Fit Happens: The Executive Search Podcast

Jason Baumgarten
[0:00:00]
I'm Jason Baumgarten and you're listening to Fit Happens, the podcast where top leaders, investors and board directors share the stories, surprises and hard earned lessons behind finding the right fit. Let's get into it. Hi, this is Jason Baumgarten and you're listening to Fit Happens, where leadership is not about being the best at everything, it's about being the best fit for the moment. Today on Fit Happens, we're exploring how fit shows up in a career defining way with Kara Nortman, the managing partner of Monarch Collective. And I have no doubt we will have a fun and exciting conversation. Welcome, Kara.

Kara Nortman
[0:00:42]
Thanks for having me.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:00:43]
Kara, I have to start with just an easy one, which is your first job. Everyone always loves to hear about the first job.

Kara Nortman
[0:00:49]
First job. Well, I started probably when I was like 10 or 11, filing and babysitting. Actually, I think I started babysitting when I was 8, which seems very young.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:01:04]
And not filing babies.

Kara Nortman
[0:01:04]
You and I both know we have three children. Sometimes you do file a baby. And then my first job, you know, kind of I would say in a more formal way was I was a scooper at Ben and Jerry's in high school and took a lot of pride in my career path there actually.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:01:22]
And did friends get extra scoops or were you?

Kara Nortman
[0:01:26]
Oh, no, I was like rule follower. But I took it really seriously. You know, we had to memorize every ingredient in every flavor. You know, I would make ice cream cakes and coffee and wash windows. And then eventually I got to become sort of the shift leader and did the financials and it was actually a really great experience.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:01:52]
I have a feeling there's an employee of the month in your Ben and Jerry's time. You do not sound like the person who was scooping at my local shop back then.

Kara Nortman
[0:02:03]
Still love.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:02:04]
They were more in the one for me, one for you style of ice cream.

Kara Nortman
[0:02:10]
I love ice cream and I love rainbow sprinkles. So that's still a guilty pleasure.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:02:16]
This idea of fit. When you were early in your career, what did you think your kind of big defining strength was when you think back to those early jobs?

Kara Nortman
[0:02:25]
Yeah, I think what I probably thought my defining strength was early in my career versus maybe even the last year of my career. Very different. I honestly thought my defining strength was my work ethic. And I just was always willing to work harder, throw hours at it in a way, in an unhealthy way, sacrifice sleep. And I always knew I had enough of every other skill. But I just thought it was like the grit and the grind and there's positives to that, but there's also negatives to that. Because there are things that I probably am uniquely good at, and then there's things I'm less good at. So I think there's been a real journey, and I often think there's a real journey in particular for women to understand strengths. But I think all of us kind of take for granted the things we're naturally good at. And at least for me, I didn't value them or even see them until, until like, really my mid-40s.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:03:18]
For a little bit of context, what are you doing? What do you do?

Kara Nortman
[0:03:23]
How broad do you want to go? Jason, I'm drinking a lot of coffee and Matcha this morning. I'm now in women's sports, but I spent most of my career in tech. And you know, I would say I spent probably the first 25 years of my career in tech between investing and operating. So everything from working straight out of school at Morgan Stanley and their captive private equity group, though I was deciding between doing that and going to work for a consumer protection nonprofit. So very different things were on my mind even graduating from college. Spent a bunch of years in venture at Battery Ventures, Upfront Ventures. I spent close to a decade operating, working for Barry Diller and Victor Kaufman at IAC, which is a public company, at the time about 100 different consumer brands. So I ran — I ended up co-heading mergers and acquisitions for them and also operating a number of the business units. So involved with everything from like the early days of Tinder and Vimeo to spinning out Ticketmaster and HSN. But what I do now is women's sports. So I run, with my co-founder Jasmine Robinson, a $250 million women's sports fund. We're still the only kind of investment platform that is exclusively focused on women's sports. We invest in teams, leagues and rights and only the most mature parts of the ecosystem. And that really came out of a fun, longer story where while I was in venture as my kind of side hustle curiosity, I ended up being one of three co-founders of Angel City Football Club, which was really the first women's sports team to prove out a commercial model and build a real P&L. And I co-founded that with Natalie Portman and Julie Uhrman, having started thinking about it in 2015 and we started that in 2019. And that really was a hobby and it led to probably the greatest fit I didn't know I needed.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:05:28]
Say a little more about that moment.

