For many startups, a human resources department can feel like a final frontier, a distraction, and a niggling detail in the way of their product. It hasn’t helped that, according to ZDNet, even “as the recession fades away and businesses have been rehiring, expanding and rediscovering their pre-recession chops, HR departments are still starved for funding, headcount, and relevant HR technology. It’s like the business is coming out of the recession, but HR is still stuck in 2008. The post-recession HR organization is more often than not comprised of survivors who possess pre-recession skills and use pre-recession tools. It’s as if HR has entered the “Twilight Zone of irrelevancy”.
Enter Fizzmint. From Seattle, with a slogan “Do your job, not the paperwork”, it’s geared itself to move quickly in a startup culture to which it is marketing itself. There are few sectors with greater variety than tech, so it makes sense that Fizzmint’s CEO has a diverse background: Tarah Wheeler Van Vlack has been an academic with a focus on cognitive theory in political science, an advocate for women in tech, a lead developer for Microsoft, and that’s just scratching the surface. We talked about leadership styles, the differences between academia and tech, and management techniques picked up from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
WeWork Magazine: If you could sum up your management strategy in a sentence, how would you?
Tarah Wheeler Van Vlack: I trust my team to be artists, specialists, and subject-matter experts, and I murder with extreme prejudice any obstacle in their path.
WWM: What’s the backstory behind Fizzmint? What have your experiences with HR been before this?
TWVV: Liz Dahlstrom and I founded Fizzmint in August of 2012 to handle the grind of repetitive business and employee management tasks that suck the life from business owners and entrepreneurs. She and I are both engineers, hackers, and architects, and we saw and experienced for ourselves this serious problem in market inefficiency. It’s been a joy to grow this business to include people with HR experience who are giving us a well-rounded view of the employee management industry, and our place in it. We’re conquering the last analog frontier in a digital world.
WWM: How have you dealt with unexpected problems?
TWVV: We expect unexpected problems. Our team is diverse, remote, and hyper skilled. We know that breakage happens, and we communicate using not just the Internet, but with our ears. We listen, and work together to solve problems. We’ve never found any obstacle that we can’t conquer as a team.
WWM: What are some differences you’ve noticed between the world of startups and academia?
TWVV: In academia, subject matter expertise matters more than people skills. In startups, people skills trump everything…but most of all, the ability to listen humbly to your investors, colleagues, stakeholders, and customers.
WWM: Has working at a WeWork space changed the way FizzMint has done business?
TWVV: Absolutely. WeWork has opened up opportunities for us that we couldn’t have predicted. The media studio, two office doors down from us, is filming our sizzle reel, and we’re helping them find new clients. I’ve gone to several office hours for startup experts, investors, and service providers, and received key insights into how we can improve our pitch, product, and positioning.
WWM: And finally, just because you’re also a Trekkie. All the captains have very different management styles: Janeway tried to encourage a familial environment, Sisko was brash and went with his gut, Picard would seek out a diplomatic middle ground, Kirk always promoted different points of view. Have any of their styles influenced you, and which captain do you think would be best at managing a startup today?
TWVV: I’m going to quibble slightly with your characterization of Picard as seeking out middle ground. I think that of the captains, Picard was the one who best understood that his people had expertise beyond his own, and that his job was to support them. He was and is absolutely the model of the CEO I try to be. He acknowledged when he didn’t know what he was doing, trusting that his people respected his judgment even when he disagreed with them. He enabled each of them to develop their skillsets to the absolute limits and beyond of their abilities and desires. Janeway’s sense of humor is the one that appealed to me most. She understood how to crack a joke to reduce tension without ever losing her authority, which is a very fine line to walk as a woman, and a goal to which I aspire. On the other hand, Kirk often seemed to provoke argument among his people to see which ideas survived conflict, and Sisko was too isolated from and didn’t always trust his people.
I think we are not just influenced by real humans, but by the literary and historical characters that we have come to know and love. Star Trek is a family of explorers conquering alien challenges and their own foibles in an unknown universe. I can often hear the voices of the wonderful mentors I’ve had, and when I ask myself how to use my authority and how to support my team, Picard always offers the best advice!
Photographs by Lauren Kallen.