Leadership Lessons From Start-up to Scale-up with Angeley Mullins

Full episode transcript

Alper Yurder: Today in the therapy chair, we have Angeley Mullins, who is the CCO of Resourcify, which is on a mission to help companies reduce their waste, which is something I'm very interested about. Angeley is a seasoned leader who focuses on commercial and operational growth. She talks about all things, sales, revenue, commercial leadership, and will touch on a few things as much as the time allows us today. And she's worked for companies like Amazon, Intuit, GoDaddy. And I'm sure you've come across her profile on some of the most influential female leaders, women leaders in commercial leadership today. So we'll also talk about her success, the joy, the pain and the journey that got her to today. Welcome to Seisterepia Angeli, how are you feeling today?

Angeley Mullins: I'm doing well, nice to be here, Alper.

Alper Yurder: Great. Was that intro kind of fair? Did it do justice or am I missing anything major? Okay. Excellent. So, Angeley generally there are four sections to my therapy and the fourth section is when I put you on the therapist chair but for the first three it is your time. Let's start with the first section which is more about your younger years. I love hearing people's childhood and growing-up stories because I think that shapes the person that we are today, the leader, the business person that we are today. Can you tell us a bit like where are you today and where were you before? You're from the States I imagine and can you talk us through a little bit like the growing up experience?

Angeley Mullins: Yeah, absolutely. So I come from California from sunny San Diego, which is a fantastic city, very laid-back beach life. So I made a complete transition. Started my business career actually as an account executive for one of the finance firms, and then moved my way up and then ended up working at Lehman Brothers, and then continued and managed sales teams across different international markets. And then we had GFC. Everybody remembers 2008 and all the banks crashed. And of course, it really got me thinking like, is this really what I want to do for a living? Do I want to be in the finances? What's going on? So then went back to school and got my MBA and then started my tech career at Amazon. And so from there, it's just kind of been onwards and upwards ever since. I've loved the tech industry, have worked between the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia.

Angeley Mullins: And now I'm in Germany and I actually made the transition between really big companies, mid-sized companies, and now scale-ups. So my previous company in Berlin scaled it to a series B and then now at Resourcify, we just got our series A last year and we're on the series B growth track.

Alper Yurder: Congrats. Excellent. And we'll talk about that, which is definitely a fascinating trick I love to talk about. I had some recent guests where we talk A to B, B to C, C to D, all of those stages. But A to B, I think is one of the hardest to crack. So we'll talk about that just before we jump into it. Right now you're in Germany, but you did your MBA in London. Was that it?

Angeley Mullins: Thank you.

Angeley Mullins: So I did my MBA actually in Chicago, and then I did the post MBAs, executive courses and cohorts, and so that was in London. So it's actually been really nice. A bunch of different universities, it's been, yeah, really, really nice.

Alper Yurder: Do you have a favorite among all those cities that you lived in?

Angeley Mullins: All the cities. I love different cities for different things. So London is fantastic, super buzzing to live in. Singapore is amazing for shopping. So any of the listeners that go down to Singapore and some of the markets that they have there, the food markets, actually have Michelin stars. So the food there is absolutely amazing. Melbourne, Australia, another city with really amazing food, art culture, etc. And now I'm in Berlin, another amazing city, but all quite different. I don't know how free, I mean, free as far as the ideas and all of that, but at the same time, it's quite quirky, it's very multinational, so that's one of the things I love about Berlin.

Alper Yurder: Okay, so as an American you've been living in Europe for how many years now?

Angeley Mullins: It's been about four years in Europe, and then before this I lived in Australia.

Alper Yurder: Okay. Do you feel like you have become more European in those four years that you've been spending in the continent?

Angeley Mullins: Definitely, definitely. Actually, when I went back to California for Christmas, I had culture shock, American culture shock. One of the first things that I did was go into a Costco and, you know, everything at Costco in the States, it's everything super sized. And I went in there and thought, Oh my gosh, do people really buy this much stuff because here in Europe, you only buy what you need. People live in smaller housing units. Everything's walkable. So definitely the culture shock.