Kara Nortman
[0:05:29]
I mean, it's a lot of moments. I mean, it's one of the reasons we call the firm Monarch — it's sort of like all of the flaps of the butterfly wing, the chaos theory that if you follow them 10 or 20 times it might lead you to a completely different place in life. But a couple of key moments. In 2015, I went to the Women's World Cup finals in Vancouver with my three daughters, my husband and my parents just to have fun. And we watched this game where the US won 5 to 2. It was the first time the US had won a World Cup in many years. And I mean even saying it right now, I'm getting the chills. I felt like 12 again and I just had so much fun. And it was almost like I remembered what fun felt like. I was a working mom in my late 30s and it was almost like I just didn't even know to look for fun anymore. I didn't even know it was missing. And it felt really different. I love sports, I played sports, but it felt very different than the men's sports events I had gone to. There was like a greater purpose, community, people were face painting, friendly. And so I went to nine stores in Vancouver to find a jersey to buy my girls. Couldn't find any. I think I found one without a name on the back. I then went home and tried to find content for this league I didn't know existed that we now have a team in. Couldn't find it. And ultimately I just started asking people and I became kind of business curious around why would you have 90 minutes of something extraordinary that hundreds of millions of people watch and then nothing to do with that enthusiasm and demand. Right. It's like having a Nike commercial and then no Nike in the store. And everyone kept telling me I was the only one who wanted more. So anyway, that led to a whole wonderful series of events. But the biggest one was when I was asked to be an advisor to the U.S. Women's National Team Players Union. A woman named Becca Roux asked me to do that and she really became my teacher and mentor. She thought I was doing her a favor. She ended up doing me one of the biggest favors of my life. And I think that is one of the things around — for me at least — how you find fit. So funny, I mean, I didn't go into that moment with this idea that I was going to have a complete pivot in my career. But what I found was I went in to help work on pay equity for the team, visibility, I mean it's how I pulled, you know, Natalie Portman and other people who had bigger Instagram accounts than mine when they expressed an interest. But I also learned licensing and rights and early NIL and group licensing when one team was just starting. So anyway, that was the biggest shift. And then there's all this wonderful serendipity that led to actually starting Angel City in the way we all came together as co-founders and the way we ended up finding capital, which was not easy — COVID, all of it. So I can get into it if you want, but I'll pause there.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:08:17]
You had a big job, right? You were at the top of your game as an investor. You had spent decades building this career and you were good at it. But when you started to have these feelings of this other thing coming together and falling into place, what did that feel like and what did it start to feel like for the thing you were doing that maybe you weren't as excited about doing as you thought about the future?

Kara Nortman
[0:08:44]
I mean it felt really exciting and really scary. I have a wonderful partnership in my marriage and I did have a big job. My husband made a lot of changes in his life and career to support mine. So I was also responsible for earning money for the family. I had just become managing partner at the firm I was at. That's where I thought I'd be forever. And as you know, the way venture works, it's long-term vests and equity and all that sort of stuff. And so leaving right as you're moving into a role like that comes with a lot of changes financially. And so I don't know that a lot of people would have done it. And I'm not even sure I'm here to encourage a lot of people to do it. But I will say that I couldn't imagine — you know me pretty well, I'm a pretty happy, joyful person. I really have enjoyed just about every job I've had. And I was often the person they would cart out to sell people on why working 100 hours a week building Excel models was going to be amazing. So I think in some ways even harder because I was always kind of happy where I was. It wasn't like I was looking for something new, but it was almost like having this feeling of like, oh, this is what true alignment feels like. And I didn't know it could feel this way to have such a drive, a purpose around what I'm doing and feel like my skill set was so uniquely suited to it and it didn't necessarily feel as suited to venture anymore. I don't know if I would have admitted that to myself because the industry had changed so much while I was in it. So it felt really exciting, really scary. And I mean, I had also a great husband who happens to now be an executive coach alongside of me, and he would make me decks and he was really encouraging me to take that risk. But it was a journey. I mean, it was definitely a journey and I got a lot of coaching externally and internally to be able to do that. And I left about a little over three years ago to start Monarch, starting at a zero salary. And being told the strategy we were raising capital against was exotic — because Angel City never paid me a salary, we just — I, Natalie, Julie and I owned 100% of the team when we started. It's actually a C-corp and so the equity piece of it was meaningful, obviously, but it was not like kind of paying the bills as a working mom of three.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:11:13]
So people talk about flow all the time. Like those moments where you feel in flow, you kind of lose yourself, lose that sense of time. You're just fully immersed in the ice cream scooping or the Excel building. When you're now in this role, do you feel like you have flow more often?

