Today, I'm connecting with Taylor Fox-Smith, Head of Community Partnerships at Airwallex. In this episode, we explore Taylor's formative years and Montessori education and dive into her latest project: building the community function at fintech unicorn Airwallex, a cross-border payments company. We also unpack her lessons from scaling channel partnerships across various stages and verticals (PropTech and ClimateTech), her journey of finding a deep sense of self amidst the ebbs and flows of startups, and her mission to become a growth enzyme for founders.
Today, I'm connecting with Taylor Fox-Smith, Head of Community Partnerships at Airwallex. In this episode, we explore Taylor's formative years and Montessori education and dive into her latest project: building the community function at fintech unicorn Airwallex, a cross-border payments company. We also unpack her lessons from scaling channel partnerships across various stages and verticals (PropTech and ClimateTech), her journey of finding a deep sense of self amidst the ebbs and flows of startups, and her mission to become a growth enzyme for founders.
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Connecting with Taylor Fox-Smith, Head of Community Partnerships at Airwallex:
Laura: Taylor, hi, welcome to the podcast
Taylor: Thanks so much, Laura, thrilled to be here.
Laura: So let's begin by taking us back to your early life. Where did you grow up and what experiences shaped your early years?
Taylor: I had a very leafy green childhood with two parents who loved their work. I was very much raised that whatever career pursuits you follow, there needs to be an element of joy in those pursuits. And I think for me, my parents made a really incredible decision very early on to put me into a Montessori Education. For me, that's something that I attribute a lot of the skills that have helped me be a flexible, agile and successful operator in the startup ecosystem. For those who don't know, Montessori is very much based on a practical education. You have three year groups in the one class. Your teacher is called by their first name. There's no uniform. One of the best examples is for mathematics, there's no blackboard and chalk putting up arithmetic. You're often working with beads on the ground and moving beads across and through the floor. Like long division, for example, you would slide beads left to right, top to bottom and a lot of those basic fundamental skills around arithmetic, but also comprehension, it's all practical so you're using your hands. My mind still to this day very much works with how can I problem solve very tangibly and physically, which lends itself to being really helpful here in the startup ecosystem. We also had a lot of time spent with our grandparents so between my home and my grandparents home, I have a lot of memories of being outside, a lot of memories of sitting in my grandfather's study, going through encyclopedias. I was really enriched from a very early age with people who were not only invested in me, but invested in nurturing this really safe and supportive environment, which to this day, I a) never forget or take for granted, but b) try and create and nurture similar environments for my nephew that we get to raise now, and the people that I get to work with, I think it's kind of become part of my DNA.
Laura: So very much family is who shaped you?
Taylor: Totally! The other day we were just talking here at work, someone asked me , why community? Like what about that kind of interests you? Any role models that you have? Community's kind of been this work stream or job title that's come up in the last two to three years and is very much having it's own moment. And I think back to my dad's career and between school drop offs and school holiday drives, we were always privy to the way that he conducted himself in his corporate roles and the way that he led not only within the businesses he worked in, but also his pursuits outside of the office, whether it's with board work or he was an instrumental figure in Champions of Change, where leaders in male dominated industries came together with Elizabeth Broderick, who was our sex rights commissioner here in Australia, to create a more gender equitable environment in various industries. I very much saw throughout my childhood, through my dad, a way to bring a community mindset to the corporate world or how work can very much be about nurturing and fostering positive relationships. I got such an amazing role model from day one about who I wanted to be, how I wanted to operate, and even to this day like we're so fortunate. I'm about to be in my thirties and I get to overlap with my parents careers and we get these small little spheres that get to overlap, and what a privilege.
Laura: Obviously you saw your parents careers unfold as you were younger. What did you imagine your career would look like when you first started out?