Alper Yurder: Okay, yeah, when you say do people buy these, I guess you should remember that you or your family used to buy that too. But okay, but growing up wasn't San Diego. Like did you grow up in just one city?

Angeley Mullins: Yeah, Mr. Byatt, yeah, I was, I mean, when you come from San Diego, I don't think you really want to leave that environment. It's one of the most beautiful cities in all of America. Yeah, they kind of call it the grease of America. It's beautiful weather, beautiful beaches. So a nice place to grow up.

Alper Yurder: Yeah, you have everything. I didn't know they call it the Greece of America. Actually, Greece is my favorite thing in life. And before starting Syester, I'm a microblogger on Instagram. And I always share my experiences from Greece. I've been to 40 islands. Have you ever been to Greece?

Angeley Mullins: I've only been to Greece I think twice, so Athens, Cyprus, etc. But I need to go back is what I would say.

Alper Yurder: Okay, you should definitely. All right, so you already started alluding to some of the career experiences and we'll get to that point for sure. When I look into your CV, your profile, I see a lot of achievement, a lot of big names. I almost see an unquenchable thirst for more and more success. I don't know if you agree with that. Like, have you always been driven by, you know, I need to be successful, I need to be more, I need to do more. Is that something that summarizes your life story, which it does for me, I guess.

Angeley Mullins: I would say I've just always been driven. So I think driven people are always driven to accomplish whatever they put their minds to. It's not to say that trajectory is always up and to the right as the graph would go. I think the nice pictures of success is where the graph goes up and it goes down and it swirls around, etc. So it's really one of those things where people constantly keep pushing. And I think it's finding the limits of who you are and what you can do. That's the thing that keeps you going more than it is an accomplishment or an award. It's that feeling that you push through different challenges and barriers.

Alper Yurder: Yeah, when I speak to different people, they have different reasons for success. So, for example, a lot of men that I speak to, you know, they talk about sports, especially sales. There's so many people who have been in a sports career or, you know, they want to be in sports. And that's all this is very like winning and champion and success driven. Like for me, success has been like I had no other choice. You know, I had to be successful because of my middle-class family, I have to make it in life. I'm living abroad, an immigrant, blah, blah. So for me, the driver for success was… I had to be successful. So what do you say for you it was?

Angeley Mullins: For me, it was more of a curiosity of who I am and what I could accomplish. And I would say, especially as a female leader, you go through business and people are always telling you, you can't do this, this is not possible, you don't see people like you in certain levels of the business. So for me, it was more about what I can accomplish, what are the limits, what do I like and not like? And I think that's just a case of being curious. Some people don't have that curiosity chip and they just want to do one job forever. I'm the actual opposite. So I love doing many things and figuring that out and that kind of curiosity and that drive that constantly goes together. So that's how I also move to different countries, trying different industries. That's also why I like the scale-up community. Yeah, I would say it's a good thing to have.

Alper Yurder: OK, one thing that I want to dive a little bit into what you mentioned is, I mean, we. It almost starts becoming a bit of a myth, like, OK, being a woman leader is difficult, et cetera, et cetera, like, you know. I have all sorts of DNI in me and I understand the challenges, but we speak it, I think, very artificially, like superficially these days, being a woman. And everyone's like, yeah, being a woman is difficult. But I don't think anybody understands. What does it really mean? Like, okay, when, for example, you mentioned when you're a female leader, people tell you, you can't do this or that. Do you have a real-life example of that? Like that like very firsthand that, you know, maybe white straight male or whatever, wouldn't experience.

Angeley Mullins: Sure. At one of my previous companies, I was hiring, I think it was a product manager role at that point and I met a candidate at the door, a candidate I was interviewing. This male candidate took a look at me and thought I was the receptionist and then asked me, get him the coffee, do this, do that. When's the hiring manager coming? And then I, yeah, and then I literally walked him into the room and I said, I am the hiring manager. So yeah.