Kara Nortman
[0:11:31]
Yes. And it's forever work to create the container to find it. Like, I don't think that flow is just consistently there for you. I would say all the — like, getting the ingredients right — make it happen. Like, make it. You kind of just — it's almost like I'm always looking for step functions and sometimes you just kind of have to realize, like, you might just take a step back and be like, wow, okay. Like, my daughters are good, my marriage is good, I'm sleeping, I'm traveling like a crazy person. But slow release melatonin on occasion really is helpful. You know, I mean, but I do think I still — I mean, I'm a self-improver. I sort of practice what I preach. I'm always sort of trying new things to bring consciousness and the right kinds of collaboration into my own life, for myself, with my team. I do unique things with my partner to actually onboard our team, which we could go and talk about. But I think I feel like these days I feel it a ton. But it also was like — it wasn't just a leaving one thing for another. It was actually doing a lot of work on fundamental personality patterns. And I had worked for other people and candidly for men my whole career, which is great, I had wonderful mentors, but actually, you know, coming into who you are and flow — the more you can find where you are versus thinking something on the outside is going to solve it. So for me, I feel like I've actually just come into it in the last couple of months in a way that's really consistent and where I constantly am looking at my husband and being like, wow. And this is kind of year six or seven years after we founded Angel City and almost three years after I founded Monarch with Jasmine. So I think it's a journey.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:13:30]
Yeah, totally. It's one of those things that you also — nobody can be in it all the time. There are no circumstances where somebody goes, oh, I'm always in flow. It's definitely a crescendo moment in a day, in a week, in a life.

Kara Nortman
[0:13:45]
I mean, I write these crazy morning pages still. Will this pattern ever change? Is this pattern good or bad? Right. But I think the awareness and habits that you build — once you have the ingredients in the environment, in your marriage — those are the things that create flow. And for me, it's writing and talking and running and music. But for other people, it may be other things. But I do think habit building has been probably one of the most productive things I've done, really, in the last six months to get more consistently into flow.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:14:22]
So when we talk about the jobs, because you've been a super successful person, and one of the things I think so important for people to hear is that even super successful people have jobs that just — and it could be a job, or it could be a part of a job — you're like, man, that just wasn't the right thing. It wasn't the right fit. I felt like I was failing, even if I wasn't objectively, totally failing. Is there something in your past where, like, that was just the wrong thing for me to do?

Kara Nortman
[0:14:53]
I don't think there's anything I did that was the wrong thing for me to do. Because I think one of the things I probably do naturally that I don't know that a lot of people do is, like, pull out and hear hard feedback from others or just myself — like, acknowledge that everything that was bad or hard or put me into this like period of time is something that made me who I am today. And I kind of think we're all on a hero's journey to truly understand how to surround ourselves with the right people, understand what we're great at, not have shame around what we're not great at, and partner around that. But I can give you anecdotes like where I felt that way and they were important. Some of them were anecdotes where I was like, oh, I did something else to put an ointment on it, even if it wasn't a full-fledged skin graft. And good things came out of it. One of them actually has a connection to a class you and I maybe took back in the day called Paths to Power. Did you take that class?

Jason Baumgarten
[0:15:55]
I did take that class, yeah.

Kara Nortman
[0:15:57]
Did it have an impact on you?

Jason Baumgarten
[0:15:59]
It did. I mean, for me, it made me — I always think of the mailroom. I don't know if you think about the mailroom, but the story of a famous person who got the lowest job on the totem pole, which was to answer the mail and used that to build enormous relationships and a position of power to influence his political career. And it's a good example of what you were saying of like, hey, that thing that wasn't a good fit, wasn't right, you weren't having fun at — is there something you can make it? Can you take agency back and make it a better fit or make it something that's more successful for you? Which I think is — often people turn into victims, right? They turn into like, I have no control, there's nothing I can do. I mean, I remember years ago in my career, there was a very cheesy campaign called "make your own journey" at the firm. And it was not received exceptionally well, but in retrospect had excellent intent, which was, hey, don't just leave or don't just be unhappy. Think about what it would take to make this current job a job that you can thrive in and actually put some time into it. And I often tell that story to others and repeat it and say, okay, well, what would it take? And do you have control over that? I remember in the 90s interviewing a very senior general counsel and asking that question. I said, what are you most unhappy about? And he went on this whole tirade about the fax machine was always out of paper and this was one of the top five executives at a very well known company. And he was just really upset about this fax machine. And I sort of paused and I said, is there a way you could change that? And he was like, well, it's not my department. I said, I get it, but do you think you could find a way? And it was like nobody had ever asked him that question. And he smiled and he's like, I bet I can. And so I'm like, change the fax paper.

