Today, I'm connecting with Harry Uffindell, Chief People Officer at Partly. Harry’s worn just about every startup hat—founder, growth, bizops, revops, people, culture—you name it. But he ultimately found his calling in the people space. Now, he’s scaling Partly, hiring the world’s top 1% talent, and building a culture where people stay excited about their work a decade in.
Today, I'm connecting with Harry Uffindell, Chief People Officer at Partly. Harry’s worn just about every startup hat—founder, growth, bizops, revops, people, culture—you name it. But he ultimately found his calling in the people space. Now, he’s scaling Partly, hiring the world’s top 1% talent, and building a culture where people stay excited about their work a decade in.
In today’s episode, we discuss:
Find Harry Uffindell:
Harry Uffindell’s Northstars and Frameworks:
Books:
Podcasts:
Frameworks:
Operators—Future leader/vision:
Ones to Watch:
Other Folks Mentioned in the Episode:
Connecting to Harry Uffindell, Chief People Officer at Partly:
[Note: This transcript is AI-generated via Descript. Please expect typos]
Laura Nicol: Harry, welcome to Calling Operator. How are you doing?
Harry Uffindell: I'm doing well. Thank you very much for having me. Great to be here.
Laura Nicol: Let's start at the very beginning. Can you share where you grew up and your origin story?
Harry Uffindell: I grew up in Auckland, New Zealand. I went to school there, and then I moved down to Dunedin. I went to University of Otago, studied law, economics, and finance, and I'm not sure why I studied law in the first place. I actually think my thought process at the time was commerce sounds okay, law and commerce sounds better. That was probably the extent of my thought process. Ended up doing that. I got an internship and worked as a graduate lawyer in Auckland at Bell Gully. But while I was at university and then my first year as a lawyer, I was sort of moonlighting. I had my startup on the side, which was called Meat Mail. So that was my first, I guess, proper jump into the world of startups Me and my co founder Dave Booth. And then I guess much to my parents dismay, I told them I was quitting law. I found out very quickly I wasn't going to be a good lawyer. I'd probably get found out eventually. So I moved back down to Dunedin. We built that company up, eventually sold it. Following that, Dave went to AngelList in San Francisco. I went to Sydney, broke into the world of management consulting, which was, you know, Still not the most exciting part. I think it was getting closer to the business side. It wasn't quite the lawyer dotting I's and crossing T's end of the transaction, but it was working with businesses, but still not the level of execution that I really wanted to get my hands dirty with. I got very, very fortunate to be introduced to a guy called Mike DeBeau, who was The head of growth at a company called Tilt, which is a US payment startup based out of San Francisco. He's now actually a general partner at Greylock, but they hired me as the first APAC hire for Tilt. That was kind of a wild entry into startup on a global scale. We were the classic went through Y Combinator, raised 1, 000. 67 million from Andres and Horowitz and some of these really big name tier one VCs in the U. S. Had an amazing team and then eventually got acquired by Airbnb. I went over with that acquisition, so I was country manager at Tilt and then was head of business operations and strategy for Airbnb across APAC. Worked there for a few years before the IPO. It's probably getting a little bit too big for me at that point. I like the release of the nitty gritty stage. So I left my partner at the time, now wife, we traveled around the world for six months, went to the Rugby World Cup in Japan, and then we settled in Europe and ultimately got forced home during COVID. So moved back here, I had my own ideas and startups that I was working on, but. At the same time, I met Levi, the CEO of Partly, about a month or two after Partly was founded, and ultimately joined them as their first non technical hire. And yeah, sort of blink, and the last four years have gone by, but it's, the company's grown from a, I guess, from an infant to a, you know, a pretty big company of, you know, nearly a hundred people all around the world. I've also gone from newly married to a couple of kids, so I've got two boys that keep me equally busy when I'm at home. That's kind of like the end to end story so far.
Laura Nicol: And that, my friends, is what we're going to unpack today. What an incredible ride so far. Can you take us through this journey and the lessons that you learned along the way that influenced the next path?
