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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

My most despised company on the planet raised money at a billion-dollar valuation this week. Polymarket just raised a $200M round led by Founders Fund. And people are excited about it. $200M to build out a gambling site. That’s what prediction markets are: gambling. This reminds me of when, as an Australian, our entire nation was jumping up and down celebrating the rise and subsequent acquisition of Afterpay. A predatory debt provider. This is capitalism at its worst.

I know building technology is hard. And winning a market is even harder. But for the love of little baby Jesus, can we try to stick to celebrating things that make the world better, not objectively worse? This is akin to celebrating Philip Morris releasing a newer, more interesting cigarette. Yeah, a cigarette that lights up in fancy colours when you smoke it is interesting. But it’s still a cigarette. It still kills people. This is the type of thing that really irks me. But, well, what do you do? What do you think, though? I’d like to know.

Anyway, enough rambling and negativity today. Besides, I am actually in a pretty good mood overall. Especially because I have an excellent piece for you today with Barbra from Pando. I love culture-first founders. People who are out to do good in the world. And she is definitely one of them. So, without further ado, here she is.

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Barbra Gago, Founder & CEO at Pando

Barbra Gago, Founder & CEO at Pando, is a people-focused entrepreneur on a mission to redefine performance management through continuous progression and just-in-time promotion. After a decade as a serial early-stage operator and CMO—bringing companies like Miro, Greenhouse and Culture Amp to market and scale—Barbra launched Pando in Amsterdam in September 2020 to tackle the opaque, biased ‘black box’ of annual reviews.

Under her leadership, Pando optimizes Employee Lifetime Value by embedding transparent career frameworks into real-time feedback and assessment, empowering managers and employees to co-create tailored development paths. Her vision has earned Pando spots at TechCrunch Battlefield 2022 and Products That Count 2023, as well as recognition on Inc. and Will Reed’s Best Places to Work lists in 2023.

Tell us about the problem you’re trying to solve?

Sure! So, at Pando, our goal is to eliminate all the time companies waste on performance reviews, because over my career, I’ve found them to be a major drain on resources. Organizations spend countless hours preparing for and conducting reviews, and both managers and reports end up altering their behavior around review time, which makes feedback inauthentic.

We collect qualitative input through question-based assessments that are prone to recency bias and other distortions, then use that shaky foundation to decide promotions, raises, and compensation.

Pando’s mission is to compound employee impact over time by building a transparent, structured system that supports continuous development instead of relying on once-a-year batches that rarely deliver great results.

What was the most difficult thing when going from zero to one?

I think the hardest part was the paradigm shift: what we’re introducing to performance reviews demands massive behavior change. On one hand, companies are eager for a better system; on the other, the people tasked with implementing it often lack the tools to navigate the transition. It’s like how Atlassian popularized agile—not by inventing it, but by building a system to help organizations orchestrate and measure it—and that’s exactly what we’re doing at Pando.

We’re reimagining performance management without being what you think performance management is, which means we must educate the market, inform buyers, and empower stakeholders at every level to adopt a fundamentally different approach.

What learnings did you take from leading marketing at Miro that you’ve applied to Pando?

I think the biggest shift for me was that I came from a career in pretty traditional B2B, SMB marketing. Lots of content and thought leadership. This served me well at Miro. But at Miro we overlaid a PLG-plus-sales motion that we sort of layered on top, and I think it was one of the first successful examples of doing both. It taught me, at least from a product and positioning perspective, that you have to talk to customers and buyers through the people who will actually use the product.

That mindset unlocked an innovative way to drive adoption in enterprise products sold to a single buyer but used by many.

Who is your ICP, and how did you identify them?

I would say our ICP is companies of anywhere from 100 to 1,000 employees. That came from understanding there’s a tipping point in performance and employee enablement around that size. Before 100, organizations often grow so quickly that they want to introduce good practices but lack the HR leadership or management layer to actually implement them.

Once you hit roughly 100 employees, questions like ‘What is my career path?’ and ‘What does success look like?’ become urgent, creating a clear inflection point where Pando fits perfectly.