Angeley Mullins: That usually, I'm not saying it's never happened to a man ever. Maybe there's a male listener that that's happened to at some point in their lives. But I would say that happens more than not with women. So that's happened. I've been at other companies where, you know, in an executive meeting, I will give basically, you know, a data report, a statement where we're out with the business. And then I've had men look to other men to say, you know, hey, is that correct? So they wanted another man basically.

Alper Yurder: Oh god.

Angeley Mullins: To see if it's correct. All kinds of things like in interviews, I mean, this is throughout my history, my career, I've had interviews, people ask about your fertility plans in your interviews. It's, yeah, all kinds of things that I, again, for all the male listeners, maybe. They've had somebody ask, but I would say, more than not, it usually happens with women. So it's...

Alper Yurder: Jesus.

Angeley Mullins: It's still not a perfect world. And I think that there's still a lot of learning to be had.

Alper Yurder: Thank you so much for so openly sharing that, Angeley. And I mean, you know, we don't know each other that well. We're not best friends, but you know, this is my style. I go very direct and you've given a very direct answer. I love it. And the reason I wanted you to share that is because I think we live in this fantasy world, this anti-walkism and all that, where people are like, everything is fine. You know, like shut up about it. Like these things are of the past and all these examples that you give, which, you know, when I hear I'm shocked, even if I believe that I'm kind of aware of things and blah blah. I know you're not because you didn't experience those things and you think everything is fine, but no, the reality is different. So thanks for sharing the reality.

Angeley Mullins: It's not fine. What I would say is a couple years ago, I was at a big conference in Copenhagen and was helping to actually prepare for one of my previous CEOs who was up on stage and in the backstage, there was a very famous news reporter, a woman, very well known, and she was doing a great job of moderating this conference. And she asked me, she said, okay, well, you're a leader, you're a female leader in tech, tell me about some of the issues you face.

Angeley Mullins: And so I was telling her about some of the issues that I just told you. And it was interesting because she told me she's like, wow. She was like, I thought things would have changed more with the next generation. Shocked. We're still talking about the same things.

Alper Yurder: Yeah, It's so, I mean, I'm going to say something funny. It's clearly not funny, but at the same time, like, what the hell, people. Thanks for sharing that. 

Alper Yurder: So let's talk about the success and the stories and the challenges of being a leader at the moment. So you're a chief commercial officer, which is a very fancy and exciting title at a very exciting business, which just got their series A investment. I mean, all looks very dashing from the outside. How is it going for you? Like, what are the highlights and lowlights of your current role?

Angeley Mullins: Well, big question. So I would take that in context. Being a CCO is always a challenging, you know, role. It's exciting. You're moving the business forward. You're driving the commercial areas, marketing, sales, customer success, you know, rev ops, etc. But at the same time, this economic period in time for scale-ups is quite challenging. So a lot of scale-ups have headwinds. We're looking at things like product market fit. How do you scale? Which markets do you enter? You know, do you scale through innovation or do you scale through tried and true methods? You always have to deal, if you're a startup, you have to deal with the runway. What does that mean for the people that you're hiring? So there's a lot of headwinds, I would say at the moment, but it also makes for a very exciting time.

Alper Yurder: Okay. And of all the things and yes, that was a very broad question. So let's try to narrow it down. Like, do you have like your top three top of mind for you at the moment? For this section is where we talk about you. And then I'm going to actually move on. What do you see overall in the market? And I'll put you in the therapist chair, which is like, you can preach whatever you believe is the solution to other people's problems.

Alper Yurder: So let's talk about, as I say, you. What are the top three things top of mind for you at the moment?

Angeley Mullins: Okay.

Angeley Mullins: As far as scaling the company, it's doing it fast enough. It's doing it with the right head tools. So yeah, we're still in that area, even though we're not in the era of hyper growth anymore, you still have the scalable and predictable revenue model. Investors still want speed. They still want to know that there is basically an equation. You put in something, you get an output, and you continue to scale forward. So we still have those challenges, and I don't think it's unique to my company. I think everyone...