Harry Uffindell: Yeah, I mean, they're all different and unique. Experiences at a really high level. Meat mail was a zero to one. Health was going from when I joined around 30 people to 150 people, which is, you know, pretty challenging, but really exciting time. And then Airbnb was probably, you know, maybe a stage or two ahead in the years leading up to the IPO, but we've sort of done some of those big funding rounds already, I guess, looking around Otago, there actually was quite a lot of entrepreneurship on different scales. And so meat mail was really that. You know, identify a problem. We were paying what I consider an overpriced to meet and veggies at the local supermarket, mainly because people couldn't be bothered driving down to South Dunedin or further afield to some of these like better, more rural kind of butchers. Dunedin didn't have a mad butcher at that point, which was quite popular in Auckland. So I remember the day actually seeing that like a mad butcher opening adversement and the Otago daily times, and then taking it to my flat or specifically Dave Booth and say, Hey, We could start a business where we like go out there, buy in bulk and then resell it to students, you know, like deliver it to their door. And this was before the world of boobarit and like getting used to food being delivered, but even things like, you know, HelloFresh, Marley Spoon, all those food subscription boxes. We got out with a clipboard and a piece of paper and pen and would go around, you know, we're in a hundred different student flats asking, What are the biggest issues you find with like shopping and food? Is it quality? Is it price? How often do you buy it? How many people do you cook for? And then ultimately if we got this product together, delivered it to your door, would you buy it? Or would you strongly consider signing up? We did that and then over the course of the next two or three weeks, we had a refrigerated truck. We were delivering over a ton of meat around the campus, which is quite a lot. I think we sort of got in over our heads pretty quickly. That early stage, that was a, just a ton of learnings, like the early product, like problem validation, incorporating and, you know, actually building a company and a brand from scratch, doing some door to door sales. Fortunately, I had a horrendous experience as a door to door sales person, but I say horrendous because it was a bit embarrassing and you got told no 75 times a day, but I was pretty good at getting those other five yeses. So I was pretty confident in my ability to sell. I think that zero to one stage with Meat Melt, I didn't have any experience there, but I learned more than I had my whole time at university. Tilt was sort of seeing what good look like at scale with the brand names we had and the amount of money we raised, you know, we were managing to recruit exceptional operators. I remember at the time looking at their CVs and going, wow, like what are these people from Harvard or Stanford, you know, graduate school of business or coming from these well known starts or other companies. So the team there was really exceptional and my aspirations like as an individual, but also what I thought of as quality work, that bar really got raised to me during my time at Tilt. And then Airbnb, I think it gave me an insight into how bigger companies worked. I think at the time with any experience, you can often play down the learnings you get from it or the skills that you're acquiring in that moment. But on reflection, whether it's working as a lawyer or management consultant or at Airbnb, you pick up little things, right? Like Airbnb, they, they had a big shift to this Amazon type culture, writing really, really tight. Six page memos, slide decks were basically banned. There was a lot of learning, just like how to communicate really clearly in written form, how to articulate a strategy or the questions that these really, what I consider like nitpicky regional directors or country managers or head of the FDNAs. But that was pretty good training for a lot of the stuff I'm doing at Parley. They really attention to detail focus. So all different learnings.
Laura Nicol: As Tilt's first boots on the ground, what did you learn about scaling global operations?
Harry Uffindell: There's one thing that sticks in my memory. So I was fortunate. I probably the best mentor of my life was my boss at Airbnb, uh, sorry, at Tilt, Tim Ryan, who had a pretty interesting career. He founded and sold his own company. He's gone on to do a lot of really interesting stuff. And I remember I'd put together this big 90 day plan. I'd got through a, what I can at the time, but it was an incredibly arduous interview process. You know, it was a San Francisco stop. So there was eight interviews, flew to San Francisco, finished with the two founders, super intimidating. And anyway, got the job. And I remember one of these first weeks I was producing a plan for APAC or for Australia. And Tim, we had our one on one and he's like, could be Harrison, but you know what Harrison? He's like, This is a very good V1. A polite way of saying it's a bit shit, or you know, you've made a start. Yeah, but you've got a long way to go. And our team, and our international team, I might have brought some of that more scrappy, on the ground stuff, and maybe taught the other people a few things of just like rolling up your sleeves. kind of mentality. But we also had people that have been five years at McKinsey and done MBAs and worked with some larger startups. I learned a lot from them of how they approach these problems, how they approach writing annual plans for their region, how they thought about breaking it down into really clear output metrics and input metrics. I think it was just learning via osmosis. The thing I'd sort of keep coming back to is just clarity of thought and communication. It's a lot harder to convey a plan or your ideas on one page of writing. It's a hell of a lot easier to write 10 pages.
Laura Nicol: From those early days with Tim to really being a country manager, I would say it's still quite a unique role in Australia. What were the, I guess, mistakes or successes that then happened once you got to execution mode that you learned from?
Harry Uffindell: Sure. I guess some of the biggest learnings, you know, as a country manager in Australia, as you've alluded to, it's not a very common role. You know, I guess it's becoming more common. I've seen like more country managers or even some of those Uber types of operational regional leads versus operators and boots on the ground. For me, our company was based in San Francisco, but we had an international team with a big London presence as well. The things that I think held me and then the Australian team in good stead was one, over communicating. You're very easily forgotten about, you know, you've got 80 percent of the team in San Francisco. You've got all the engineering and product team and they're kind of like, who's this weird guy in Australia? Who's this person in the Nordic? Who's this person in Ireland? And so I think just really over communicating progress, whether that's presenting to the company all hands or writing memos that are easily accessible to other people in the company. That was really important, just the communication piece. The second one, which is semi related is get on the plane where possible, just get over and spend time with people at HQ, especially, but also like our head of international team in London. I spent a decent amount of time in San Francisco. And I think every visit there, particularly when you're a cologne ranger or a sole operator in a new region, having those in person connections, it's just completely different. You know, like if you're spending a couple of weeks, you do a few visits to, you know, And then you've built a really deep relationship with a product lead or one of the engineering leads or someone that's sort of running a lot of the marketing and community efforts. It's a lot easier to go back to them and then ask for favors or ask for assistance rather than just being like, Oh, is that Harry guy from Australia? By asking me to sign on Slack again, I can kind of ignore them. It's not that critical. And also I think just being kind of unreasonably ambitious as well. We had our 90 day milestones, but in terms of as a team and we didn't really tell the company, like we said our own ones because we wanted everyone when they saw them to go, holy shit, like Australia is on a tear. Uh, so that was going to be the approach we took.
Laura Nicol: How did that journey then lead up to the acquisition with Airbnb?
