Shannon Bracken on Intentionality and Talent Development

Amy talked about HIPAA hires, high-performance entry level. Just to give you an example, last year, 2023, across the Vista companies, there's about 87 companies as we sit here today until Shannon gets one done next week, but we had 2.4 million people apply for jobs at those companies last year. We tested 489,000 to find a hiring pool of 60,000 in which we hired 15,000 people. This is ongoing all the time from all walks of life, 180 geographies, countries, and that is an important part of casting a wide net. I will guarantee very few of them look like what you would expect to work at a software company, but what we're able to do is find these talented, motivated people, and then identify that they will be successful in our businesses, and then from there, we put them into programs that actually accelerate their development. So maybe, Shannon, talk a little bit about what you're doing at the portfolio companies, and then how you're thinking about that in terms of driving that into how we're gonna adopt AI and that thinking in our AI fabric. Yeah, so I think on the building of diversity, at least in the financial services industry, you see a lot of stats around the hiring classes. So the percentage of women, the percentage of people of color, the percentage of underrepresented minorities. That was necessary because unfortunately, the organizations were so far behind where they should be and still are from a diversity perspective. But to me, that's like 5% of what matters because if you are hiring diverse classes, but you are not retaining and training and mentoring those people, it's not only not good for those people, it's not good for your organization. And so, so much of the focus, to me, goes on the 5% of the problem. I think, candidly, what attracted me to Vista 10 years ago was that it felt like 95% of the focus was actually on what happens once you get here. I felt the intentionality in every part of my interview process around how they develop talent or how we develop talent. At the time, it was they, now it's we. And really cultivate that talent. And it's everything from who we put first year analysts and associates with in their office and who we pair them with from a mentorship perspective, which, by the way, is not all women should be mentored by women. It is, there's so much more complexity to how you think about that. Developing that skill set, setting expectations, performance managing, driving accountability, and ultimately creating a culture where everyone feels like they can be successful. And part of that is you need to be able to look up and see a lot of different types of people finding success. And that's, again, it's not just, oh, there's another woman, and I can be successful, too. It's, no, there's a man who puts his family first and is very open about that. Like, there are tons of different pockets of being able to look up and say, okay, I see these patterns, I think I can be there, too. And to Robert's credit, it's been a part of the firm since day one, and you see that. And we have the only female-led, I guess both of you work with Renee and Rachel, the only female-led technology investing strategy in our Endeavor Fund. And you don't get there overnight. You really have to be intentional about that.