Kara Nortman
[0:18:01]
Yeah. It's such a great example. And I will answer your question. But it brings up, like, there's a few frameworks that have been really powerful for me. One is the victim, villain, hero framework. And I did a lot of coaching with Conscious Leadership Group where if you're in — yes, you can be a victim of things that are terrible in the world that you have no control over. But if you're sort of a knowledge worker, etc., and you're in just under — or even in a marriage, right, like I do think they're similar. I think one is addressed by therapy and one is addressed by coaching. But actually, like, the people I've worked with kind of work on the whole person because you can kind of show up in both in the same way. And I think it's strange to take like a segment of a person — becoming better in work made me better as a mom and a wife, right. And vice versa. But so the victim — you know, you can actually role play this. Like, what do you — when you're in the victim mode or the hero mode or the villain mode, and when you're pointing fingers — it really is a helpful thing around facts and stories and how you choose to digest them. So that's one thing that's been really powerful. And then I think the other is truly understanding those situations. Like, the mailroom people do have natural personality profiles or trends, right. And this is — I got very into the Enneagram as a personality profiling tool. And these days I'm down the Human Design rabbit hole. So I think I pick a new one every 12 to 24 months. But we do Enneagram test everyone who comes into the firm. And I think it is really helpful to hold this stuff loosely but understand that there may be like — there isn't a kind of an aha, an epiphany — but like, oh, I see this person acting in this way, and they love taking on authority and challenging it, right, an Enneagram 8, versus like, oh my gosh, I'm sort of addicted to positive reinforcement and achievement. And so I'm so thinking about image that I'm not actually going and asking for something that would make my life much better when the worst thing that could happen is a no, right? So I do think having that lens can help people also take a step back and do things differently. But I'll go to the example. So the Paths to Power class — I always think about Henry Kissinger taking over a defunct global conference and turning it into a must-attend conference. Or Lyndon Johnson did the same thing with mock congress before they moved into their real power. Or Keith Ferrazzi who was deciding between two consulting firms and went with — I think Deloitte or Bain — instead of McKinsey and said, but hey, will the CEO meet with me twice a year? So a lot of this is around like what are things in the margin that people aren't doing, that they don't value, that you can take and make your own that you have natural energy for. And I did one of those things at Battery Ventures straight out of business school when I was feeling like not fully comfortable in my skin. Even though I was a pretty good associate — I was a great associate for them before business school — which was I started writing a blog. They needed someone to write a blog in 2004 and I was in Silicon Valley doing venture capital for the first time. Facebook was coming out and this and that. It's like, why would anyone want to talk to Kara Nortman? You know? And so I became like a journalist and I always have written, loved writing, kept a journal since I was in seventh or eighth grade. Took it really seriously. I published two, three times a week. I had like an ethics policy — I wouldn't write on our portfolio, which is sort of ridiculous now that you think about it. But it became this extraordinary way — when people weren't doing it, right — it seems obvious now, but this is over 20 years ago — where I wasn't like excited about the companies I was bringing in to do something unique that was good for getting Battery's reputation out there. But my brain was out there in a way where people who wanted that level of feedback or substance would find me. And that actually led to my job at IAC, which I got at a very young age. I became sort of a senior person in their M&A group and then co-headed it, I think, at 30. And it was because my blog was sent to the vice chairman and he said he'd never seen one of those before. And he was notorious for like being one of the toughest guys out there. And he gave me the easiest interview because he said, I know how you think, I read your blog. And then of course they made me shut it down because it was a public company and blogs were weird. But that's an example of — and I have another really good one when I was at IAC and running a falling knife that ultimately led to the incubation of Tinder. But both of them were in painful moments where I was just butting my head against the wall. And in this case it was CitySearch and we just could not figure out how to get its data uncorrupted and it was reporting into an ad network. And so I joined the mobile incubator board and recruited in a guy named Sean Rad. And we incubated Tinder. You know, while I was pregnant with my third child. And it's so like — those things that when you're frustrated and you're hitting a wall — I was doing empirically a bad job. I could not turn around CitySearch. I could not figure it out because the data set was corrupt beyond the advertising. So those moments were like — out of frustration I just look for a creative outlet outside, or something that just, like, the blog felt like a lot of work to take on, but I was like, okay, I'm going to do it. And then it gave me a lot of gratification for doing it.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:23:30]
All right, what's your side hustle now? Because you're in your happy place, but do you still have a side hustle?

Kara Nortman
[0:23:37]
That's a really good question. I shouldn't say this on your podcast, but I'm actually thinking again about joining a board outside of Monarch. Like, I was on 10 or 12 boards before I left my last role at Upfront and a nonprofit board that is aligned with something I care about deeply. We're an impact-oriented fund, but very non-concessionary and there's just great things happening in sports and women's sports and adjacent things, entertainment. So I'm spending time with a lot of people around that — it's moving my thinking around Monarch. I also kind of want to start a secret, not-so-secret society. I even have a working name for it — to gather people to kind of like build friendships, but then transact like new forms of keiretsu where the idea would be like, if you show up in London or Seattle or LA, you're like, okay, here are 10 people who care about the same stuff on the personal development side, do really cool things in the world and I'll just enjoy having a meal with, but with an intentionality around like, what are we putting in here to transact against. Like, that I've been sitting with for a long, long time. And I think there are ways different kinds of people can come together to create impact, wealth, culturally relevant moments, you know, stuff like that.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:25:00]
And people are deeply lonely.