Harry Uffindell: It's an interesting story actually. So we, we got a lot of things right at Tilt, but I think there was a bit of a missed opportunity as well. I think there was the ability to become a Revolut type competitor or become the Revolut of North America. And I think we just missed that and we're still on the precipice, but we still had good traction and we were going in to raise our Series C and at the same time, we were Airbnb was struggling with some issues around basically group travel, right? People being able to combine funds, split payment. And that sounds simple, but when you're talking multiple different people from different countries, different currencies, Tilt had built all of that structure and, and done a lot of that engineering work. And then we also had an e money license and they used a team of. 80 to 100 people at the time of which they probably wanted to hire about 80 percent of. So I took this as like an acqui hire with Airbnb. I was in the Marlborough Sounds at the time and got a call from my boss, Tim, and the reception there is notoriously bad and it was cutting in and out. And you sort of hear like acquisitions and then was it Airbnb? And then that was kind of the extent of the call. And so I remember going back upstairs. Like, I think we got acquired by Airbnb. I think it's a good thing. I'm not sure. They think I have a job. I'm not sure. So anyway, it all got figured out and I think you're going to be acquired by any company. Airbnb was definitely the top of my list. That was a pretty interesting change.
Laura Nicol: And what was that integration into the Airbnb company like?
Harry Uffindell: I'll be really candid and honest here. When I arrived at the Airbnb office in Sydney, there were some great people there. I think they built an outstanding culture. To me, it didn't feel like people were working that hard until I was working very long days, you know, like sort of 12 hours a day for the Monday through Friday, working Saturday, maybe a bit of Sunday. And it wasn't because like I necessarily had to, it's just because I really wanted to. And that was just kind of like the feeling or the stage of the company. Airbnb most definitely had done that, but I feel like that sort of got to a point where this wasn't true, but it almost felt like people could stop showing up to work and it would kind of carry on. I was in there at 7am and then I remember the first few weeks thinking people walking in the door at like nine o'clock or nine 30, leaving at five. I don't know. It wasn't sort of what I wanted. It's still today, not how I like to operate. That was a little bit of a surprise, but on the flip side, I think there were some incredible people, genuinely world class, top of their game, either had been at Airbnb from the early days or had come across from companies like Amazon and things like that. So a lot of good friends and people I still keep in contact with today. Great.
Laura Nicol: What do you reckon that one impact project was that you're really proud of still today?
Harry Uffindell: There's a few that jumped to mind, like I did ANZ's 2020 plans that was going from 2017 to 2020. Like a pretty broad three year plan and there was a ton of work that went into that But ultimately australia was already doing very well as a market for Airbnb But this was making it the most penetrated market in the world I left partway through but we'd executed on a lot of that and that was really successful I led our Qantas partnership. We drove a lot of demand and even On the supply side, I drove a bunch of new hosts through that and critical markets. Something I don't talk about as much now because I've gone more focused on homes, but I, I played a bit of a role in launching experiences in Australia. I ran my own Airbnb experience, which was like a tour of the Sydney startup hub. That gave me my piece of scrappy zero to one company building that I needed to like get me through that period. That was a ton of fun.
Laura Nicol: Because country managers are such a unique position in ANZ, do you have any advice for our listeners based on how you might pitch yourself to a global company for one of those roles or how these roles even come about?
Harry Uffindell: In terms of positioning yourself for a country manager role, you know, it could be country manager, it could be chief of staff type role, could be a growth lead or launcher, whatever it might be. The single most impactful thing I did, and I think people will look for this often for those roles, is people that have actually started something themselves. It doesn't need to be a breakout success, but it's someone with a bit of entrepreneurial flair that was curious enough, they can prove that they're resourceful, right? Yeah. Someone that has started and failed through startups and moonlighted on the side doing X or started a podcast or whatever it might be. All of a sudden, that will jump off the page. If I was interviewing someone, I wouldn't ask about any of those experiences at university or law or consulting or those early jobs. I'd go straight to the tell me about the startup. What led you to start that? How did you do it? What were the problems? How did you do this? How did you do that? So I think that's the the single impactful thing you can do is just start something even if it's a complete failure Like that's that's fine The second piece in terms of identifying those roles is if you're waiting to find it on a job board Like a it's probably too late and b With startups at that stage, a lot of the time it's just not published, right? It'll come through referrals or people they know are kind of good, but they're not sure what role they'll be. So I'm pretty meticulous. I treat it kind of like a sales process. When I've approached these things in the past and how I advise other people, don't try to find out what kind of role would suit you and then go search the internet for that, instead, I would do the things that will make you exciting for a role like that, and then create your list of companies that You know, it could be sector dependent, could be size dependent, could be off the back of a recent fundraise, cause you know, they'll be hiring and then create like an Excel or Google sheet list and just be meticulous with, okay, these are all the companies, here's a mutual connection, or maybe here are the three people that will go to a shared connection and I can do an introduction and sort of be constant with just trying to get in front of people. And also just being shameless about reaching out on LinkedIn or wherever it might be, or cold emailing people. New Zealand. And probably Australia are not as good as that as we should be. There's still this fear of rejection, but you know, go to door to door sales for a summer and they'll knock that out of you. I think the best approach is something just trying to add a little bit of value in it. And it might be the smallest thing of, Hey, I saw you're hiring for this. Show that you've done research. Hey, love what you're doing in this company. I thought this was really interesting. This new product release. I saw you're hiring for this role. I'm not a fit for it, but I went through my connections. I found these three people. Let me know if you'd like an introduction. Or I went through your website, I actually found these few errors or I was using your product and this is broken and here's a loom of it. People overestimate how long that takes. Instead of emailing 100 companies, you could email 10 and just by doing like one little bit of value add, you'll jump to the top of that list. You'll suddenly be in the 0. 1 percent or below the 1%. So yeah, it's taken that extra little step and it's a good reaction.