Taylor: When I was finishing my law degree, my first role was actually teaching gender studies at one of the universities here in Sydney. I had done an honors thesis and I love writing, I have an insatiable curiosity, there was an allure to academia, which very much drew me in as I was getting towards the latter stages of my law degree. I'd gone into academia, I was lecturing, I was tutoring classes, I was feeling really inspired to be part of these little tiny cohorts of folks who were kind of learning collectively. It was a topic that was really interesting, this was also like 2016, 2017, so we had very much seen the cultural zeitgeist shift with the election of Trump. We were seeing the rise of technology, AI had found its way into curriculums in the humanities. Taylor Swift and Beyonce were also changing the way we spoke about female artistry, the way we spoke about musical history. We're just at this really exciting and buzzing moment where I felt compelled to pursue the academic piece. That in itself lasted for the last 18 months of my studies before I moved into consulting. I moved into this very boutique tiny consulting firm where we did everything from government relations strategies through to crisis communications. We were straddling this multidisciplinary play around PR comms and government relations. It was such a great education in the way that businesses conduct themselves, but also in the variety of roles that can be played within the walls of a business. In that role, not only got to see what options were available to me, but I got some really great mentorship. I think that's a recurring theme throughout my career is having these particularly influential individuals in roles that I've had guide me and shape who I now know is exactly the person that I want to be in my career. From there, it was very nonlinear. So my entry to startups is probably like a lot of folks really where you kind of reach a fork in the road where you're maybe insatiably hungry for the unknown, you've got a risk appetite that you just need to fill or you have a friend who's working in a startup. For me, after about three or four years of floating between advertising agencies, consulting firms, public sector, I'd never really found my feet. That was when I made a very monumental phone call to my friend, Jethro, who is now an investor at Square Peg. At the time, he had just moved to a prop tech called :Different. This prop tech was trying to change the way that landlords and tenants interacted with one another to make the experience of renting and the experience of investing in property better than it had ever been. The founding team were a husband and wife duo, and Mina (Radhakrishnan), who was the female co founder of this business, she was actually the first product lead at Uber. Hearing and watching this experience that Jethro was having at :Different really struck a chord in me at that time. I had yet to feel a sense of satisfaction, I had yet to feel a sense of fulfilment, and I very much felt like I was moving through my career at the whims of my own instinct or maybe the advice of those whose opinion I really valued and I hadn't really found my own voice or my own feet in having strong conviction in the role that I wanted to have. So reaching out to Jethro I said, wherever you are, if there is a place for me to join, I would love to explore it. The kindness and generosity that he showed in not only saying yes to having a coffee with me, but encouraging me throughout the interview process, really set in play and in motion, a career that I think I was telling you before we started recording today. I feel like I am exactly where I'm supposed to be in my career, and without Jethro saying yes, and without that coffee happening, and without his encouragement to get my assignment in, because imposter syndrome played a big role in me potentially not following through on that interview process. He was instrumental in giving me that first confidence boost that I needed to enter the space that: Wow, I just fell in love the moment that I landed there.
Laura: Cheers to you, Jeffro. So you've navigated this journey from a Series A PropTech to a C Stage Climate Tech, and now you're leading at Airwallex. Can we unpack this experience and the journey between the three of those?
Taylor: Yeah, so when I joined :Different, we were in the attic of our founder's home in Sydney. There may have been 20 of us. I was the second partnerships hire working under another incredible startup operator, Soro, who after :Different actually went on to be the VP of business development at Immutable, where he still is to this day. Joining that team in that attic was at the series a stage, you could feel the rumblings towards a series B. This was also at the time of COVID. So we're in this very interesting moment in the startup ecosystem where not only we're seeing this second generation of founders who have left the likes of Uber and Airbnb take the leap into building these juggernauts that we now know today, like Safety Culture, Culture Amp, Airwallex, Canva, this 2019 through to 2022 was such an interesting period of growth and experimentation. Being part of that team through to that Series B raise, we then went from a team of 25 through to a team of 140 with these beautiful offices down at Walsh Bay. Each of us who had been there during the attic days, were now getting the opportunity to build teams and I think for me, it was really that autonomy and that trust that I was given by those founders between series a and series B to build a team that solidified and reaffirmed that I had what it takes to build at scale in really hacky and friction full conditions that you can make really beautiful things happen out of that. A big learning in that period as well is how to balance the emotions and the potency of emotions when you are so close to a product and so close to a mission and in a lot of ways, so close to the people around you because you're building and putting in such long hours, how do you balance the emotional toll of that with the professional boundaries of the fact that this is still a business? I think startups, you can often become so emotionally invested that line becomes blurry. And for me, that was a big lesson that I learned as we grew into that series B stage. I was growing as a