How Inclusive Culture Grows People and Business

Discover the transformative power of workplace culture with our special guest, Patrick Penzo, former Onfido executive and current growth lead at Quench AI. Patrick reveals the secrets behind Onfido's remarkable success, emphasising the critical role psychological safety and inclusivity played in their record-breaking acquisition. From offsite team-building activities to core values that promote collective success and pride, you'll learn practical steps to foster an environment where innovation thrives.

Patrick opens up about his personal journey of embracing his true self in the workplace, detailing the challenges he faced while concealing his sexual orientation and the eventual success he achieved through vulnerability and authenticity. This episode underscores the importance of a supportive and inclusive company culture, demonstrating how such an environment enables employees to thrive and drives business success. 

If you're enjoying this episode and looking to boost equity, inclusion, and diversity in your organisation, my team and I are here to help. Our team specialises in crafting data-driven strategies, developing inclusive leaders, designing fair recruitment processes, and enhancing disability confidence. With a blend of professional expertise and lived experience, we're ready to support you on your journey. Reach out to us through our website. 

If you want to build a more inclusive workplace that you can be proud of please visit our website to learn more.

Chapters

• 0:01 Building Inclusive Workplace Culture for Success
• 11:34 Nurturing a Culture of Equity
• 19:23 Thrive Through Inclusive Workplace Culture
• 28:11 Developing Inclusive Workplace Culture Insights

Transcript

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Inclusive Growth Show with Toby Mildon, future-proofing your business by creating a diverse workplace.

Toby Mildon: Hey there. Thank you ever so much for tuning into this episode of the Inclusive Growth Podcast. I am Toby Mildon, and today I'm joined by Patrick Penzo. Now Patrick and I first connected on LinkedIn as all good people seem to find each other. And Patrick and I are going to have a really interesting conversation because Patrick used to work for a company called Onfido, and at the time of recording this episode Onfido has just recently been acquired and is a bit of a record breaker. It's one of the biggest acquisitions within the tech sector, hugely profitable acquisition for Oxford University. And what we'll be learning from Patrick today is that culture was actually a huge part of the valuation and the acquisition. Now, Patrick no longer works for Onfido, he's moved over to a company called Quench.ai, but we will be learning from Patrick about what he learned from Onfido and what he's taken across over to Quench.ai and is trying to implement over there. So it is going to be a really interesting conversation because we'll be talking about culture within the startup and the scale-up environment and how that actually delivers great value for the business. So Patrick, thanks for joining me. It's lovely to see you.

Patrick Penzo: Thanks for having me, Toby. Glad to be here.

Toby Mildon: So just to get us started, can you just tell me a bit more about your role as a growth lead at Quench.ai? 

Patrick Penzo: Yeah, absolutely. So Quench.ai is a startup. We've been around for about two years and our purpose is to help everyone we touch be the best they can be. So we believe that human beings are the best people to help you grow in your career, but we think AI can help you find the right people and build the right resources to go to where you want to go. And as the growth lead, it's my role to oversee marketing and sales and effectively find the first early adopters that are excited to build pilots with us, to build hopefully another successful company.

Toby Mildon: That's brilliant. And hopefully Quench.ai will get the same amount of an evaluation as Onfido and everyone can take early retirement.

Patrick Penzo: That'd be nice.

Toby Mildon: So how did you end up at Quench.ai and why was diversity important for your own career progression? 

Patrick Penzo: Yeah, I like to talk about my professional career in the context of belonging and authenticity. So I belonged to a calvary Catholic community where I grew up in Italy in Venice and I was going to church Sunday. I was leading the local parish choir, but I always felt a little bit like an outsider and I basically couldn't wait to get out of Venice. And I was lucky enough to make it to Oxford University. And I know it sounds ridiculous, I couldn't wait to leave Venice, but that's the truth. And when I got to Oxford, I started to realize that for the first time in my life I could start to explore who I was authentically and who was I. And I came to realize that as a gay person, there were many reasons why I didn't really belong and fit into the community that I grew up with.