Kara Nortman
[0:25:02]
And people are deeply lonely. People are deeply lonely. But I would say I've been really, really focused. I haven't had a side hustle in a while. I did realize the other day that I miss a little bit of this creative outlet. You know, that's where you get it.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:25:18]
You gotta come on the show a lot.

Kara Nortman
[0:25:21]
But yeah, people are really lonely. I mean, it's actually really an epidemic. It's what my — in a way, like, my husband coaches CEOs, but he also runs men's groups at our temple now and men's retreats and sort of like, how do you — you and I have a million wonderful friends, but how often do you talk? How often do you see them? Like, this is very much on my mind. In fact, I think I said to my husband a year or two ago when Heather Fernandez, who runs a company named Solve, was in our kitchen — I mentioned this because Jason knows her — I said, I don't know if I'm meant for a single family home. I would love to live within 5 feet of 10 people I love. And there's something around that, that I don't need to start things, I can join things. And I'm now doing a fellowship with the Aspen Institute around some of these topics. So yeah, solving loneliness. I think we all have it.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:26:29]
How are you handling it, Jason? How are you handling it?

Jason Baumgarten
[0:26:29]
I'm doing podcasts, and I'm getting people on the show to talk about what they're doing. And I, you know, me, I travel all the time. And so one of the things I do is wherever I am, I always try and find people to have dinner with or breakfast with and drop into. And one of the wonderful things about what I do is I talk to people all day long. And so some of that in person, some of that virtually. But I do think it's one of the real blessings of what I've been able to do is just that I'm constantly talking and connecting with people.

Kara Nortman
[0:27:02]
I think it is a blessing of what we both do. But I also think about how do you pull that outside of your work identity? Because I think we can all really over-identify with it. So one of the things I try to say and do more often is I'm your last-minute girl. Like, text me, call me last minute. I will meet you for jazz if I can. I will fly to that game if we can. And I mean, you're good at that too, right? You'll tell me sometimes, hey, I'm in LA, can I come see you? So I think there's also like — and I'm calling my best friends who live on the east coast or in Europe more often. I think there are little five-minute things you can do or calls to action that if we all just sort of reach out 30% more, there's no downside to it, you know, there's just no downside.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:27:53]
I used to do this thing when we all commuted to offices. I would always leave my commuting time for calling people just — and literally, it would be random. It'd be like, who have I just — who's the first person I'd scroll to that I haven't talked to in a while? Could be a really close personal friend. Could be somebody that I've kind of done business with, but we're friendly and I just haven't talked to them in a while. And I realized with COVID I sort of stopped commuting. Like, I stopped a lot of that regular stuff. So now I do walks. And I will go on a walk and just call people and say, you know, hey, we haven't talked in a while, what's up? But it is — as you collect more wonderful people in life, it's harder to stay close to lots of them. And sometimes you — the notion of, oh my gosh, I haven't talked to them in a while, it's awkward. I'm like, forget it. Just call them.

Kara Nortman
[0:28:38]
You know what's interesting? I wonder if you and I like people and we're also pretty energetically proactive. I wonder if there's like the opposite kind of profile where it's sort of like, hey, maybe you realize you're not that person. But you could tell people, I'm not great at outreach, or I don't naturally have that impulse, but I love to receive it. So if you ever do want to call me without warning, put me on the no-warning call list. You know? So I think about that.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:29:04]
My theory is people just don't pick up if they don't want to talk to you. If they're so introverted, they're like, I just — you know, that's Kara calling, like, voicemail. Or they read the first three lines of the transcription now and decide whether to pick up the phone. So you've had this amazing role as an investor for so many elements of your career, whether it was M&A investing or venture investing or sports team investing. And a lot of investing is getting the people right. And most investors, when you talk to them at the end of their career, say it was really more about the people and picking the right founders, the right circumstances and understanding when that founder was doing something that was the right fit for them.

Kara Nortman
[0:29:51]
Yeah.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:29:52]
What would you share you've learned the most about when somebody's right for something?