professional and an operator. After about just over two years with different, I was ready to make the leap back into something small again. I was craving that very early days building, the white boarding and the strategizing and the category creation, not really knowing where you are and where the product is going, and having a really instrumental role in those decisions. I was really craving that. That was when I took the leap into climate tech. I was ready to really shake my hands of property and move into a completely different problem space. Trace was interesting to me because it was category creating. Carbon accounting was still a nascent practice for businesses and very much a nascent practice for accountants to be able to put into the way that they service their business clients. Moved into Trace to build a partner program, which is exactly what I had done at :Different. The same fundamental functional skills around building a channel partner program, but , whole new category. When you are an operator at a very small startup, you can often play the Swiss army knife role where you are tasked with being your founder's hype person, you're tasked with being their contractor reviewer, you're tasked with ghostwriting, with contract negotiation. There are so many different roles that you play for those founders. I knew that was going to be an expiration date for me on how long I could play that proximate role with what really felt like quite a weight on my shoulders. I also was having visions at this point about how I could help founders at scale. I'd really found my niche or my strong suit as the engine room behind a founder. I knew for myself, I was never going to be the founder. I, the entrepreneurial spirit that I have is very much around elevating and enabling visions that I feel are going to change the way that the world works. And so I knew I wanted to make the leap into a scale up. I had a list of about four scale ups that were Australian born, who I wanted to work with. I had a vision of building a program or some sort of enablement scheme that gave founders the tools that they needed from day one to build effectively at scale. I've seen the types of tools that founders had used at Pre Seed, at Seed, at Series A, and also then at Series B. I kind of had a sense of what was needed to be a champion and a support person. The word I love to use is an enzyme. I want it to be like a growth enzyme for founders so I wanted to work with a scale up that had appetite for testing and learning and building out a program for founders and Airwallex were the scale up that that vision, met me with a similar enthusiasm and interest to experiment, explore and eight months later I couldn't be happier with that journey.
Laura: I actually spoke to Ben Hanley from Trace ahead of our call, and he mentioned your incredible knack for spotting opportunities, building partnership programs, and scaling them with a strong focus on relationships. He also highlighted your commercial strategy superpower and how you turn all these connections into give, give outcomes for the business and the partners. Earlier roles are very partnerships focus. I just want to give you an opportunity to talk there.
Taylor: Well, first of all, what a kind soul Ben is to share such a laundry list of positive qualities. I'm sure there is another column there of cons, which he won't share with you, but partnerships is a major unlock for startups. It is something that I think about every single day here in my role at Airwallex. One to one growth is the pathway that a lot of founders will take early stage because it fits their ability to kind of own the storytelling, have proximity to user feedback. It fits their vision for being able to sell direct to their ideal customer. What many founders miss or start to build too late is one to many growth. Having a plan for, or an understanding of a partnership play for your product can be the difference in such scalable growth in the early stages. For me at :Different, what I learned under the mentorship and stewardship of Soro is working out who has the rights to sell your service or product. That's the first question that founders need to ask before building or thinking about a partner program. Second piece is then being able to execute on that vision with very early discovery conversations with those partner profiles and that really does take subject matter expertise. My experience at Trace, we very early earmarked a hypothesis that accountants and professional services folks who are building strategies and advising businesses are going to be asked about the sustainability needs of their client at some point in that customer journey. We identified this right to sell for anybody who is likely to be asked about their sustainability needs, but accountants are their own ecosystem. They are professional folks who have a very long history of advising businesses with analytical and proactive advice. They are trusted advisors and in order for us to work with them, we really had to in turn be a trusted partner to them as well. It's very much about building that subject matter expertise with those partners that you identify. For me, that's such a joyful exercise to undergo because you're not looking for a sugar hit or a flash in the pan. You're not looking for one really positive engagement, one referral and park that opportunity somewhere in a CRM that gets lost to gather dust. The efforts that you put into building a partner program are for long term mutual value creation and in order to do that, you have to build a strong relationship, you have to build a good communication cadence, build trust and you have to affirm that your hypotheses is right, that they do in fact have a right to sell your product or service to your ideal customer. Partnerships is something that I have had a lot of fun and joy building out for two different startups. It's also a function that I've enjoyed creating and a function that I highly recommend founders consider creating as kind of their day one talent focus. You've got your technical hire, your growth hire, your marketing hire, and I think you've got your partnerships higher would be probably that one missed unlock for founders.
Laura: And so that's partnerships for startups. What about community for startups and what unlock does that create?