Laura Nicol: I love that so much. And I know that's true to your angel investment thesis, and we'll get to that shortly, but I can't believe we've not even spoken about Partly yet. Tell us about your time there. You've grown with the company from VP of Ops, and I think you said in the first handful of employees to about a hundred, and you've grown through a few different roles. So I'll let you share some more on that journey and what that experience has been like.
Harry Uffindell: Rewinding the clock, just for a moment, I was working on my own startup. I had a ton of personal conviction, but I couldn't convince investors to give me any money. And I was slowly running out of my own money through my funds and a friends and family round. And then I was kind of losing conviction, but getting progressively better at talking to investors. And then at the exact point where I think I applied three times or maybe two times to start mate. I finally got accepted, got offered an investment. At that point the lines crossed each other and I've lost personal conviction what I was doing. I had just become good enough at convincing other people to back me. And that's a very strange position to be in. I think the only right thing to do on that point is either You know be up front and completely change your idea and go. Hey, well if you back me as an individual I'm going to do something but it's probably not this or or you turn down the money and so that coincided with a weird sliding doors moment been christchurch either a Person that i'd met online and she was doing a bit of product work for me and she'd moved to christchurch Into this co working space And it just happened to be where Levi and the Partley team was just after founding the company. It was a very fortunate and just random meeting that once I lost conviction of what I was doing, it was the same time I met Levi. And I remember just being sort of blown away with him and just the size of ambition. It's very rare to hear a New Zealand founder talk like a founder in San Francisco saying, you know, We're gonna maybe not change the world But yeah often like changing an entire industry had this huge impact on a world scale and success You know after all that might be listing on the NASDAQ one day And I was sort of just blown away by Levi's level of ambition, that I love the fact that problem space was enormous, but also pretty unsexy, right? It was kind of like accounting before zero, you know, and it wasn't the next hot thing by any means, which I've always seen as a very good thing. Levi and I were the only two in there at weird hours, like 5. 30 in the morning, grabbing our coffee across the road from McDonald's and got chatting. And I joined as a VP of operations. I remember sort of bailing him up in the kitchen one morning and saying like, Hey, I'm not going to do my startup, but I think I want to join partly. So it's not what he was expecting at a high level worked across our marketing, sales, marketing, Early sort of customer success functions, a lot of these things were just in their infancy. So going from like zero to one, and then we started needing to hire people. So sort of started to move into that space. As the company grew, you know, we'd have someone that came in that was hopefully better at me than marketing or someone would start taking over sales or customer success. And I just kept trying to move towards what's the biggest fire? What's the biggest thing, keeping the team, keeping Levi up at night. And so pivoting towards that and where that led was a huge early focus on culture and building that initial team. I think people underestimate the impact of just being very intentional early on about the type of company that you want to build, the values that you want everybody to share in the company, the types of people that you want to hire. So like go out and hopefully change the world with. We spend a ton of time here. So I sort of balance both like operations and the people side. So on the upside, it was kind of the taking some of the learnings from Airbnb and Tilt, but, you know, watering it down or make it simplified for our initial annual planning and budgets and our quarterly OKRs and then how we held folks accountable and sort of did that on a quarterly basis. On what we call seasons, our sort of season by season basis. On the people side it was, okay, we're still relatively unknown, but how can we begin to like create this company brand and narrative and how can we start attracting some of the best talent in New Zealand and in the world to join us on our mission. If I look back at my time at Partly over the last four years, I think that's probably what I'm most proud of. Like my role has changed a lot. If I look at the team that we've got around us today and some of the people that were convinced to join us and the culture we've built and then the ruthless kind of intensity, you know, hopefully that's going to put us in good stead for the next season, the next 12 months, next few years.
Laura Nicol: When I spoke to Levi ahead of this conversation, he did describe your early days as fighting fires, rescoping goals, and navigating those big pivots. Can you walk us through any of those zero to one moments that helped you as a company sharpen your focus?
Harry Uffindell: Our goals and like how we go about doing it, our go to market, all of those things have changed a lot, but the underlying vision and the core things we need to get right, we're actually still pretty spot on from the beginning. There's been a few things that have helped us over time, which has been, um, You know, continuing to like just approach everything with a beginner's mind, not being too stuck and kind of know, like, this is the direction, this is what we told the board, this is what we need to do. I feel like for a couple of years there, every board meeting was a bit of a refresh and an update. It wasn't just, Hey, here are the metrics. It was like, Hey, this is our approach. This is what's changed. That ultimately was a good thing. That's led us to a place where like, we're constantly questioning assumptions, constantly questioning how we thought about the world. And a lot of that relied on. Speaking to people that were deep in the industry and just continue to like update our mental models. One of the lessons and saying that we try to drill home to the team is that people conflate change with a startup not knowing what they're doing. It's actually not that a change shows your ability to be really adaptable, to be able to identify the most critical problems, to be able to know when something was a priority, but now it isn't a priority, and then be nimble enough to very quickly change your approach to. Completely real that the company to put people in different teams, we try to mark that as like a real positive sign that we should celebrate. So I think a lot of companies trying to shy away from that. They almost embarrass like, Oh, the team's changing again. I was just like, no, like this was a good thing. This was one of our super strengths. Like we're changing again for a reason.