Patrick Penzo: Fast forward to my first role at Onfido. For those of you who don't know what Onfido is, if you ever opened a bank account with your smartphone or rented a car, when you take a photo of your driving license and a selfie, chances are you're being verified by Onfido. We make sure that you actually are who you claim to be. When I got to Onfido, I was still so stuck in these prejudices that I built from the community I had belonged to for a long time, that I did not believe it possible for me to be my authentic self and be successful and thrive. So I just didn't think that I could belong and be authentically myself. Over the course of five years at Onfido, I kind of had to slowly unlearn that. So I started as employee number 10. So I was the first salesperson, I was the first queer person on the team. By the time I'd left the company, had raised hundreds of millions of pounds. I had worked in the United States in Singapore and in the UK opening offices and winning some of our biggest customers. And as you've mentioned, Onfido is now being acquired and it's the biggest return on investment for the University of Oxford from a student led business. And I've been asking myself what made it all happen and that's why I'm here today because I think it's a really interesting use case for people to hear about.

Toby Mildon: That's cool. Now, I alluded to this in the intro culture being a big part Onfido's success. So what kind of projects did Onfido run to create that inclusive culture? 

Patrick Penzo: Disruptive innovation happens in a place of psychological safety. So what I mean is that disruptive innovation is at the heart of a startup and how you really generate value as a business. But I don't really think it's possible for it to happen in a place where the employees don't feel psychologically safe. And what Onfido did was from a very, very early stage in building itself, it really invested in creating that environmental, psychological safety. And I don't know that we were consciously doing it at the time, but I've thought about it quite long and hard. And I really think what really sets us apart in the market was that emphasis on that culture. So then we started, was one day we were probably about 20 or 30 employees, we took the day off work, we went on an offsite and we spent the whole day asking ourselves what were the kind of people that we wanted to be? Who do we want to sit next to? What did we want our customers to say about us? What were our values? And from that whole exercise, we diluted it all into four key values. Now those values were succeed together.

Patrick Penzo: So the deal was that success didn't ever belong to one individual, but it was always a product of a network. It was learn things and share them. So it was about be curious. Don't be afraid of asking questions. But more importantly, when you learn something, don't keep it for yourself, but share it with others. It was take pride. So it was like care about the environment that you're in, care about how people think about you, care about how other people help you thrive and find a better way, which basically was like, it doesn't matter if things are done really, really well now, there's always a better way to do it. So don't just sit in the status quo.

Patrick Penzo: And those cultural values basically became like antibodies. We had the culture police, and pretty much every single person in the company was adamant, really emotionally protective of these cultural values. And you could have been the chief people officer, you could have been the CFO. If you did something that didn't feel like it was Onfido, a new joiner could walk up to you and say, that was not very Onfido of you. And that was a very acceptable interaction. Now, that specific scenario, I know for a fact that when Ruth, who was a fantastic chief people officer. When she joined and was really cared about nurturing this culture, she realized that she already had a bunch of culture ambassadors.

Patrick Penzo: People kept walking up to her saying, this thing that's happened, that's not very Onfido, or this thing that happened, that's not very Onfido. And so what it created was this environment where people could feel safe and could feel like they belonged. And I knew that from my personal experience where I gradually came to realize that I could be myself and still have successes. I think at the heart of that, there's a few things. So I think the key for Onfido was bringing two people who were different from one another. And the moment different people share their opinions, there's going to be disagreement inherently because they come from different places.

Patrick Penzo: So the second thing we did was create the space that was safe where people could share their opinions, could feel listened, could trust that in the process of hearing other people being honest and frank with one another, and from that cacophony of different opinions came a decision that was always greater than any one single opinion would have been by itself. And I genuinely believe that that was across the board building block that made us successful. And success, there are many, many factors that went into Onfido's specific success. But I genuinely think that without that foundation, we wouldn't have got where we did in various different aspects of the business.

Toby Mildon: Yeah, that sounds really cool. I really like those four values that you listed 'cause as you were going through them, I was thinking, A, they're really simple. And I was just thinking it's something I, if I was working in the company, it's something I could definitely get behind. But I was also thinking about a framework that we often share with our clients is the five dysfunctions of a team by Patrick Lencioni. It's a really good book. It's quite short. It doesn't take very long to read. But he talks about the five dysfunctions and then also what a high-performing team looks like, but it's presented like a pyramid. And at the bottom of the pyramid, you've got trust as the first layer. So dysfunctional teams don't have that trust.

Toby Mildon: They don't have that psychological safety that you mentioned, somebody's ability to speak up if they notice something isn't going right, or they're afraid to share their idea because they're worried about backlash. And then the second layer, which I think a lot of organizations trip up with, is the fear of conflict. So high performing teams, they have candid conversations, they feel like they're able to challenge one another in a supportive way, but low performing teams will tend to avoid difficult conversations because they want to avoid that conflict so when you were saying about that's not very Onfido, I suppose that that's an indicator that somebody felt able to potentially have a conflict where there wasn't that alignment with that particular value.