Angeley Mullins: You know, CCO or CRO is facing this challenge. We also have the challenge of getting the right talent. And you would think in this economic climate that there would be tons of talent on the market, which there is, but finding the right talent for your company and where you are in that stage of growth, that profile of talent changes what you need. So I think that's really important. And then also making what I would say the right scaling decisions. Do we have the right product set? Are we scaling into the right markets? If we build new features, do they have to have features or nice to have features? Are they going to affect the bottom line? What's the trade-off between building that and just throwing more salespeople at the problem to sell more of what you currently have? So there's a lot of these issues, I would say, at earlier stage scale-ups. When you're at later stage scale-ups.

Alper Yurder: Yeah.

Angeley Mullins: You have a bigger issue of investors usually wanting to push for IPO or you have to basically own entire continents as far as your market portfolio is concerned. So the problems become bigger and bigger. But I think there's some similarities in the challenges for different stages of scale ups.

Alper Yurder: I mean, all of the above resonate with me. But the challenge here is today you throw me this wall of, you know, trying to make the podcast in 30 minutes. So I'm going to really struggle because I want to talk about, oh, we have to have you back, Angeley. But let's dive into some. Let's dive into the current. You just raised the series, all of the three resonate with me, although we are pre seed, I think, like you still have to be fast, which is why, you know, we were like the hours that we do, I guess. Hiring, huge challenge. And exactly as you explained, although you would imagine, wow, you know, everybody's firing. There should be a lot of hiring. No, because you have to find the right fit and it takes time. And do you want to go into your tips and tricks for those two first, maybe? Like, how are you juggling those things?

Angeley Mullins: So for me, I have a very direct approach. Tell people, and this is the difference actually, culturally between what I was trained in the United States and how to hire versus what I see in Europe. So in the US, we're very direct. This is what we need, this is the skill set, this is what's going on in the company, here's what's going great, here's what's really bad. Can you do this job? In Europe, it's a little bit more like, they don't wanna tell everything that's going on inside and they kinda wanna interrogate the candidate first, and I don't really agree with that approach, especially in a scale up environment. You need people to come in who know exactly what they're getting into, what the situation is, hitting the ground running. That's the most important thing because in scale ups, every month matters. And so you have to make sure that the people in place are the right people pushing towards the common goals and doing it in a very fast and effective manner.

Alper Yurder: So from all that scale up experience of yours, would you be able to say anybody... Let's first dive into one for example. What was a very enjoyable experience, a very high highlight, and one that was very tough, a lowlight? The highlight was at my previous scale up. We scaled to a Series B. We closed a 36 million cash and debt equity. This was in 2022, which was really nice. And it was actually right before all the investors were closing their pocketbooks. We got it right in under the line. It was a really cool scaling experience because we actually took two companies, consolidated it into one, flipped from a backend product to a frontend SaaS product, and really moved

Angeley Mullins: Really cool and actually really liked the product in Berlin. In Berlin. It's called Berlin. And it's a really cool product and it has some really nice insights. It's a market research product. So that was, I think, a really nice journey and a nice journey to be a part of. One of the low lights I would say, actually this one was not from a scaling journey. This one's from a bigger company. I worked for a.

Alper Yurder: Where was this one? Which was? Which was this one? Okay.

Angeley Mullins: massive tech company, which one can imagine who those are. And it was just chaos everywhere. So it was absolute chaos everywhere. We were preparing for an IPO. And it was really just do everything you can to hit the stock price to make sure that the stock price opens at x dollars a share. So it really wasn't so much about

Alper Yurder: Yeah, go and do some spying guys.

Angeley Mullins: build the best products, make sure you have product market fit with consumers, et cetera. It was just really structured to make sure you open and you hit the stock price. And then when everyone knows when you hit that stock price, they want it to continue to go up. So this also happens in scale ups. But at the same time, when you're IPO in a company, there's just so much more on the line that it's important to make sure. Just to go back to your roots, why do you have that product?