Laura Nicol: I feel like you've got lots of value to offer in the people and culture space and how you've built that function.
Harry Uffindell: On the people and culture space for folks that are at an early stage with their company, you want to be really intentional about this. And for us, that means getting, I think it was the first 10 of us in a room. And I remember this very clearly, like we're doing this live on a mirror board, like no little sections. And just writing the types of values that we hold personally. What kind of people would we want to work with? And like ultimately what we're trying to get to is we want to be able to define the values such that in 10 years time, we get up and we're just as excited to come in and work with each other and with a growing team as we are today. I remember reading, I think it was Delivering Happiness or one of the early Zappos books. And one of their co founders, maybe it was his prior company, they had worked really hard, the business had done well, but 10 years in, it was like the last thing he wanted to do each morning was go to work. And it was his own company, right? And that's kind of terrifying. And so, in the very early stages, just being very intentional about the company that you want to build. The values that you want to share with your fellow teammates and then one of those behavioral traits, right? How should people behave when no one's looking and what sort of things that we're going to celebrate?A lot of that has faded into how we approach problems and how we work today But it's also a filter for our hiring, right? We break our hiring down into skills base at the beginning. So maybe for an engineer or whoever it might be. Have they got the skills necessary to do the job really, really well? Are they the sort of top 0.1 percent in the country or in the world? And then the second stage is our loop interview. Amazon calls it the bar raiser process. And so in that stage we'll sort of take the box of like, yes, we think this person is exceptional from a technical point of view or a sales or customer success point of view. And this is, do they share the values and behaviors that will allow them to be successful at Partly? That's been one of the most impactful things we've done. We spend an inordinate amount of time on hiring and interviewing. I think for the last of 10, 000 applicants, we've hired 30 people. So we're, we have a really, really low acceptance rate. And there are people that are graced, but either not a fit for partly or just not quite at that bar. And I think every quarter, every year, that bar just keeps getting higher and higher. We've never talked about a talent retention strategy. We've had one person voluntarily leave over the last four years. And that's not because like we had these things in place to like keep people or these like perks and benefits that were like best in market and you know, like this crazy gift on your anniversary. The reason people stay is not for any of that stuff. Like people stay because one. They're surrounded by the smartest and most ambitious people that I've ever worked with before. They're given really big problems, hard problems to solve. And then they're given a ton of freedom and responsibility to do what they do best, right? They grant their role, and then they've got the freedom to go out and do it. And a lot of that means stripping back things. It means getting rid of bureaucracy, getting rid of process, getting rid of meetings. We've taken a lot of inspiration from Netflix. Our expense policy is the red face, right? You can basically spend whatever you like, as long as you're happy to get up at the next company all hands. Justify it without getting red in the face and blushing, right? Airbnb, counterexample, and most companies will do this, like, I think the accommodation budget is Whatever it was. So what do people do? Do the search on Airbnb and they go two 30 per night, right? Try find the wherever possible. We've just continued to try raise that of talent density. We've just really tried to treat people like adults, which sounds like obviously companies do that, but most don't. That's why your policies and process and and rules in place would try to give people more autonomy, more freedom and responsibility.And then continue to remove rules and process where we can. I think those three have kind of like a bit of a flywheel that's helped us, you know, retain the team we have, and I think operate as effectively as we have.
Laura Nicol: How are you playing into your strengths or your genius zone in your role? What would you say your number one superpower is?
Harry Uffindell: My personal superpower? don't ask me that. What I've learned over time is one of the single most impactful changes or skills that you can develop is the ability to focus. I mean that in two ways. One is particularly in a startup environment, there's always a lot of distraction. There's always a lot of new shiny object syndrome, you know, things that you can go to. I think people conflate being busy with being effective. That's one of my internal muscles that I've built over time is, is two things. One is consistently asking myself, impactful thing I can do for the company? It's a little bit that Eisenhower matrix of like urgent versus important. There will be things that are like not important and urgent, like you need to get that off letter out or you need to do this or you need to like get this U.S. entity established, whatever. Some things you just have to do. But then I think people often get distracted by like the urgent not important and their days look like buzzing around slack And you know end of the week I've definitely had those weeks where you feel like you're busy and your mind's very loud But you haven't achieved those one or two really important things And so I think one of my superpowers has been to really zone in on one of the one or two Key things that I can do at the company, like the most impactful things. And that's changed over time. It's probably gone from really scrappy to now it's what's the leverage I can have across all our leadership or our people leads or what we call our managers. Then things I can do that impact the entire company on a more just like tactical day to day basis. It's little things like catching myself and knowing when I'm being distracted by the dopamine distraction, right? Am I being responsive in Slack? If I'm super responsive, that's normally not a good sign. So really prioritizing that deep work. For me, that means planning my day the night before and sometimes even finding ways to be accountable in public of what I'm doing when I don't even need to be. So I tell my team, Hey, These are the two things I'm going to get done this week. And then I know in the back of my mind, I've got to do this, right? So it's funny, like little hacks to hold myself accountable. If I had to add to that, it's semi related to the first point, but I've never sort of seen my role as boxed into one thing or another. I am constantly thinking, particularly as we get bigger, what's the biggest thing keeping Levi up at night? Or what's the biggest fire at a company level which I can impact? And so I think that's been good, you asked for one superpower, but hopefully that's all kind of one related thing around like prioritization, focus, and impact. The last thing, or the second thing, if, If that's one group, the ability just to ruthlessly execute and get shit done. I'm pretty good at, once I know what I'm doing, just being sort of like headphones on, very resourceful, like holding people to account and being relentless to like own something end to end and not getting blocked, like I'm going to keep pushing things, keep pushing people until we deliver. As a company, when you're growing this fast, your skills don't necessarily mean you're going to be, As good as you need to be for the next challenge, right? So you need to be growing as fast, if not faster than the company, or you should be replaced, right? Like if I'm not the best person at that next stage, like Levi should fire me. He should replace me with someone else. It's on all of us in these positions to keep driving our own growth and to keep getting ready for that next stage.