Patrick Penzo: Yeah, that was completely... If I think back on it, we maybe disagreed too much sometimes. But it was really at the heart. And I think it stemmed from the top. So hats off to the founders. They, first of all, created a team that was very different and diverse. And they really encouraged people to share their opinion. But then, quite importantly, as the business grew they made sure that they created a leadership team that had a lot of differences, that they established a rule of interaction with one another that was critical. And I think at the heart of it, it's not only feeling comfortable to disagree, 'cause that is both a personal thing and an environmental thing, but it's also making sure that people are listened to and feel listened to.

Patrick Penzo: And if you look at the executive team that the founders put together, there was a CFO who'd done it all before at PayPal and was in his 60s. Ruth, as I mentioned, there's this extraordinary woman who now works in helping women in leadership. But she comes with huge amounts of energy and bubbliness and very go-getter and has a very different personality from a lot of the other people in the executive team. And yet... Although everyone was very different, no one ever disrespected anyone else in the process of making decisions. And I think that really led to a very high impact, highly effective leadership team.

Patrick Penzo: And that behavior kind of trickled down across the whole company and the whole organization. And so as the company grew, we were able to retain that kind of behavior. What it also meant was, and I think Onfido did a great job of hiring people, but we know every business makes mistakes. When someone was hired and they didn't fit within that behavior model, it was very easy to identify very quickly. So as I mentioned, after my first year at Onfido, I moved to the United States and I opened the office up in America. And then as the business grew in the United States, we wanted to bring in a lead for the United States.

Patrick Penzo: And at one point the hard decision had to be made. The person that was hired was just, was not the right fit for the role. And again, credit to the founders, they made the very difficult and very swift decision when they realized that this was not a culture fit to finding a new GM and America's really now the powerhouse of Onfido in terms of kind of revenue and growth. So it wasn't just a face value culture, as I said, it was almost antibodies. You could almost identify very quickly who didn't fit. And we generally believe that that was the key to our success and that it was worth investing in and protecting.

Toby Mildon: Because we often hear stories of where companies will keep hold of somebody because they are a big Rainmaker, but they have a toxic leadership style and they don't align with the values of the business and it causes all sorts of problems, but they're retained because they're making big money. You know, it takes a very courageous leader to say, hang on a sec. You know, yes, you might be a big Rainmaker, but your leadership style is damaging the culture of the company. And that's having a negative ripple effect across the business.

Patrick Penzo: Completely. And for us, it all goes back down to that thing that we're in a business of innovating, disrupting and doing things differently. And that's not possible in an environment where people don't feel safe to disagree. We at a point, we've eliminated disagree from the vocabulary. 'Cause We assume that people will disagree. What we want is that moment of listening and just sharing opinions. And that can't happen in an environment that isn't creating a space of belonging for everyone.

Toby Mildon: That's very cool. So you've moved over to another startup, which is Quench.ai. What are you personally taking across from Onfido to Quench.ai? So some of the, obviously the cultural aspects that we talked about or some of the other kind of programs that Onfido was running.

Patrick Penzo: There are two aspects. So one is, you know, obviously as I mentioned, we're only two years old, but we want to make this a very successful company. And so I'm really trying to work out what were the ingredients that I can replicate. And I think there are, there's one thing that comes from Onfido. There's another thing that is new but is inspired by Onfido. So the thing that is the same is again, understanding what, how can I create an environment of belonging where people can be their authentic selves? And that doesn't mean you have to be, you are a hundred percent authentic in the workplace, but it needs to mean that you can feel comfortable being you and bring yourself to work, feel like you belong. Because I feel like in that kind of cultural environment, the magic happens effectively.

Patrick Penzo: So to give people the freedom and the power. So at my team level really driving that culture of disagreement, I think I came in and I had a team that was a little bit unsure about voicing their opinions. And so really giving them the space to do that. And fostering that disagreement if, although we're not allowed to say that because I think it's at the heart of working stuff out because we don't know at the moment, right? The second thing that we're doing at a business level is making sure that we're creating a team that's very, very different from the ground up. And that means we've hide in different places. So the leadership team has people that come from slightly bizarre or unorthodox backgrounds. So one of the things that we're very proud of is that we've partnered with Blue Hope, which is an organization that helps refugees get employment in their new host countries.