Kara Nortman
[0:29:59]
I think really assessing how good you are at assessing is something I've been thinking a lot about. And what I mean by that is I said this to my co-founder at Monarch, Jasmine, the other day. I think she's really good at first-meeting assessments. And sometimes I'm moving — my brain's moving too quickly to sink into it, sometimes it's not. But there's instinctual judgment, there's resume judgment. And then what I realized I've become good at — you know, right, like I don't want to diminish my skill set in that area — you can tell. And I think sometimes you can kind of tell only if you talk to a hundred people and you're like, that person is going to be extraordinary at running a team, which, oh, by the way, is actually a different skill set in some ways — but not always — than running a tech company. What I've realized I'm really quite good at is assessing people's strengths and weaknesses when I have a body of work with them and then being able to have kind of conversations, self-awareness conversations, that inspire them to look holistically about how they build a team around them. And I actually think you gave me some advice on this, which is like, everyone's looking for the A-everything, but actually it's the A-plusness of how you complement people in a team. And like, listen, I don't think you want a CEO who's just internally facing and can't tell your story and can't inspire at least a little. But I do think there are a lot of ways to build teams. So I guess what I'd say is I personally have realized I'm a collaborator. We have five core values at Monarch. We work with them all the time. And it's like collaboration, joy, discipline, dependability — I forget which one it is right now, we keep changing them — patience. But one of them is collaboration. And I work best in teams. I like the accountability of it. I like the handing the baton back and forth. I like the idea that psychologically sometimes we need to be lifted up and sometimes we need to lift up, and like, it's one of the things we do at Monarch — we're really very operational, hands-on capital for these women's sports teams where it's not just financial structuring. You actually have to be extraordinary at financial structuring because the right thing doesn't just land, it's very proprietary. Most of the team came out of both sports and Bain, so we're incredibly thesis-driven. We just did our first incredible team in Europe in Berlin — FC Victoria — spent three years on the ground, hired someone, spent a little time living there, spent time with lots of teams. And we help people think about this. But I think it's one of the things I'm reflecting on as we're writing our year-end piece — I think we uniquely don't just have this operational skill set behind the scenes, but we kind of like will call the other person in who has a complementary lens, skill set, etc., to see if we have a blind spot or to see if they can resonate with the team differently than we can. So I think a lot of what I've learned is figure out how to assess and what you're particularly good at, figure out how to complement yourself psychologically, skill-set-wise, etc., and then figure out where you have weird pockets of shame around things you think you're supposed to be good at in this role. Because I think the things we're supposed to be good at are much bigger than what most people are good at. And it is actually — I think partnering well is the long-term driver of every company that doesn't just succeed in the early days, but succeeds to become essentially cultural institutions, which the best tech companies become. And certainly that's why I'm doing what I'm doing — to have cultural impact, to bring Democrats and Republicans together where they don't even realize they dislike each other until they realize they have something in common. Which is, gosh, terrible loss by the Rams to the Seahawks, right? I mean, that was awful, Jason, last night.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:33:54]
There's always something, there's always a unifying thing. Sports, food, music, something. It's funny, I remember years ago we were talking about this question of are you a good picker? Like, are you a good assessor? And one of the things people do is they're like, look, this person's good, this person's good. I'm like, well, who are the people you said were bad and what did they end up doing?

Kara Nortman
[0:34:15]
Yeah.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:34:15]
Because often it's like — it's the full baseball card, you know, it's the full statistics sheet that help you realize, wow, I'm just randomly — you know, I'm 50% good. Which is what most people — most interviews, they say that an untrained interview is in the single to low teen digit percentile of predictability, and a well-trained interview is often 50% — no better. And so the reality is — I didn't get that.

Kara Nortman
[0:34:41]
What does that mean?

Jason Baumgarten
[0:34:42]
So if you're a highly skilled interviewer, you will be as good as a coin toss. Wow. And what that means is that when you're — and by the way, I would posit that part of the reason is that it starts with not really understanding what you're trying to get this person to do. Right. Like, you know, you may be thinking — boy, my ice cream scooping example — I need a great friendly greeter to make everyone feel wonderful in the store.

Kara Nortman
[0:35:11]
Yeah.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:35:11]
What you might be selecting for is like just somebody who isn't going to give free ice cream to their friends.

Kara Nortman
[0:35:16]
They did get both of me though. I have terrible handwriting. So I was horrible at the ice cream cakes.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:35:21]
Not the menus. Not the ice cream cake. So there is something about like what is the essence I'm looking for? Which is I think part of what drives that. The other part is, am I good at reading the signals? And I think we all have a lot of fear of failure in our hiring and so we look for people who don't have blemishes. But when you think about it, most amazing people did something that didn't go well.