Taylor: Yeah, community led growth is something that my resume would say I'm very new to. I am by no means the expert, I by no means have the playbook. Check in with me this time next year, and I'll have a good 18 months under my belt. Community led growth is all about making your current ideal or prospective customer feel part of something bigger. Community sits at the very, very top of the funnel. So you think about your brand efforts, you think about your performance marketing, you think about your website design, all of that sits in the top of the funnel to be able to create demand for your product or service. That demand creation often requires anywhere between five and seven touch points before you have someone feeling really intentional to work with you, buy from you, intentionally transact with you. Community is the umbrella under which all of this can have even more impact. What I've experimented with here at Airwallex started with a very clear mission statement. I wanted to make sure that Airwallex was present, relevant, and loved in the startup ecosystem. And again, right to play. Do we have the right to play in the startup ecosystem? Airwallex was founded in Melbourne by four students who started a cafe and had trouble paying international suppliers, importing international goods, and essentially moving money was painful for a small business owner. And with that pain point, Airwallex was born and almost 10 years later, we have a unicorn with a 6 billion valuation, a unicorn who has very much maintained its Australian roots, so when I think about our right to build community in the startup ecosystem, I always come back to that story and to the authenticity of our shared experiences of our community members. How does community manifest itself? It comes from a few different behaviors that an organization can put into play very easily. When we think about being present, there is a physicality to community that you can't get virtually. In this post COVID era where we're reconnecting with what it means to be a professional operator, people are seeing the value in in person connectivity. Community helps people connect a person with a brand. I have felt really connected to that personally since I joined Airwallex. I want Taylor, the person and the operator to be inherently and deeply connected with what community means at Airwallex. That's where the physicality connects really well with the brand, because where you are and what you do and the events that you run all feed into and can become content that is part of your personal brand part of your branding story. I don't know if the word love really has its place in a professional context, so I'm gonna do my best to describe what I mean by loved. There is an emotional component to buying and transacting that many people miss when it comes to B2B relationships. What I wanted to do was fill a delta of financial technology isn't super sexy, it's not super emotive, people don't feel things about it in the same way they might feel about Tracksuits brand data, or they might feel about Canvas graphic design tools. We don't have that same emotional pull, but what we can create is a community that makes people feel good. It makes people feel heard and makes people feel seen. And I, wanted to create a feelings component to that to create trust and to create longevity. That's how I thought about community at Airwallex and would very much recommend those three pillars as a really strong starting point for how other founders might build as well.
Laura: Love being a human emotion so you're adding human into B2B, which is incredible. And this is a great segway into your role at Airwallex and that growth journey. What did your first 90 days look like?
Taylor: I had the most incredible first 90 days. I know that scale ups are on high performance, hyper growth journeys and I knew coming in, it was going to be a change of step from where I was at these very small startups. I knew the biggest challenge was the size of the team that I was entering. I was so used to these very, Intimate, these very small teams where functional ownership very much sat with one person. I knew that what I had to do in my first 90 days was really carve out what was my space going to be in Airwallex and what was success going to look like for me if I was to continue to own and iterate on that space. So my first 90 days at Airwallex, I knew I needed to set a really clear vision. That's where my present relevant and loved came in. I knew I needed to quantify that vision so I set a number of events, a number of community partners and one big hairy audacious goal. That was to launch a program for startups, and on day 89 of my tenure at Airwallex, we were able to launch Airwallex for Startups which was at that point, the first program run by an Australian born unicorn to help enable and empower founders. So I think for me, what does that 90 days say? One being mission focused can really help set your intentions. It can also help really ground what you say yes and what you say no to. From small to big startups, you've suddenly got a lot more stakeholders, a lot more operators working in and around your space of ownership. Have a really clear mission statement. What am I here to achieve? And you can start to say yes or no based on that mission statement. I think the second part is that you can get shit done at scale ups in the same way you can get shit done at startups. For anyone who is feeling apprehensive about taking the leap from small scrappy hacky into big big, potentially more finessed, more process oriented scale ups. That startup DNA in my experience here at Airwallex has never really left.
Laura: I've got so many questions around the startup programs, however, I just wanted to zoom out slightly. So from Jack's, who's CEO and co founder of Airwallex, updates it seems that you don't need to prove the value of building a community function. He gets it, that's why you're here. Can you break down on how you're building out this new function and what are your operating principles?