Patrick Penzo: And in our case, we've hired a fantastic guy from who's come from Afghanistan. And he's, we're training him up as a software engineer. So he came in with a level of skill and we've invested time in upskilling him as well. He brings so much wealth, not only 'cause he is really passionate and really wants to develop personally to like become a very successful software engineer, but also 'cause he brings so many different perspectives that most of the people in the team haven't got. And it makes us all the richer for it. So those are two things we're investing in a lot that kind of culture of safety, but then also the really making sure that when we go through an interview process, we find people that are in some way different from who's already in the team. And we push ourselves to find ways of sourcing candidates that bring something new and something different so that there is disagreement, but in a good way so we can listen to one another.

Toby Mildon: That's really cool. What's your advice for a leader of a startup or a scale-up regarding equity, diversity, and inclusion? 

Patrick Penzo: So I would ask them to start by asking themselves if they are authentic at work, because I have to say hands up for a long time I wasn't. And I had to ask myself why. Right? And the second question is, if they, if not, then why not? Why you are not, are you not feeling like you can be your authentic self in the workplace? Because if you aren't, then probably the rest of your team isn't either. The second thing I would then say is like, if you feel like you absolutely belong, is that true of everyone around you? Does everyone else feel like they really belong in a way that they can both belong and be authentic? And then the third question is is everyone feeling like they belong 'cause they all have the same opinion and everyone's saying yes to the same things because that last one means that you are not creating an environment of disruptive innovation. You're creating an environment where everyone belongs. But it's not true psychological safety. It's an environment where people conform to this one environment.

Toby Mildon: Yeah, it's that group think, isn't it? 

Patrick Penzo: It's Exactly the group think.

Toby Mildon: It's like I feel like I belong, but it's because everyone around me is just like me. I once worked with a HR director who said I always thought that it was opposites that the attract, but now I know birds of a further flock together.

Patrick Penzo: Yes.

Toby Mildon: Yeah, that's quite true actually.

Patrick Penzo: It's very true.

Toby Mildon: If you don't mind me asking this is a bit of a personal question. You were saying that before you felt like you couldn't be your true, authentic self. What did that look like and how did that impact you? 

Patrick Penzo: So when I joined Onfido, I wasn't openly gay in the workplace because I genuinely believed that if I told people I was gay, I was not gonna be able to become a CEO. That I would not be able to progress in a customer facing role. I thought I couldn't close deals, right? So I worked very hard to kind of like have a very neutral kind of personality. I wouldn't really disclose any kind of information about what I was doing on weekends. I was very guarded about those things. And what I found was that that was really difficult in an environment where everyone is being very open, in order to disagree and like share your opinions, you need to be vulnerable and you need to feel like you can say what you want to say and feel like you can be vulnerable because people around you are. And so I realized that I was feeling uncomfortable not being vulnerable. And people around me were, and what I was also seeing was the moments when I was vulnerable and being more open and honest. I was still having successes in the workplace.

Patrick Penzo: And in the first 12 months I went from knowing nothing about sales to closing this little known company at the time, which has a kangaroo logo and delivers food in scooters. But you might know it as Deliveroo now, but I, yeah, I couldn't wrap my head around how the more I was myself, the more things went better, right? So the relationship with the people around me improved the more I was my genuine self. And I think to Onfido's credit, it's the fact that they created this environment where I could go on that journey for myself that I really thrived effectively. I was given opportunities. I was never held back. I never was made to feel like anything is possible and that it's just up to me. And so I think really my and I found it especially in America because in the UK we were quite lucky we couldn't product market fit. I don't know if it's luck we found product market fit relatively early. As I said, we won delivery in my first 12 months of working there. When I went to the United States, we just assumed we could do the same thing. And it was like a very different market.

Patrick Penzo: We really had to understand people a lot. And often people are much more open in an American market than they are in a British market. And so honestly it was a nightmare. I had very few successes for a good year and a half. And that, I think that was really the point in time where I really had to realize I need to be more comfortable being me and I need to also, Tim Cook had written the letter that I only discovered it a bit late in life, but I discovered the letter from Tim Cook where he described that he was the CEO of Apple and a gay man. And so lots of things that were built up in my head disappeared. And so I was able to be, at that point in life, I would say I was brave, but I was able to just be more authentic and I found that that's when successes actually came in in the workplace as well.

Toby Mildon: That's really cool. Thanks. Thanks for sharing that story. And I think it goes to show how individuals can thrive when you work in an environment where you can bring as much of yourself to work as you want to or you choose to. And if you thrive as an individual, then that's only good for the business. That will only help the business and the team prosper.

