Sophie Theen - The Soul of Startups: The Untold Stories of How Founders Affect Culture

Sophie Theen

Copyright 2022 by Sophie Theen. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data is Available:

ISBN 9781119885597 (hardback)
ISBN 9781119885610 (ePDF)
ISBN 9781119885603 (ePub)

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Cover Image: Ekaterina Bedoeva/Getty Images

To those who inspired it,

Good and Bad.

Thank you for setting me free.

It really is that simple. I stood nodding my head under drizzling rain in the middle of Hyde Park, rereading my WhatsApp exchange with Sophie. Mental bookmark, I said aloud and continued walking. She and I had been going backandforth about a particularly stressful interpersonal work conundrum I was experiencing, and I was in search of some tough love wrapped in sympathy, which is exactly what I got.

For most of my career, particularly the last decade, I've been pursuing a vision of work where I feel confident, valued, and fulfilled. Why is that remarkable in any way? It's not. We're all doing the same thing, every day. However, it is remarkable to find someone who challenges and helps you refine your thinking to make both your pursuit and your vision not only sensible but attainable. Even more remarkable is finding someone with whom to build that vision. I (and many others) found that person in Sophie. Together, she and I have spent countless hours bonding over our shared passions, similarities, differences and, ultimately, how we want to make changes in the world.

Sophie and I first met in person in December 2019 in the London HQ of the FinTech company she had recently joined. I was in the recruitment process to join and was looking to leave my role at a large, very stable organisation, to head up marketing and customer acquisition at this much smaller B2C FinTech. I had ambitious plans to seriously disrupt traditional consumer lending. I arrived in a suit. Sophie turned up with rainbow hair, workout pants, and sneakers. Cooooooooool, I smiled as she opened the door of the soundproof meeting room pod.

One of the first things you notice about Sophie is that she knows her stuff. She can get down to business in a way that makes you confident she is handling whatever she's handling. The second, third, and fourth things might be her brightly dyed hair, her tattoos, and/or that she is physically very, very small. Immediately, I wanted to know her MBTI type. A dated reference? Maybe. Nonetheless, I really wanted to know!

That day, we ended up chatting about a worrying new SARSlike virus that we'd been hearing about, handwashing (why doesn't everybody just do it already?), social trust in Asian cities versus European ones, and lots of other seemingly random topics. I say seemingly random because when we were done, she closed the conversation by summarising her takeaways against the points and questions she had had regarding my candidacy. Clever! That was my trickget to know someone quickly and relatively profoundly through active listening and lots of specific yet casual questions. Now I really wanted to know this Sophie woman.

In the end, I accepted the role of Chief Marketing Officer, which morphed into Chief Product & Marketing Officer and, finally, into Chief Executive Officer over my tenure with the firm. Along the way, Sophie and I formed a decisive allyship and friendship, nourished by direct and honest conversation and a lot of shared values, two of which repeatedly make their way to the forefront of our discussions: 1) leading by example with compassion and empathy, and 2) leaving a team, department, company, industry, or all the above better than you found it.

I started the CMO role on the 18th of March 2020, a date I will not soon forget. COVID19 was surging (for the first time) in the UK and the entire country was placed under lockdown the very next day. Over the nearly two years that followed, I was fortunate to work closely with Sophie and benefit from her wellworn experience navigating an incredibly broad range of subjects and personalities. At the same time, shelike everyone elsewas learning how to lead in a pandemic, being faced with new demands and circumstances every week if not every day. It is plain to see why Sophie has chosen the unpredictable and exhilarating world of startups. She is simply brilliant under these circumstances.

At a time when the entire world was in upheaval, no one knew exactly what to do, which sounds unbelievable but was 100 percent the case. Governments were enacting then reversing then updating mandates every couple of days in an attempt to get in front of the pandemic while not crippling their economies. Streets emptied almost overnight. Businesses shuttered. Fortunate employees flicked on their computers at home instead of at the office, and for the most part kept grinding. Of many, the notable exception was, of course, parents whose lives descended into chaos that needed specific and urgent support from employers. For the less fortunate, however, work was severely disruptedsome of which will never return to prepandemic conditions.