What is your North Star metric at Pando and why?

I would say we look at weekly and monthly active usage in a way most performance platforms wouldn’t. Engagement tools might only be used once or twice a year. Performance reviews are the same. So we focus on whether we’re enabling managers and employees to have structured feedback conversations on a much more regular basis.

It really ends up being bi-monthly: managers and their teams are in Pando at least twice a month, and that signal shows we’re driving just-in-time performance rather than a once-a-year batch. We’ve also explored ways to extend engagement outside the platform—into Slack and other channels as an example—so that feedback and development become part of people’s everyday workflow.

What is your day-to-day job as CEO?

As CEO, I’m building a people-focused product, so much of my day revolves around management, feedback, culture, and development. I’m constantly asking whether we’re creating a company that people love and living up to our vision. I dedicate significant time to sales and to product, because as a non-engineering solo founder, I wear many hats.

Who are your direct reports, and what does your team look like?

My direct reports include operations, finance, sales, and a marketing lead—though it isn’t a formal ‘head of marketing’ since I fill that role myself. Functionally, customer success and product also roll up into me. My leadership team is comprised of an engineering lead, an operations lead, a customer success lead, and a sales lead. On the product side, we have an engineering team headed by our engineering leader, but I still drive much of the product vision and hands-on management.

How do you unblock your engineering? Do you have technical advisors?

We do! We have several technical advisors who cover everything from DevOps and infrastructure to operating systems and front-end engineering, and these senior experts step in whenever we hit a roadblock. My husband, who’s an engineer, also serves as a ‘shadow’ advisor. Whenever I share a challenge with him, he offers insights that help smooth the path.

Internally, we work very fluidly: we set thematic priorities for the year, build a quarterly roadmap, and then recalibrate every two weeks based on customer feedback. Rather than locking ourselves into rigid deadlines, we keep a continuously prioritized backlog and only make firm commitments to our largest clients, staying adaptable and ready to shift course as new information arises.

How do you think about leadership?

I’m very values-oriented. From my very first hire at Pando, I defined our core values and built an interview kit around them. Because values are how you anchor and align people to the behaviors and expectations that matter. I believe in radical transparency, so I share our default-alive status, runway, revenue, and company health openly to create a true sense of ownership and engagement.

Authenticity is equally important, which means I hire people who know more than I do and lean into collaboration: I recognize my strengths and my weaknesses, and I encourage experienced leaders to step in and take things off my plate. I have no problem sharing my legos so to speak, and I expect every leader at Pando to be willing to do any task—even the most menial—if it helps unblock someone’s success.

What is the business status? Raising, burning, default alive?

We raised a substantial round in 2022 and immediately adapted our strategy to reach profitability. Today, we run very lean but continue to grow with excellent retention metrics. Having come from hyper-growth SaaS environments, it’s been eye-opening to see the market shift, but our lean operating model lets us move and adapt rapidly to customer needs.

Right now, we’re default-alive and focused on profitability so that we control our own destiny, rather than chase aggressive growth at any cost. Our customers remain highly satisfied, so our priority is sustaining that positive experience instead of endless expansion. We’re also rethinking our go-to-market approach and business model, exploring self-serve or freemium options and integrating AI, to unlock new growth avenues in a category historically sold via enterprise contracts.

How do you set goals?

I’ve done a lot of goal setting, and I’ve often been the de facto person leading it at many companies because I love structure and transparency. At Pando, we set annual goals with the whole team, collaborating on mirror boards to anchor our main objectives and then determine the key results together.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

I also know when I need breaks and what self-care means for me, so I make time for massage, regular exercise, and other rituals that keep me balanced.

Living in Europe while most of my team is in the U.S. gives me quiet mornings to reset and approach work with fresh energy. Between physical activity, meditation, reading, and carving out moments for what makes me happy, I maintain both the mental and physical well-being necessary to bring my best self to Pando every day.

And that’s it! You can follow and connect with Barbra over on LinkedIn and Twitter, and don’t forget to check out Pando’s website.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

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