Laura Nicol: Plus one on all of that. When I spoke to Levi and David actually before this interview, In terms of your operating style, they described you as methodical, gritty, pragmatic, and highly action orientated. And actually, I really love that your superpower filters down to your team and your goal setting. From the research I've done, you use the one thing goal setting method. So I love that you bring the team on that journey, too.
Harry Uffindell: It's important, and it's something that we've done recently with Partly, of just making sure that We've got these big company goals on an annual basis, on a quarterly basis, we've got some group and team outputs. It's a good sense check. It's something that, you know, we ask people that like people are pretty prepared to answer. You should know what the one key thing you're doing at the company is or what impact you're trying to have. If you don't, it means we need to fix that, right? We need to make sure we get clarity, make sure people are focused on the right thing.
Laura Nicol: Actually, I had a therapy session at the beginning of the year because I found myself procrastinating. And I was like, I just don't understand. I love what I'm, it was actually in all areas of my life. I was like, I love what I'm doing. Nothing is scary here. Well, actually, it is scary, but in a good way. And I just had this inaction. Actually, it was simple advice. It was just like, the thing that you're chasing is too big. Break it down into mini parts. And I've been flying since, so yay.
Harry Uffindell: And on that, I've had that same issue and when I'm doing my plan the night before, what I'll often do is, let's say there's three things I want to work on tomorrow. I use Trello, have for a long time, I haven't like updated, still like very simple, but I will have a card and then within that I have my checklist. And I'll even get to the point of like making it so easy to start momentum that it sounds comical. It's like the first step might be, Start NotionDoc and then second step is like research this. And so it's sort of like winning by making your bed in the morning. Right. It's just that what's the smallest little thing you can do to fall for and create momentum. So I find this having that's easy. And then I'm away the other thing, which is a bit of a weird one, but again, a hack that I've used pretty successfully is if I don't want to do something, there's a. A website or a tool that I use is egg timer and I give myself permission to not keep working on something. I go, look, I don't want to do this. I'm going to set a five minute timer and then I can quit. I can stop at the end of five minutes. And you know what happens like nine times out of 10, you get five minutes in and then you kind of go, Oh, this is interesting. And an hour goes by. I kind of know what I'm doing to myself when I do it, but it's surprisingly still works.
Laura Nicol: We're going to look ahead to the future now from your vantage point as chief people officer, what trends do you see shaping the roles of operators?
Harry Uffindell: If I had to zoom out a little bit in terms of like, how do I think about operators at a company, at a company that's growing fast, I think there's two things. One is there's an expectation of operators to be sort of force multipliers across the company, right? You might be an IC, but you should be able to have, if you're a great operator, like this multiplier impact. Like you should be able to, if there's different things people are working on, like maybe you're working across various teams, this ability to, Company move faster simultaneously. The second thing is, I think just this increased productivity as a person, right? For our team. I don't want everyone to be 10% more effective each year. Like I want our, our enablement or our operations team to be finding ways to be 2, 3, 10 more effective over the next couple of years. And some of that sure is using AI tools and things to make yourself. More productive, but one of the changes we'll see or already are seeing is that companies have been founded and you know, they're getting to product market fit and they're raising these big rounds with really, really small teams, you know, three to five people, people keep talking about when we see the first one person unicorn, but I think an element of truth carries over to operators and established startups as well, which is, yeah, Yeah. Like the company might grow their revenues by 10, 20, 50 X, maybe the engineering team is getting more effective, which if you can deliver these products to more customers, you'll get a bigger return. I actually don't think the engineering hire will slow down. I think people as a result of the higher return, hire more engineers and more product people. But I think for operations and for operators, the way you should be thinking about it and how we're thinking about it for our team and partly is. As the company scales from a hundred to five hundred people, I don't want our team to grow. Like I don't want this huge team. I want this crazy efficient team. Friend of mine, Jean George had a company and she said their goal is to automate themselves out of their own role. And like, maybe you don't want to go to that extent where you like you, you actually not needed, but. Getting to the point where the systems and the things you're putting in place, like you're not having to do this manual repetitive work, you're finding ways, like whether it's AI agents or it's just automated way of doing things that allow you to then focus on higher impact things. And then again, and again, so we can be a team of, I think about six or seven in our enablement team. And then we've got a larger ops team. But how can we stay the same size, but, you know, be serving in 50 X number of customers, 10 50 X the number of internal employees as well.