Angeley Mullins: Why are you opening on the market? What's the plan? Because if you constantly go for just the stock price, you'll find that you're going way off direction. So it was a very interesting experience, is what I'll say.

Alper Yurder: Yeah, I think you have a very wide variety of experiences which I really love, but do you feel like now at the age that you are an experience that you are, you found your happy place, your spot where you feel more comfortable? And is it this one, for example?

Angeley Mullins: Yeah, so I really like scale ups. So my current CEO, you know, asked me to come in and they said, you know, you've scaled the company before, can you do it again? Sure. And it takes a certain kind of person that wants to scale companies. So I think.

Alper Yurder: Sure, I'm crazy. I'll do the same craziness again.

‍Angeley Mullins: But again, and it's one of those things that after you've scaled a few companies, you know, you know how it's done, you know what the challenges are. Usually you've got product challenges, sales challenges, you know, growth as far as markets, different verticals, you also have cultural challenges, as the company has to change culturally as you scale. So, you know, these challenges are not unique. I know every company thinks it's unique to them, but it's not. So for all the listeners, every company goes through this. And it's really, it's a difference from your first scaling journey to your fifth, and you're going through it and you're like, okay, this is usually what happens, let's prepare for this. So it's nice to be able to understand and have that foresight, but this is where you asked previously in this podcast, this is where the drive and the curiosity comes into play.

Angeley Mullins: Because people that don't have drive and don't have curiosity probably are not a great fit for scaling companies.

Alper Yurder: Yes. Yeah. My retirement plan is definitely to go to a, you know, legacy company and just, just sit in my place there, you know, make the big commission check and, you know, happy days and 95. I don't think I would ever be able to do that, but that's a great life, I think. But it's about choices. Like what works for you. It's about understanding who am I being aware of? What do I want? What are my three must haves and what do I go for? And for you, it's that curiosity, that drive, that learning, that passion. Somebody who you mentioned like the first time and the fifth time of doing that role, somebody who is in those shoes for the first time, chief commercial officer. And let me throw in even more Jews, like a woman, you know, any diversity, any race, any background and going through similar things. What would you tell them to do and don'ts? Do you have any tips?

Angeley Mullins: I would say the first thing is to keep going and don't give up. That's the very first thing, because I think you get into a challenging situation, it's easy to throw your hands in the air, it's easy to say, hey, everything's not going well, and just give up. So I would just tell all the listeners, especially the female leaders out there, keep going, don't give up. So that's the first thing. The second thing is to understand, just like we talked about with the complexity of scale-ups, these scale-ups have a pattern. They all go through a similar journey. So if you understand that pattern and you understand that journey, that's going to be easy for you to plan, to plan around it, to plan for the challenges. If you're a first time leader in a scale up, I would just say, learn as much about the scaling journey as possible. A lot of leaders like to really dive into their own function, whether they're sales or marketing their product. They want to say, Hey, I want to be the best functional executive leader possible.

Angeley Mullins: I would actually tell listeners now to not do that. I know it might sound a little controversial just because at that point in your career, you should have enough functional experience, right, to drive your department, organization. And at that level, you can hire really great experts, individual contributor experts to help fill in any gaps.

Angeley Mullins: At this level, it's more about steering the organization to better outcomes. So it's understanding on a macro level, the challenges that the business is going to face as it scales. So we need to build a product. We don't have enough money. We need to hire salespeople, but you know, you have to prove all your different KPIs before you can justify hiring more in. We need to expand. Do we do it in our own market or internationally? These are the things that any good go-to-market and any good leader does in a scaling journey. needs to understand those fundamentals.

Alper Yurder: Okay. If I read somewhere that the average tenure of a CRO at the moment, I think this was one year ago, so it might be even shorter, is around 18 months. I don't know if that's true, which is quite scary.