Taylor: The function itself is set around a few core pillars. The first one being community. I think community, whilst it has been the driver for creating Airwallex for Startups, it is one pillar among many in terms of the value proposition that it delivers to our ideal recipients. Community manifests itself, like I was saying before, in predominantly events and also professional networking opportunities. So we want those to be both educational and also, create connectedness in the ecosystem. The second one is research. We want to be able to lead and contribute to the conversation in our ecosystem around startup financial confidence, and actually, as I'm speaking to you, we are this week releasing a report called the Airwallex Startup Financial Confidence Index. That's a report where we have interviewed 500 founders in Australia to understand how they think about their financial status, their financial operations, their access to financial support. And so that research and kind of contributing to the conversation in a way that feels good, productive, but also optimistic. How do we create research that builds momentum towards great things and how do we contribute to increase startup density and how do we contribute to increased startup financial literacy? Research can play a really great role in setting not only baselines for where we are, but also data driven metrics for where we want to go. The third piece to this , adjacent to both community and research, is content. So we want to make sure that we are speaking with an amplifying thought leaders that can help startups get to where they need to go. We recently did an interview with the great team at Stella Startups to help founders leverage and more deeply understand the power of personal brand and we want to continue to do that , whether it be with agencies who support early stage founders with MVP builds, or whether it's with the really great team at Cake Equity talking about setting up ESOP in the early stages, also with our VC partners. We work with a lot of early stage through to later stage venture capital partners, from Square Peg through to Skalata and Folklore Ventures, also Antler, we want to work with the accelerators and the pre accelerators that kind of get these ideas off the ground. Very much creating and generating content that kind of answers questions before they're asked. The final piece to that is obviously helping startups runways work for them. There are two ways we help on the runway side of things, oh, three ways actually. One is we do a grant, so in the eight months that I've been here, I've been able to give out two grants of 10, 000. Those grants are obviously not going to take a business from seed to series A, but they may help a founder get that contractor that they needed to be able to quality control their first product. Or it might help them get that really viral TikTok campaign out that really. helps them reach their ideal customer. On top of grants, we also do product offers for both Airwallex and our partners. Capital raising at the moment is taking founders anywhere from six to 12 months. It's taking a very large number of meetings to get that money in the bank. WhyHive are a really great example. They've actually just made their entire fundraising journey public on their data analytics platform called WhyHive. Whilst we don't want to take the role of a VC or take the role of the accelerator, we do want to be able to accelerate the rate at which a startup can protect and nurture and sustain their runway. And for us, that's with access to our products that really helped do that and access to services that we know founders need, but maybe just need a little bit of help making sure it's more affordable.
Laura: The word influence has just popped to mind. You're a solo functioneer at the moment, and you're heavily relying on cross functional teams to help you bring Airwallex for Startups to life as an example. How were you influencing across teams to put the community work front and center?
Taylor: I'm going to rephrase it for my own answer. How does community infiltrate, influence, become part of the KPIs of other teams, and I think it's such a great question because it is frankly hard to do. Community is challenging to quantify. It sits at the very top of the funnel so you're often justifying community as an influencing factor on a metric such as lead generation or customer acquisition or maybe it's upside GP on existing accounts who had a great experience at a community events. They've decided to work more deeply with Airwallex, or they're looking to explore new products they didn't know existed. The way that I've thought about influencing is: what's in it for you? What's in it for another team? How can I help your team reach your goals? What we've found with community in terms of our cross functional collaboration with the commercial team is it's been such an exciting opportunity for us to work t hrough the end to end sales funnel around how do we engage with and educate customers in new and interesting ways. A great example is a format of event that we have been iterating on this past year around embedded finance. And it's this particular topic and this particular question around how do I influence other functions to care about community. That's a really tricky topic to tell someone over one email or one phone call, is interesting or relevant to them. And community can play a role in creating these long form relationship first environments for people to get a deep learning experience on a product opportunity. This coming Wednesday, we're going to run that breakfast for the second time and we will have reached over a hundred people before Q4 on this particular topic that without community would have been very challenging, very frictionful and arguably not very successful because you're not able to get to the heart of that topic and the relevance of that topic to a potential customer without the really human side of community nurturing and elevating that experience.
Laura: Couldn't agree more. So we focus a lot on Airwallex and the tactical initiatives that you've been running as a community leader. I'd love to zoom out slightly and just think of you as an operator. What do you think your most valuable skills or genius zones are that set you apart?