Laura Nicol: What's your vision for the future as a leader or as a leader, or as a human being,
Harry Uffindell: I would tackle the like operator slash later one first. Partly it's the number one focus and the challenges ahead are going to be massive. And for me, I need to keep scaling with the company. So my sort of professional mission is to become the best startup CPO in the world. Intentionally ambitious. If any, whether it's an investor, a founder, a CEO, if they think, shit, we need some advice or we need help with this problem. I'm sort of the go to right? I've learned enough, I've developed these skills, I've seen enough, I've experienced enough, you know, through Partly and maybe companies I've invested in as well, to really have an enormous impact. On a personal level, again, this sort of speaks partly into my view that the work life balance is BS, is that I firmly believe that to create outsized results, to do truly exceptional things, You need periods of imbalance. Those imbalances can be on the work side, they can also be on the professional side. Personally, I, this is a time in my life where I lean into the work side, I'm happy for that, and by design, I imbalance on that side. I guess the good thing about it is, while we work extremely hard, we're also very, very flexible, right? So I will work strange hours, I will be up at 5am, I might work very late, but then I will be taking 4 or 5 hours off just to like spend time and pick up my boy from daycare and spend time with my kids. Firstly, for me, I think continuing a life of imbalance and then hopefully on the other side it'll flip. There'll be an imbalance on the family side. But I think as soon as you've got the startup bug, it's pretty hard to let that go. There's always going to be that nagging sort of question of what else could we be doing? So we'll see how that turns out.
Laura Nicol: Yeah, nice. I love that you've got that flexibility to hang out with the family. You're trying to be the best CPO in the world. Is there a leader that you're aspiring to be like or who has walked the path before?
Harry Uffindell: Yeah, I think on the people and culture side, the two that would jump to mind for me would be Petty McCord. and read Hastings from Netflix. I think there has been some changes written about recently on the culture at Netflix, but I think all in all the journey they've been on, the culture they've managed to maintain at scale was really impressive. From a pure execution point and just clarity of thought, I loved reading anything by Patrick Collison and the Stripe brothers. I think Stripe, you know, learn more about them and hear more about them as they go public probably this year, but they're, they're probably the two to three that I look to most.
Laura Nicol: You mentioned about your portfolio companies. Do you have any advice for any operators looking to start making their first angel investments? Second part of that question would be like, how can you pitch how you'd add value to those companies on their journey?
Harry Uffindell: The best way to get started is find ways to add value to founders. There's lots of money in the ecosystem. There's huge buzz and inflow of capital around anything that's got AI in a pitch deck. So look, money is there for people that can get those foundational pieces right. Money's helpful, like startups, you know, particularly founders in the early stages, sometimes even before they've got an idea or like before they've got any sort of sign of product market fit, being able to just write a check and give them cash. Like that, that is useful, gets less useful as they get further on. But I think in those early stages, it's figuring out how can I add value? And similar to when you're looking for a company to join, as I mentioned before, I think it's just that really scrappy stuff that you can do for a founder, right? Stuff that they would be doing as a founder in their day to day. Might be. Hey, I know you need to hire that first engineer or designer. I've gone away and I've populated this Google sheet with 20 great people. Here's like their LinkedIn's. I can introduce to these ones, like blah, blah, blah. Like just, just doing stuff like that where I found all the holy shit. This was helpful for me. I'll obviously help people with hiring. I'll help people with some early operations, stuff, early cultures of thinking through that. And, and also with my experience at Google. Meet Mel and Tilt, a lot of it was in the growth area. So just helping those like initial growth levers or thinking through how to approach it and fundraising, right You might have a superpower in design. Great, like lean into design and just give your time, just like lean into what you can help with. And if it's not clear, like there's always stuff you can do. Like startups always need a hire. They always need to speak to customers. You can always. At a very basic level, like build, lift and like do things that will help or find a way to introduce them to useful people. For me, I've found that approach. I think there's a book here, which is like dig your well before you drink from it. A lot of the deals that I've got is just because I've been helpful. I pre check, pre investment, just trying to add some value. And then once you are investing in the company, hopefully there's even more motivation, but if you keep trying to help that company, then they will refer you to others. Another thing to keep in mind is a lot of the efforts don't bear fruit today or even tomorrow. It might be meeting with people. It might be helping someone. It might not be for this business. Maybe it's like being able to invest in the next business. So I think over time, like the more effort you put in, it compounds on itself. If you don't get a huge return out of it, maybe it turns out you're not a great investor. It turns out it's better investing in the S& P 500. I think there's still value in investing in a few companies, just like get that insight into how they operate, the challenges that they have. Maybe it even provides you a job opportunity down the track, like lots of VCs you'll see doing that. I'll pick the best portfolio company and jump into it and maybe it'll, it'll help you sign your own company one day. The best thing you can do is start a company and the second best thing you can do is invest in a founder and help them start a company or join an early stage company. That's probably number three or number two or three.
Laura Nicol: I have an ad for that. I feel like if you want to learn alongside other people, syndicates are a great way to learn how to diligence a company, learn how to get to conviction on a company because the syndicate lead will be like taking you along on that journey.
Harry Uffindell: Yeah, absolutely. Syndicates are great. But let's say you don't even have the money, you know, syndicates, AngelList, you normally do a thousand dollars. So you can spread that across 10 companies. There's also just a ton of resources online, right? Like Clary Stebbins with 20BC, that's super interesting. There's a ton of podcasting content out there if you just want to learn about the world of investing and those early sort of startup stories.
