so we can wrap before we do. If any founders listening in want to follow along with your journey as you build and execute on this vision. Where should they go? 

Barbra Gago
LinkedIn is like the only social media I’m on and probably too much, and I’m easy to find there. Just Barbara Gago and then if you want to check out Pando, that’s just pando.com. Those are the two best places. 

Brett
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat about what you’re building and share some of your valuable lessons and everything that you’ve learned throughout your career. This has been awesome. I know it’s going to be a hit with our audience and really appreciate you making the time. 

Barbra Gago
Thank you. I really enjoyed it. 

Brett
All right, take care. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit Frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for category visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.