Yahoo Finance My first boss: Sam Franklin, Otta co-founder and CEO
The people who helped shape business leaders
Sam Franklin is CEO and co-founder of Otta, which champions salary transparency globally.
London-based Otta work with over 1.2m people across the UK and US with their recruitment business, ensuring candidates know what sort of job they're going for. The business has raised almost $25m.
I was working at consultancy firm McKinsey when I took advantage of its Take Time programme, which gave four weeks of unpaid leave to employees. Most took the time to switch off, go on holiday or learn an instrument. I decided to work.
I emailed a lot of entrepreneurs asking if I could work with them, as I had dreams of building a start-up. Lots ignored me but one, Matt Robinson, got in touch and asked me to work with him for the summer where I was chief of staff/right hand person.
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Matt is CEO and founder of Nested, the online estate agency, and had previously founded a very successful business with two friends called GoCardless, one of the best fintechs in the UK.
On my first day I was in his one-on-ones, so he trusted me very early on. At the time, Nested was 18 staff and after one more year at McKinsey I called Matt asking if there were any roles. The company was then at 60.
I joined in 2017 as chief of staff. The mandate was to work with Matt and the other leaders and I threw myself into the role, involved in things like business strategy and dealing with customer service downturn.
I learned from Matt that being an entrepreneur was different from being a leader, that fundraising and raising money for a company is a specific skill, and understanding business models, where opportunities lie, and wield things into existence.
There’s almost this point where you have to keep pushing to make it happen. Matt would say to me that as an entrepreneur you have to think about why something will work, rather than being an analytical person as to why it won’t.
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Matt was also instrumental in allowing me to build my own company. I had told him about it from the outset and he was open and supportive. He did really well in encouraging people what they wanted to do next.
At Nested we didn’t find the right model for a while. It was a huge lesson in innovation but also a lesson in when an idea is actually good.
One of my roles was also to interview and Matt asked me to fill in as interim head of people. I was doing 30 hours a week of interviewing and at the end I would ask candidates how their job search was doing.
"Job search is soul crushing" and "feeling like a second class citizen" were the most common responses.
It was a lightbulb moment with some of the emotive language people were using. My Nested experiences ultimately let me discover what Otta could be.
Matt had told me to find a fast-growing market but also one that was mission driven and special to me. I am one of three co-founders at Otta and we discussed how to convince ourselves that this was something we were passionate about rather than what the product was.
On the side, we became career coaches for free, helping friends of friends on the interview and job search. We wanted to test ourselves to see if we were up to the task and also the problems people were experiencing.
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We were savvy operators and this helped us make some shortcuts to avoid mistakes. We learned a lot about how to build businesses fast and our investors told us that we were very good at going after one thing quickly over doing too many things at once and losing traction.
Matt was super sharp and able to discuss all areas of the business and his persona at being a very capable individual helped him build trust.
From three people in a bedroom starting Otta in June 2019 to 60 people three years later, along the way Matt has been incredibly invaluable and, as a first boss, is still very present in my life.
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