Episode 11: Interview with Shanti Ariker, GC & Chief Privacy Officer at Zendesk

Inspiring Legal

How do you build that business-savvy legal team? In this episode, Stine teams up with Shanti Ariker, General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer at Zendesk, to learn just how she did that and the impact it had on the team and the company.

Thank you for listening to Inspiring Legal.

Full episode transcript with timestamps:

[00:00 - 00:09] Welcome to Inspiring Legal, the podcast for in-house legal.
[00:10 - 00:16] Get insights, learn from peers, life lessons from some of the most influential GCs.
[00:16 - 00:19] If it's related to in-house legal, we cover it.
[00:19 - 00:31] For more inspiration, go to openli.com slash community.
[00:31 - 00:35] Welcome to another episode of Inspiring Legal.
[00:35 - 00:39] My name is Stine and today I'm joined by Shanti.
[00:39 - 00:46] You will hear much more about her in a second, but I can tell you she has a very impressive resume,
[00:46 - 00:49] working for some of the biggest tech companies.
[00:49 - 00:51] Shanti, welcome.
[00:51 - 00:56] Thank you so much for having me today. It's great to be here.
[00:56 - 01:03] I just wanted to welcome everybody to the podcast and I'm excited to be here.
[01:03 - 01:07] We are super excited to have you on.
[01:07 - 01:12] What we're going to be talking about today is making legal a part of the business.
[01:12 - 01:21] How do you get legal to be that business partner that not only helps protect the business, but adds value too as well?
[01:21 - 01:26] That's something that I know that you've been very passionate about, Shanti, during your career.
[01:26 - 01:35] But before we jump into it, I would love for the listeners to get a little bit of flavor into your background
[01:35 - 01:43] and who you are so they get to know you as well.

[02:14 - 02:26] I am currently the general counsel of Zendesk, which is a large CRM software company that mainly focuses on customer support and customer success.
[02:26 - 02:34] But previously I've worked at other large companies, as you mentioned, including Twilio, Autodesk, and Salesforce.
[02:34 - 02:46] So in my time, I've done a lot to grow large tech companies and to really work side by side and hand in hand with the business folks.
[02:46 - 02:52] So it's not just tech companies.
[02:52 - 02:55] These are some of the biggest in the world.
[02:55 - 03:03] If you know about SaaS businesses and you know about tech, you definitely know about Salesforce and Twilio and Zendesk.
[03:03 - 03:08] So how did you get into the tech as general counsel?
[03:08 - 03:10] How did that start?
[03:10 - 03:17] So really, it started quite a long time ago with my interest in science and technology.
[03:17 - 03:23] My father was a physicist and always interested me in that sort of thing, even though I was an English major.
[03:23 - 03:34] So while I never went into the technology field myself or became a technologist, I was always really inspired to understand about it and wanted to,
[03:34 - 03:42] and having grown up actually in Silicon Valley, I wanted to be near that and be part of it in whatever way I could.
[03:42 - 03:51] So when I became a lawyer, I thought, what better way to honor kind of my father's legacy than to continue in the tech field myself.
[03:51 - 04:03] So when I did start out, though, I was at a big law firm on Wall Street and then moved to the Bay Area and was working in the litigation group of a Bay Area law firm.
[04:03 - 04:07] And I really did want to move in-house and work in tech.
[04:07 - 04:14] And in order to do that, I got a little bit lucky and was asked to go in-house by one of my clients.
[04:14 - 04:21] So I did that, but I eventually started to work more on technology agreements and work on commercial agreements.
[04:21 - 04:32] And so that, you know, really got me much closer into the business because litigation, you know, you learn like maybe one facet related to a case, but not as much about the whole business.
[04:32 - 04:49] And so as I started to work more on technology transactions, I learned about what the concerns of the business were, what the needs were, and, you know, over time have delved more and deeply into business areas.
[04:49 - 05:02] So you mentioned it, getting closer to the business, and I think this is something that lawyers are becoming better at doing.
[05:02 - 05:12] But what would you say have been kind of like the development over the last, let's say, 10 years, in your opinion, has it changed?
[05:12 - 05:15] Have lawyers changed as much as the business?
[05:15 - 05:18] And how have you seen this develop?
[05:18 - 05:29] Yeah, I think, you know, over my career, there's been a big shift between inside and outside counsel, right?
[05:29 - 05:36] So there were much smaller legal departments in-house when I started to practice law.
[05:36 - 05:44] There might even be no general counsel or just a general counsel and no staff, maybe one person at most.
[05:44 - 05:56] But now, you know, some of these companies that I've worked at have hundreds of lawyers or even thousands of lawyers on some of the larger FANG companies like Google, Facebook, et cetera.
[05:56 - 06:03] And so they're almost like whole legal firms in and of themselves.
[06:03 - 06:16] So, you know, the practice of law in-house has really changed quite a bit because you have to specialize, you're much more focused on creating value for the business and really understanding the business.
[06:16 - 06:24] And so, you know, the companies where I've worked, we've had, you know, larger legal teams, but not enormous.
[06:24 - 06:30] And I think where you can really add value and where I've been able to add value is to really understand the business.
[06:30 - 06:32] And what do I mean by that?
[06:32 - 06:34] And it's not just about my little area.
[06:34 - 06:40] You know, when I was hired at Salesforce, I was mainly working on the master subscription agreement.
[06:40 - 06:45] And certainly I know my way around an indemnity clause and limitation of liability.
[06:45 - 06:55] And then but you have to understand a little bit about the use cases of the customer, what they're looking to put into the system as by way of data,
[06:55 - 07:02] the privacy areas of regulation and where that could trip you up and depending on which country you're in.
[07:02 - 07:10] But the more the longer that I'm in a company, the more I'm interested in, you know, what is exactly what is their product do?
[07:10 - 07:19] And where are the things where are the where are the problems and the issues that are facing customers when they're trying to use the product?
[07:19 - 07:30] And how can you as a lawyer bring those to the business and make them understand where they're where there are these friction points that you can help solve?
[07:30 - 07:34] Often they don't they don't earn in those conversations, in those negotiations.
[07:34 - 07:47] So they don't necessarily know, you know, sometimes they'll be in a good example is a very acquisitive company may have acquired a bunch of different products and not put them on the same platform.
[07:47 - 08:01] And so when you're negotiating an agreement, suddenly you've got six different security standards or the data is residing in different places or it's being processed in different ways.
[08:01 - 08:05] And so you don't want to have the same security addendum apply.
[08:05 - 08:09] And the customer doesn't care because they just want one set of term...