Kara Nortman
[0:35:47]
I think that's a really important point. And I feel like with women's sports it's interesting because you know, Julie — I brought Julie in to be the day-to-day CEO, but in the first couple years when we were building it, it was like we were talking 18 times a day. It was a very operational back and forth role. And I also worked with some other people on it and it just became actually clear in the day-to-day what was required and what was required of that phase and then what's required at the next phase and how do you help grow the person into it. But so I feel like in women's sports I can really tell because I was in that. But I also — I always say like 80% of the job is going to be the same, 80% of the team is going to be the same, but it's the 20% that's different, right, in the context, in that environment that is important. But I have found like almost all the best people I've worked with or hired had real blemishes, you know. And this idea that there should be perfection, or they look good on paper, or they ran something big and they're going to be good at small, or they're good at small and they're going to scale to big — you know, and even like the founder dynamic that we live through. I definitely think the resumes don't always tell you. And actually sometimes you want a broken resume and something to prove, you know. And sometimes — I don't know — you want someone who manages up better than down, right? Like, so anyway, I totally agree with that. And I just — do I tell everyone? I'm sure you do: if you are working with Spencer Stuart, still do, like, make sure you're doing references directly as well on someone you're going to hire. Because it's not that you won't get the great feedback and you should obviously — especially someone like you — get the insights, but you'll read between the lines. And not just like, are they good or bad, but how are you going to show up as a partner, whether you're their board member, their CEO and boss, to make them successful, which is really nuanced — even if they are good.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:37:58]
You haven't done good referencing until you hear things that are not good because nobody is perfect. But the other thing is that you can't go into referencing trying to figure out if you should hire them or not. You actually need to go into it making those references — you know, making those referencers feel like they're giving you advice to work with the person, because otherwise their frame of reference is, am I going to give a good reference or a bad reference? And what you actually want is for them to help you figure out, when the person's in the role, how do you make it a successful journey? And if what you hear is so contrary to everything you've learned about them, that's when you might go back and say, I'm not going to hire the person. But I think you've got to get — we've all been on the other end of reference calls. I think everyone always starts with like, should I hire them again? It's like, well, I don't know, what do you need? And so to me, it's really, you're trying to learn who they are and what they're good at and what their fit is — not are they good or bad. And again, it's this binary nature of how we think about hiring, where I'm like, if you went into every day being like, are they a good person to marry, it's like, that would not have worked out well. You got to start with, like, let me get to know them and figure out what they're looking for, too.

Kara Nortman
[0:39:10]
Very, very good point.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:39:14]
I'd be curious — I actually asked this question, and I've decided I'm going to ask everybody this question because it's just so timely. You've been in tech forever. Your view of AI and, as a parent, your view of how young people should think about their careers now — maybe differently or the same.

Kara Nortman
[0:39:38]
Yeah, I'll start with the second part. I really like, you know, try to tell my girls — and I have a senior now, so she's doing the whole college thing — we don't really know what the jobs are going to be, right. Like, obvious stuff. But please don't — they're very, some maybe all of my daughters are very driven it seems. And they are doing something I did when I was their age, which is like, they're looking for examples of the world of like, what they want to be and who they want to be. And I'm like, there's just — you know, when I came out of college in '97, I saw a bunch of people in suits interviewing for jobs on Wall Street. And I was like, oh, maybe I'll wear a suit. And went to a suit warehouse and found a suit. No one in my family had ever worn a suit like that. And I'm like, we don't — but it wasn't like people were like training to be the best at Excel. It was like I could walk in. I learned the difference between debt and equity the night before I interviewed. It's nuts, right? And so that analogy just to like, what, you know, what will be the jobs that bring you joy, that stick around, that train you in different ways. So I try to tell them that. But also my two older daughters are very good at science and math and things like that, and also great writers and readers. Well, I'm just going to brag about my daughters. My youngest ones are great, too. Aggie, if you're listening to this — she's just the third child and I'm like, really, the stuff that makes you like, understand — what I kind of try to tell them is understanding how to use these tools, right, prompting things differently, not being afraid, finding ways to leverage what's out there. But then like, really what makes us human is going to become even more important. And so I believe deeply in the liberal arts education. I think it's actually more important now than even when we went to school in that — I think the things that make us human, how we interact face to face, how we pick up cues, how we help people — my oldest daughter is really interested in decision-making and psychology, I think behavioral economics and just how do we come together and make decisions, feel good about it. A lot of stuff we were talking about. So anyway, I think that's — I don't — I'm not prescriptive. You can't change what they're going to do. But I think they're coming into the world in a really interesting time where, you know, like, social media use has peaked everywhere in the world other than the U.S., right. So my daughters have better phone hygiene than I do. They are native to using these tools. And I'm trying to role model, be a decent human being. So I hope they'll just play with it and figure it out. My view on AI — I love that I accidentally moved into an industry that is about gathering and where AI — I mean, AI is interesting for sports, right? Like, you can use it on the sporting side to really have some fundamental understanding of what's going to happen when, say, Harry Kane leaves Tottenham and goes to a team in Germany. Your goal differential is actually going to get worse, not better, even though he's one of the best forwards in the world. And that's what happens. You know, it's not perfect, but you can make informed decisions and there's still a lot of art to it. And it's one of the few things that's unpredictable and where people come together. It's why I love music, right. And I go to a lot of EDM shows now and stuff like that. So I think that's probably my take. I try to use the tools a lot. We're building a firm at a time when remote work and AI are sort of at the core of the way a lot of people work and we travel a ton and we walk stadiums and communities and sit with people. And so how can I think about building this firm with Jasmine in a way where, yes, you used to use people for that thing and actually you can automate that thing, but you want people to do even more of this thing that makes us human and show up and be there and live in Europe and be available at midnight when something inevitably goes wrong. So that's kind of how I think about it.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:43:57]
All right, so Kara, five questions for you. One, the leadership advice you still hear often but you think is actually very harmful.