Alper Yurder: What do you do in those 18 months? Where do you begin? So I, okay, let me make it a bit more, you know, precise. What I really loved about what you said is I think it was a very altruistic way of putting leadership, not just your own, you know, function. Think of it as you're almost thinking like a founder, you know, it's your baby. You're growing it, which, which is very, I think it's very rare for people to see because they're just going to go for my thing, my KPI, my success. But you say, no, to be successful, it needs to be this broad thing. So how do they start? Like what one, two, three steps a good successful CRO, CCO takes to make it in that scale up environment?

Angeley Mullins: Talk to other CROs and CCOs. Talk to other leaders at other companies to learn the failures and the successes in the scaling journey. So there's a lot of scale-ups right now. I mean, all you have to do is open TechCrunch or Sifted or any of these leading media publications, and you see different scale-ups that are not doing well. Really understand the fundamentals of what happened. So.

Angeley Mullins: You have startups that get a lot of funding and then for some reason or another, they still go out of business. Figure out why that happened. You have scale-ups that were bootstrapped and they end up getting tons and tons of revenue. Figure out why that happened. So just start to do your own research and start to ask around and really get the on the ground expertise and feedback from people who are in it at that moment in time.

Angeley Mullins: I think that's one of the best things that you can do is to become part of different communities and to really have those conversations. Because it kind of goes back to what I said. Most people just want to focus on their own function for obvious reasons. They want that function to do well. But sometimes as a leader, if your head is down too much and you're not looking around, our job is to see around the curve, to see the horizon, and to make sure that the company is on the right path. And you can't do that if you're not...

Angeley Mullins: looking around to make sure that your plan, your strategy will make sense.

Alper Yurder: I think, I mean, it's probably the ideal way, but when you have that pressure, like there's a founder who brought you in for a reason, they want to see the results, you know, what are you doing in the first month? Of course you want to do more research and understand and do, and you're trying to battle that, like, give me a little bit, like, if we do this right the first time, it would be better. But then they're like, no, this is the way to sell and go sell. How do you manage that friction?

Angeley Mullins: You know, I'm always of the mind of better to ask for forgiveness than permission. So in this case, you know, nothing succeeds like success. So if you can even prove out a test run on your idea and show the success, the efficacy of that idea, then when you're pitching that to your CEO, your founder, he or she will say, oh, okay, well this works. So, okay, try it some more.

Angeley Mullins: So for me, don't be afraid to try something out. Don't be afraid to take risks. And that's one of the other cultural differences I see between the United States and Europe. The US is a very risk loving society and Europe seems to be a very risk verse and being very general, but it does still seem to be true. Do not be afraid to take those risks.

Alper Yurder: Okay, by the way, did you say you have to... This is for Hazar, our editor. Did you say you have to run now or in...

Angeley Mullins: I do have to run now, so like one last closing statement.

Alper Yurder: Okay, that's fine. We'll wrap it up. Oh, Angeley, this is a great chat and I'm very happy to find you. We should have more conversations. Anyway, okay, let me do the wrapping up then. Now that has been a great chat. I couldn't have enough of it. I definitely have to have you back on the show, Angelie, and I'm sure our listeners will be like, what the hell, why are you letting her go? Because she has to go, guys, it's not me. So any closing remarks before you go today, Angeley.

Angeley Mullins: I would just say for all the listeners, stay inspired, keep that drive, keep that curiosity, talk to other leaders. So if you're a listener and you are a leader in a scale up especially, talk to other leaders, not just in your own company, but in other companies, create that community. And I think that you'll find that you have a strong network. So yeah, stay driven and curious.

‍Alper Yurder: Yeah. You brought it on yourself. Maybe they'll come try to talk to you, Angelique, but I'm sure you will have that. You will enjoy giving that advice. Excellent. Now, as any good therapist, I'm going to have to cut us on time. Thank you for being with us today, Angelique Mullins and to our listeners. If you enjoyed the podcast, please follow us on your favorite platform. And until next time, thank you very much for listening. Bye.