Taylor: What I'm most proud of and what I think my greatest strength is is very much an experimentation approach to my work. I have always started a role with a vision for what success looks like, but needing to get that down into setting your why and then the road map of how in order to get both of those together and experimentation mindset is really what helps me. Really following that classic high school science experiment format of what is my hypothesis? What are my objectives? What are the steps I'm going to take to test that? What were my results and how might I discuss those results? It's very much the format I'll use for a lot of my internal documentation for what I'm going after. I think the second strength I have is storytelling. I am characteristically an introvert, and when I come to work, I, a bit like you, I put on the colorful jumpsuit. I really bring what I hope it is an authentic vibrancy and an investment in other people's enjoyment and experience and this insatiable curiosity, and I want it to be heard and seen in a way that makes the work that we're doing feel impactful and valuable. I want to be able to tell those stories consistently, but I also want to be able to tell those stories with data and with evidence. And I think the experimentation mindset and the storytelling cadence two of the superpowers that I've brought through all three of the startups that I've worked at. Here at Airwallex is I've really found myself come into like a really comfortable rhythm on both of those superpowers and also affirmation from leaders and operators who I'm working with in this much bigger business, that those two things are not only helpful or useful tools in my toolkit, they're also seen as superpowers. I think for a very long time, I saw them as just like my BAU. It's the way that I do things. It's the way that I'm going to measure and manage my expectations, measure and manage my success. But now being in this bigger organization, I'm starting to realize that actually maybe those two things are what set me apart. Just touching on that introverted piece for a bit, I know a lot of people actually who are in community roles or who are ecosystem champions who do identify more on the introverted scale. I see that as a bit of a superpower for me as well. I'm really comfortable public speaking. I am often called very vivacious and outgoing and all of that is true. In my life outside of work, I'm mostly in my home. I have two cats. I have a beautiful husband. I live in a really beautiful suburb where I don't have to leave. I can walk to my market and my cafe and my bookstore all within this five kilometer radius. I have a very small group of friends and I'm very close with my family. My life outside of work is really, it's not quiet, but it's small. And it's, got its own little hum to it. And then I'll come to work and it's kind of this loud orchestra and it's almost cacophonous at times , this world and life that I've built in my professional role. Hope it doesn't sound duplicitous, but it's how do I, maintain joy and comfort in, in both sides of my life. It's also coming at a time where I feel like I've got this really robust sense of myself. I know exactly what my boundaries are, and what I like, and who I want to invest in, and how I want to conduct myself. I've got this really wonderful thing that I'm sure it happens a number of times throughout your life. I'm sure it happens at 34 and 42 and 57 that you just get these waves of like, oh, this is me. And I think joining Airwallex has very much happened at that same sunrise for me in my personal self, which she still lives here in this jumpsuit at work. She's part of this. I definitely want to keep a little separation because I want to protect my life that lives outside of this is not so deeply and inherently connected to my professional persona. I want to keep a little bit of separation between the two.
Laura: It's no easy feat. Every operator I've spoken to so far, that's one of their biggest goals. How do I separate this work success from my personal identity? I'd love to flip success on its head there, and I'd love to know what the toughest lesson is that you've learned along the way.
Taylor: I mean, there are so many lessons to be learned and challenges to overcome. I think the biggest lesson I've had to learn is managing the ebbs and flows of the emotional journey that is building a startup and how those ebbs and flows show themselves when you were in a professional environment. It's definitely shaped the way that I keep a separation between the personal and the professional. As part of being an introvert, I'm a very sensitive person. Historically, I've taken the wins of a startup as personal triumphs, and the elation and the joy that comes with that is something that I felt throughout my career on such a deep and intrinsic level, to the point where I might even get teary if, a huge partner was signed, or the series B announcement is made public. I felt it so deeply and so strongly and the same was for the reverse emotion where If I got some constructive feedback from a leader who I really respected, or I really disagreed with the approach that a peer was going to take, which would affect my team. I used to feel that frustration and that disappointment so acutely that it would almost affect my ability to execute on the work that was in front of me. What I learned at :Different, what I tried to practice at Trace, and now what I feel like I have a really strong grasp on, is that the emotional rollercoaster of being part of a start up and scale up journey, it is all within reason. It all has to be within the confines of you are there to play a role in the part of a business. It is not the beginning and the end of your personal identity, so trying to find how to bring emotions to work without letting those emotions bring you away from the success of that job is, yeah, it's an ongoing journey for me, but something that I can definitely confidently say to you today, I feel like I have a really strong grasp on and something that over the better half of the last half of the decade, I've done a lot of work with professionals, with friends, with peers to make sure that I can be my best self at work and continue to be my best self outside of it, too.