Patrick Penzo: Yeah, exactly. And that's exactly why I'm working where I'm working now because we really, we're in the business of upskilling people and how, and really what that means is you are somewhere in life and you wanna go somewhere else. And it's helping you find the right path for you. And we really think that a lot can be done and that AI doesn't have all the answers, as I said at the start. It's a combination of humans and AI, but we really think that we can help you find the right people to go on the path to be the best person that you want to be and that you can be. And that's why I'm quite passionate about where we are now.

Toby Mildon: That's cool. So the penultimate question that I ask everybody is what does inclusive growth mean to you? 

Patrick Penzo: Yeah, so I don't know if this is an academic answer for you, but I've thought about this in quite a lot. So I think that in the 1980s, or since the 1980s, growth for businesses has meant share price. So ultimately what it means is that growth is whatever benefits the shareholders of a company. And historically, I don't think shareholders have been the most diverse or inclusive group of people on the planet. And it also means that companies haven't taken into account various other stakeholders that they're accountable to employees, customers, the environment, so that the community and the planet that they exist within. And I think that's why we're kind of seeing a lot of the results that we have today. Kind of compensation of CEOs being disproportionately massive compared to employees. Let's not talk about the climate crisis.

Patrick Penzo: I think when you build a company where employees are like the market that they sell to that business is gonna better understand its customers and it's going to have long term better growth. Right? And I think that's true. Also, a company that takes into account the environment that it exists within has a long-term growth trajectory that's much better than a business that doesn't take into account the costs of environmental crises disrupting their bottom line. In a very broad sense, inclusive growth is that sense of taking into account all the stakeholders that a business is accountable to for ultimately much better long-term growth than like a short-term minded growth, which is what we've had for a while.

Toby Mildon: Yeah, that's really cool. I like that kind of long-term thinking or planning that you're talking about there. Something that you said reminded me, I did a project once with a FinTech organization and they work with entrepreneurs and the chief executive said to me, but I think the penny drop for her was that she realized that their customer base was incredibly diverse.

Toby Mildon: The world of entrepreneurship is quite diverse. And she was saying that it was important that the product team reflected the diversity of the end users. 'Cause they were able to build a better product and if they built a better product, it would get into the hands of more entrepreneurs and they would be, their business vision was to expand to markets outside of the UK as well. So there was a clear link there with mirroring the diversity of their end users and the growth of the business, which I found really interesting.

Patrick Penzo: Yeah, and it just makes sense. I mean, as I said we're at a startup that's not quite at that product market fit stage. We're constantly questioning what do people want? How do we help people upskill? How does a business need this? Like, if we can't get into the minds of our customers, we're gonna go nowhere. And I'm only one person with one perspective on the one world. So the more the group is different, the more perspectives we can come to understand better and faster. And it all goes back to that psychological safety.

Toby Mildon: Absolutely. Brilliant. Thank you. So if the person listening to us right now would like to get in touch with you, maybe they want to have a conversation offline, they might be really inspired by what we've talked about and want to just pick your brains about culture within startups and scale-ups. What's the best way of doing that? 

Patrick Penzo: Yeah, they can definitely reach me on LinkedIn. That's, I'm very active there. I'm always accessible. It's Patrick Penzo and if not, they can come to the Quench website and it's quench.ai and they can reach out through to the website as well.

Toby Mildon: Brilliant. Well, Patrick, thank you ever so much for joining me today. It's been lovely to just sit down with you and have a conversation. I found it really insightful and I'm really pleased to hear that the kind of inclusive culture that was built at Onfido can be attributed to their valuation, that and their success. Hopefully you'll get the same level of success at Quench.ai. Maybe you could even beat the record. Can I hold you to that? 

[laughter]

Patrick Penzo: Yeah, well we're working on it. We're trying to, but thank you Toby. I really appreciate the time.

Toby Mildon: You're welcome. You're welcome. And thank you for tuning into this episode with Patrick and myself. Hopefully you've taken some interesting insights away about the kind of inclusive culture that was built at Onfido and some of the things that Patrick has learned and is now applying at his new business, Quench.ai, If you need any support on developing your inclusive culture, then feel free to reach out to me and my team. The best place to start is either through our website or just drop us a line on LinkedIn. Until the next time I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of this podcast, which will be coming up very soon. Until then, take good care of yourself. Bye-Bye.

Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to The Inclusive Growth Show. For further information and resources from Toby and his team, head on over to our website at mildon.co.uk.