Founder’s Field Guide
Episode 26 Modernizing Compliance
Founder’s Field Guide

Episode 26: Modernizing Compliance

Modernizing Compliance

Roxanne is the co-founder and CEO of Ethena, a modern compliance platform. We cover the lessons Roxanne ported 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.

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[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 its effectiveness

[00:38:13] - Darker sides of growing the business and raising money

[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 thing about the Rhodes Scholar program

[00:54:02] - Kindest thing anyone has done for her

Modernizing Compliance

Introduction

Patrick
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.

Our mission with these episodes is to provide access to the best ideas and people in business and investing. We will soon be significantly expanding the scope of this effort. To make it possible, at Colossus, we're expanding the team and hiring two critical early roles. The first position will be our lead mobile software developer. This person will lead the development of our mobile applications, which will change how people learn together. The second position will be our lead designer. Because the existing team lacks UX and UI design experience, this person will have a blank slate to creatively design new applications from the ground up. To learn more about both roles, visit joincolossus.com/careers. Now, onto the show.

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