#281 - Kelsey Bishop, CEO Candor on making the dreams happen

Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to put your team culture on autopilot, share authentically, and discover how to work better together. My guest is Kelsey Bishop, Founder and CEO of Candor.

Kelsey is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. She started her career as an employee in early-stage startups. She is also an angel investor in companies that include Primer, Roster, Alongside Finance, Noula Health, Candid Health, Taiyaki, Areyo (acq. Zillow), and Channeled.

Throughout her career, she worked on teams that felt like magic and worked on teams where that wasn't the case. Curious as she was, she started digging into why that was the case.

But getting visibility on how a team really works together is hard. Tools like LinkedIn and Glassdoor are cluttered with spam, virtue-signaling, and fake or toxic profiles.

So, without finding a solution, she decided to create one herself and founded Candor in May 2021.

Their mission: help people find belonging at work. Candor believes true job satisfaction in tech comes when you can be yourself in a team where you are included and accepted.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Kelsey to my podcast. We explore what's so hard about qualifying cultures inside organizations. Kelsey then shares the steps that were critical on her journey to get the company off the ground without a tech team and obtain the funding to accelerate its growth. She then elaborates on what she did differently to make users come back every single day to build the culture they desire. Lastly, she explains how she's able to grow the business without spending anything on marketing - purely leveraging the remarkable effect.

Here's one of her quotes

We're building some of those tools for day-to-day culture. What we hear from users is, 'A profile is great for onboarding or for this one moment, but company culture happens every single day. And so candor actually can help you manage how you celebrate your people, how you do retros, how you do one-on-ones. All of these moments that require intentionality. And on the flip side, startups usually get them wrong. They're not thinking about this stuff every single day. And when you don't think about it, you usually let it fall by the wayside, and you get it wrong.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. You can start a successful Tech Startup and your first raving fans without a tech team.
2. Delivering your promises to investors is about doing what makes value sense to your customers and the business - even if this means delaying or even abandoning the original vision you promised them.
3. Finding your sweetspot starts with finding the people that care about the same.
4. The reason why people fall in love with your product is not what it does but how it will make them feel.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Kelsey Bishop
• Website Candor

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