Roxanne Petraeus - Modernizing Compliance - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.26]

My guest today is Roxanne Petraeus, co-founder and CEO of Ethena, a modern compliance platform for businesses. Roxanne’s background is pretty incredible, before starting Ethena she was a Rhodes Scholar, served in the US Army, and worked at McKinsey. In our conversation, we cover the lessons Roxanne ported over from her military career to building a business, how she’s trying to make compliance training not suck, and the woeful state of funding female founders in VC today and what can be done about it. Far from a boring conversation about compliance, this was an incredible discussion with one of the best founders I’ve met recently. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Roxanne Petraeus. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is the ultimate marketing platform for e-commerce. With targeted segmentation, email automation, SMS marketing, and more, Klaviyo helps you create your ideal customer experience. See why Klaviyo is trusted by more than 50,000 brands, like Living Proof, Solo Stove, and Nomad to help them grow their business. For a free trial, check out klaviyo.com/founders. ----- This episode is brought to you by DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean provides founders and creators with the platform they need to get their website and apps off the ground, all with low-bandwidth pricing to save them money over other cloud providers. If you are looking for the best place to build web apps or API backends on robust infrastructure, DigitalOcean is the place for you. They provide a fully managed solution that handles your infrastructure, operating systems, databases, and other dependencies on their new App Platform product. App Platform makes it easy to build, deploy, and scale apps. Get started for free at do.co/founders. ----- Founder's Field Guide is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Founder's Field Guide, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:03:29] - [First question] - What Ethena does [00:06:31] - Lessons from her military career [00:09:13] - Good and bad elements of leadership training from the military [00:11:35] - The problem of what sucks in compliance training [00:14:33] - The enablement of bad behavior among people with power [00:17:56] - The original idea for Ethena and bringing it to market [00:21:15] - Determining who is the right person to serve first [00:24:03] - Lessons for building good software [00:26:21] - How they have adapted to working in and around regulation [00:29:31] - Getting other companies to buy into the product [00:34:45] - Creating effective content and measuring that effectiveness [00:38:13] - Darker sides of growing the business and raising money [00:39:57] - How ‘the Motherhood Penalty’ Plays Out for Startup Founders [00:43:12] - Fixing the problems with bias in venture capital investing [00:46:57] - What is the outlook and long-term vision for the business [00:50:38] - What has her most excited for the future [00:51:53] - Most interesting about the Rhodes Scholar program [00:54:02] - Kindest thing anyone has done for her