Kara Nortman
[0:44:07]
That you can't have a hobby, that you can't like be a decent parent — I mean, like, that it has to be so all-consuming that you don't do anything else. I think you can have amazing output and there's times where you can't do anything else. But I think it is really, really important to live a full life and figure out a sustainable path. And then I think you outperform in the ways that really matter. And then yeah, so that's what I would say — that it has to be everything and that it has to take up 18 hours of your day.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:44:45]
I know with you it's only 16. The skill you thought mattered earlier in your career that you've kind of changed your mind about.

Kara Nortman
[0:44:53]
I really thought you had to be good at all the sort of tactical things, whatever that is — right, whatever — buying AdWords directly, building Excel models, excellent execution on decks, and you had to be able to command a room and think strategically and you had to read everything. Knowledge is not information, wisdom is not tactics. And I think it's deeply important that you do these thankless parts of the job when you're young, even if AI does it. Like, I think everyone who's in finance should really understand how to build financial models through and through. It's how you learn how they work. But I do think as you move along in your career, finding people you trust who can take your inputs and really scaling in the ways that are uniquely your gift becomes very important to being able to do this for 50, 80 years.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:45:51]
The biggest surprise about your current job.

Kara Nortman
[0:45:54]
I mean, that I'm doing it. I didn't know I could love a job as much as I love this job. And as I said, I love all of them. And so the biggest surprise is like, when you're aligned in the right way in your marriage, with your kids and with your partners at work, how much you can smile, accomplish and do in a way that you're proud of every single day. And it's relative, it's not absolute. That's what I would say. It's relative and it is very specific to you. Like, it's the right thing for you, not the right thing. And I think I was working on getting an A in what the world told me was important to get an A in. And as soon as I started defining it for myself and not really caring what the world thought, it was like, all of a sudden I really found the thing that has been career-defining, life-defining, community-defining. I'm having a 50th birthday soon, actually. Jason, I don't think you RSVPed, but you have an invitation.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:46:55]
We're coming.

Kara Nortman
[0:46:56]
Planning ticket books last night, but it's totally either way. But you'll have fun. But if I think about who's there, right, it is this beautiful amalgamation of people I work with, I play with, I grew up with, I've found in the last year. And it's like more and more of the right people. And that kind of comes out of, I think, alignment in every part of your life. And it's a journey to get there.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:47:18]
So with the qualifier that you said you don't have to read everything, is there a book or a TV series or some media in the last year or so that has just really impacted you?

Kara Nortman
[0:47:29]
Yeah, okay. I'm just going to do what I've done most recently. I usually talk about 15 Commitments to Conscious Leadership, but I just watched the Billy Joel documentary, and that one really impacted me in all sorts of different ways. He's generationally important to me, my kids — my daughter's senior song is Vienna, which kind of blows my mind. She's named after Down Easter, Alexa — and just his low, high journey, right, this virtuoso-ness that was inside of him, but growing up in a very kind of difficult environment. And then how Judaism became important to him and how he had different partnerships in his life — like multiple marriages — but really how he honored and valued each one of them, getting him to a point even if they didn't work, is really good. And then on the book front, I'm reading this book right now. It's just sort of surprising me. I think it's fiction — it might be nonfiction. It's called The Chronology of Water. I've never really read a book quite like it — both the technique, the way — and it's kind of shocking some of the things this person goes through. And it's just really reminding me that we all are on this journey, and some of it goes through difficult family situations and addiction and learning who you are in your body and all of these things. And you can kind of emerge in ways that blow your mind and everyone's mind and sort of go on your own journey. But it's pretty interesting. It's definitely written differently and is like opening my eyes. And I think often you learn through people's journeys sometimes more than you do through reading the facts.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:49:09]
One hobby or pastime where you get to totally zone out of every other distraction.

Kara Nortman
[0:49:15]
Dancing, downhill mountain biking, and skiing. Those are the ones. I am very happy when I do any of those three.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:49:26]
Hopefully none of them together. Well, Kara, it's been a pleasure. I always love to hear the latest and greatest with the Monarch Collective and everything going on with you. And thank you for being a guest. Thank you for sharing so much of your story. And, you know, it's a great testament to the fact that, you know, leadership doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens in context, and we hope that fit can always happen.

Kara Nortman
[0:49:49]
Yeah. No, thank you, Jason, and thank you. You've been an incredible friend, and I've learned so much from you, and I know a lot of people say that, but as we're doing this podcast, I'm remembering four or five pieces of advice you gave me on how to hire, how to onboard, how to acknowledge you've made a mistake, how to grow. And so, like, you are one of my favorite people in general and on these topics. So I love being able to do this with you.

Jason Baumgarten
[0:50:13]
Thank you, Kara.