Laura: We're going to look ahead to the future now. What do you believe are the key trends shaping the future for tech operators? I think a main trend that I'm seeing and one that I'm biased towards cause I'm working on it is personal brand. I think operators and startups and potentially the way that we hire will move away from resume storytelling and into branded storytelling about our skills and what we're about. Whether it's through LinkedIn or other social media channels, I think operators are going to be drawn to the curation of a personal brand. The second trend is going to be around technical prowess. I've definitely seen from when I was at :Different, now through to my time at Airwallex, is there was an era where you would have a commercial and a technical co founder and they would be a really strong marriage or partnership to start a startup. And then you would have an org chart that fit that same split and you would have your commercial operators and your technical operators. I think we're moving into an era now where you need to have a working technical literacy at the very least to be able to communicate or understand product roadmaps, to be able to understand product functionality. I think particularly as our technology becomes more robust and integrated with artificial intelligence and generative AI. We're going to open up a whole other language. It's going to be a completely different way of talking about whether it's an AI first or an AI fostered, technology company. Startup operators are going to need to have at the very least a working technical literacy. the third trend, we saw a move towards virtual communications over COVID by nature of all of our circumstance. I think over the next few years, we're also going to see a demand for in person engagements. People are going to want to have meetings. They're going to want to have workshops conversations. This ability to be able to connect with people face to face. Remote work is going to come under a lot of scrutiny or questions in the coming years as well. Some brands are really committed to it like Atlassian, other brands have kind of shifted to a more three days in two days flexible. But I think we're going to start to see the in person component of business development and business community creation, lean in towards being visible and seen and present.
Laura: And talking about being visible and seen and present, how do you see yourself contributing to the growing presence of women in tech leadership roles?
Taylor: I feel really proud to be a female identifying operator in the startup ecosystem who has had a really positive experience in the three organizations that I've worked for. Looking back at my resume, all three startups that I've worked for, including Airwallex have had a female co founder and it's been really important to me that I do my due diligence on an organization in terms of how open and proactive they are on creating gender equitable environments, whether through perks, through hiring practices, whatever it may be. I want to make sure that I'm working for and contributing to brands and workplaces that care and invest in gender equality and equity. In terms of the role that I'm going to play in representing Women in tech, but also being able to create an environment where more women and female identifying folks want to enter this ecosystem, it really comes down to telling the stories of my experience. I have had a great experience. I've had incredible female leaders manage me and make me a better operator. I've been able to connect with and learn from incredible female and female identifying leaders in this ecosystem, and there is so much data to suggest a dark and grim picture, but I think you will find a lot of anecdotal evidence of really positive experiences. When it comes to building a team, or it comes to how we iterate on the Airwallex for Startups program, I want to have a dedicated work stream to women in technology. I want to be able to give opportunities to young aspiring female leaders to be part of my team into the future. One thing that I've done in the last six months is start a community called Women in Finance. I've taken that term to mean everything from a VC to a CFO, a fintech operator to an accountant. Any women who are working adjacent to the financial services industry. Here in Australia, we have a pay gap which is plus 25%. That, that's really important. Pay gap alone is a troubling statistic. What it tells us about the ways that women have access to and are nurtured within this industry is even more troubling. The research that I've done suggests that women very often don't use their professional network to get opportunities, but use their professional network to get referrals into opportunities. We're one step removed from accessing and leveraging our networks. One of the mission statements that my co leads on this community, Emily, Lisa, and I agreed on is we want to reach a thousand women before the end of the year to give them more opportunities to pursue their career ambitions in finance. There are micro actions like building that community and then macro actions in the role that I can play as a representative or just like one anecdote of a really positive experience where I feel like I've been given promotions. I've been given access to leadership in a way that I feel my gender is not a detriment. It is just another piece of the puzzle that makes me a great operator.
Laura: In terms of access, what tactics, frameworks, and people in the industry have been your North Stars?
Taylor: My North Star would be my dad, and the reason that I hesitated is not because I'm unclear on him being the North Star, more how to describe the influence or the role that he's played on my career. I think there is so much of my life that is off the back of his investment in me, the educational opportunities he gave me, the role model that he set for me in terms of the way that he treats his family and his friends and the way that he has pursued his career ambitions. One thing that kind of ties both the role that he plays as my father, but the role that he plays in his professional pursuits is it's all about creating safe environments. Safety, there is a direct correlation with nurturing, which has a direct correlation with community. do we create these environments or tones that help people feel seen or part of something bigger. The role that my dad has played in the medical, pharmaceutical and digital health industry has almost always been grounded in mentorship. And the time that he puts into mentoring, educating, and enabling the next generation of leaders and even his peers is definitely a playbook that I have replicated in my own work, which is: it's these micro actions and micro investments in an ecosystem that help to not only build your own network of actively listening to what's happening, what the pain points and ambitions are of your community, but it also helps to set you up as a trusted part of the ecosystem and a trusted advisor, a trusted confidant and friend. I know we become more like our parents as we get older, but certainly for me in the last year, I can see and I'm very proud that I have very similar characteristics to the leadership my Dad showed in his career.
Laura: What's your dad's name?