Laura Nicol: Are there any resources, frameworks, or people in the industry that have been your Northstars
Harry Uffindell: Yeah, I'm kind of like a a la carte dish of the day kind of person, right? I used to read a lot of books which weren't that timely, you know, they were just recommended and they're great books, but find what's a lot more valuable is what problem do I have today? And what is the specific resource or book or person I can speak to? And you, I think spending a lot of time figuring out like the number one person to speak to about a problem is better than speaking to like the five kind of average people that all have like semi different ideas. I wouldn't say there's one fallback in particular. In terms of frameworks, me personally, I've used the Eisenhower matrix just in terms of prioritizing what we should focus on like as a company, as a team. The radical candor framework is the same that we use a lot internally. Partly I'm just, you know, caring personally enough to challenge people really directly and give them that feedback they need to have. Books and like things I have gone back to there's the one thing which we mentioned before there's the netflix style book So there's sort of powerful which was an early one and then no rules rules Which is a recent one one from left field, but I do a yearly read of how to win friends and influence people It's an old book and like some of the examples are outdated But I find it just like a good refresher of kind of how to get what you want or like how to work with people and um I don't know. It's kind of become a yearly ritual now, but I find there's always two or three things in there each year that I'll take and go, okay, when you come into the situation or you find yourself with someone that maybe you don't agree with, or, or you're trying to get this result, it's been helpful with my approach to things.
Laura Nicol: Yeah, I really love it. Especially when you're in a situation where you need to influence across an organization, but not everybody will be your direct report. This podcast is all about lifting other operators up. So if you had to name an operator who's doing great things, who would they be?
Harry Uffindell: I could cheat and list a bunch of people up partly, but I won't do that. I'll take a bit of a people spin on it. So in terms of like operators in the people space or leadership space, Kirstie from Aura. I've been pretty relentless in just asking her feedback on things from time to time. And Penny from Crimson Global Academy. She's very impressive. She's a great operator. We fortunately just interviewed Jamie Beedon in our recent season opener week at Partly, which was pretty inspirational. Yeah, they're probably like the Kiwis that initially jumped to mind, particularly with a slight people lens on it.
Laura Nicol: Love it. So last question, do you have any advice on staying grounded amid the chaos?
Harry Uffindell: I'll happily embarrass myself here. I've always loved this like constant experimentation with what works for me, what doesn't, what leads to more productive weeks. I'm probably not quite like the Tim Ferriss, but I think there's like elements of that for our work week, or even Michael Batko has like a whole productivity stack, so there'll be bits that I take from there. For me, personally, what I've found most impactful is I meditate every day and I find that's the single most like profound change I made, just the ability to not be as reactionary. I think it's very helpful in a work environment or just being able to be productive, but also at home, right? At the start of this year when I started thinking about what things do I want to do, I looked at, What are like the highest leverage things? What's like a change that doesn't just impact one part of my life, but has like this spillover effect to work and relationships and whatever else. I'm one of those annoying early morning people. So I find, you know, getting up about 4. is my standard. That's self induced, but it's also partly due to having two young boys. I start early. I exercise pretty much every day. I've avoided, I don't eat breakfast anymore. So, uh, I got into some intermittent fasting, but also find it just like, it's a, a way of simplifying my morning. It's a very calm, slow start. It's not very distracted. I start my morning early, focus on the most important things. This will seem counterintuitive for a startup, like partly, but any startup. So I don't have Slack on my phone. I don't have email on my phone. I even block Safari so I can get to it, but it's just very annoying and cumbersome. I've sort of got the brand new iPhone and then I've Proceeded to try and make it a dumb phone. So I, yeah, I know I go back to the old 3315. I find all of this really just grounded in like, how do I remove distraction from my life and maintain focus? Even little things like when I go home, there's a place in my house for my laptop and phone, right? Cause my personality, give me the chance and I'll be back on Slack. I'll be back on email. I'll be doing something. The lesson there is try to be great at work and be a hundred percent at work when you're there. And then when you're with family or with friends, be a hundred percent there. Don't be doing a half written reply or not being able to reply because you need to access something and it's now distracting you from a dinner out with your friends. Be a hundred percent one or the other. The last thing I do, which I think helps ground me and keep the chaos at bay is I do a monthly personal review session. I go out, choose a different location and I look back at what are the things I wanted to do this year personally and professionally, am I tracking against what I said I was going to do? Are there little tweaks to my schedule or my life that I want to change? It used to be an annual review. Then you get to the year and you go, Oh, well, okay, like this went well, but these didn't. So like having just a light half an hour, an hour, have a wine or a beer while you're doing it and kind of reflect. It's kind of a, just a good recurring thing to have in my calendar. So it's been pretty helpful.
Laura Nicol: one to that. I call it my temperature check each month.
Harry Uffindell: Yeah, that's great.
Laura Nicol: Awesome. Okay, so where can our listeners connect with you?
Harry Uffindell: One of the things I wanted to do this year was actually starting to write down some of these learnings to be a bit more public and share these things.It's a bit of a leap of faith here, but I'll direct people to harrysnewsletter. com. That's where I'm going to be starting to write more lessons and sharing more resources of next year. That's one of the big things I'm focused on doing. On LinkedIn, you can just find me, Harry Uffendell and then harry [at] partly [dot] com. Encourage anyone to reach out directly. Always happy to chat or help in any way I can. If you're an operator, if you're looking for your next career role, if you're looking to found a company or anything you think I might be able to offer some advice on, feel free to reach out.
Laura Nicol: Oh, that's so greatHarry, thank you so much.
Harry Uffindell: Thanks, Laura. Really enjoyed it.