Taylor: Gavin.
Laura: Gavin, welcome to Calling Operator. First Dad named on the podcast. You were saying before that you're incredibly plugged into the startup ecosystem. Who is a startup operator that you think is doing incredible work and is really helping to shape the ecosystem?
Taylor: We are so spoiled for choice when it comes to the startup ecosystem Australia and across to New Zealand. Here in Australia, I can't go past Emily Casey from What the Health and Annie Liao at Build Club. I think what I admire so much about what they have independently built in their chosen verticals is these very tailored experiences for founders and builders in a particular vertical and industry. And I think what they're able to do is, it's not only are both of these operatorsh subject matter experts in their chosen verticals. They are also able to connect their community with the equivalent subject matter experts to help enable empower their journey. I think what often we can find with community is people try to be everything to everyone, and that's great because networking is great period. What What The Health and AI Build Club are able to do is nurture a very specific cohort of builders and founders with tools that are specific and relevant to their needs. That's certainly a playbook that I am trying to iterate and replicate on here at Airwallex, because it is that specificity of community building, which is not only the secret to their success, but I'm sure it is also the secret to their value creation and their value capture. And in the last fortnight, I had the pleasure of going over to New Zealand to learn a little bit more about the startup ecosystem over there. I think startup density wise, New Zealand is punching above its weight, the innovation that's able to be nurtured through incredible accelerators like Creative HQ or venture funds like Icehouse Ventures. I'm still very early in learning who the operators are for me to be inspired by and learn from and listen to, but I had such positive interactions with the likes of Jeffrey Ling from Ministry of Awesome, also Stephanie Benson from Icehouse Ventures. The generosity and the open arms that those operators showed to me is somebody who's really just going over into a new country to learn what the ecosystem is like and how in the future, Airwallex might be able to play a role in helping those founders. I certainly found both Jeffrey and Steph to be super warm and kind.
Laura: Actually, when I was trying to implement my learnings from the Women's Fellowship, Stephanie and Jeffrey were so integral to my journey. Like, how do I make all these Australian learnings work in New Zealand? And truth is, I couldn't., Wrong stage, wrong time, but they're wonderful. I love to end each podcast with a bit of advice around mental wellness, and I think you did a really good job of touching on this earlier, but in such a dynamic environment with rapid growth, what personal habits or beliefs help you stay centered and focused?
Taylor: Centered and focus is so key for any operator in any startup and I think I am just going to repeat a lot of the mainstays of the conversation that we've had. Having a personal mission statement about what you are there to achieve can really help define how you spend your time. For me, that is definitely core to being centered and focused on my work: am I saying yes to, or am I contributing to work that works towards or achieves my mission statement. Being introverted outside of the workspace means that I need the workspace so I'm habitually in the office minimum three days a week. That for me just helps keep me accountable to the in person commitments that I have in my role, it help keeps me accountable to a level of energy that I want to deliver and invest in my role and into the program of community. It also helps me to develop and nurture those cross functional relationships that we talked about. Being able to be available, reachable, inside of the same working space as my peers in different functions, I think can really help to elevate the relationships that we have internally. The other habit that I have which helps keep me centered is working from home on Fridays, my husband will do the same and every Friday morning between 7. 45 and 8. 30, we go for a phones free coffee together at a coffee shop around the corner from our house. It is one part of the week that I look forward to more than anything else that's in the calendar. It wouldn't matter what is on that coffee that I have with Dan and that 45 minutes is so important because I know it happens each week, it always happens on a Friday. So whether it's a great week and we're celebrating things together, or it's been a really hard week of long hours, really big milestones, potentially hurdles and challenges, that coffee is a mainstay in my week that really helps center and focus my week and make sure that I have a safe and fun space with my partner in amongst all the craziness of it all.
Laura: I love that for you. Taylor, thank you so much for all your time today. Where can people find you?
Taylor: Thanks so much, Laura, for having me. It's so exciting to be part of dialogues that I think help to give people an insight into what it's really like. I think what Calling Operator has done for so many of my peers in this ecosystem is give them a bit of a playbook, or maybe it's like a bit of shared commiserations, shared triumphs, and yeah, I just, I so appreciate being part of such an amazing calibre of guests that you have. You can just find me Taylor Fox Smith on LinkedIn. I think I was very early on in the personalized URLs, again, a Jethro special so I've definitely got Taylor Fox Smith saved as the post LinkedIn URL, no spaces, no hyphens, no nothing. You can find me there. I would love to connect with anyone who feels like this story resonated.