Tyler Finn 

When your legal career spans, law firms, tech giants and venture backed startups. You don't just follow a path, you help create it. Today on The Abstract, I am joined by Tina Hwang, head of legal at Class Dojo. Tina has built and rebuilt legal functions at companies including Google, WhatsApp, ancestry and now in her current role, along the way, she's built teams, grown the business, and designed her career on her own terms. We're going to chat today about how she evaluates different opportunities, adapts her approach to leadership, to meet the moment, and some things that she's learned about hiring, team building and finding fulfillment in the work itself. Tina, thanks so much for joining me for this episode of The Abstract.

Tina Hwang  

Thanks, Tyler, thanks so much. Really excited to be here.

Tyler Finn  

Okay, well, Akshay, our COO put the two of us in touch. I'm really excited for this conversation, and I don't always go like all the way back to the beginning of the legal career with with guests, but with you, I am kind of curious. You know you started your career working as a staff attorney at the court of appeals, eventually moved into tech and into Google, Google when Google was still, I think, pretty early. Yeah, tell us a little bit about those experiences and what it was that ultimately pulled you to Google.

Tina Hwang 

Yeah, you know, it's so funny. It's one of those things where on paper, if you look at my resume, you would think that I had this all planned out, that I would be at the firm, and then I would go to the Court of Appeals, and then I would go to Google. And I just want to say no, like the behind the scenes there. There was a real moment in my early career where I was out of law school, I was at the law firm, didn't really feel like that was the right fit for me in terms of the dynamics, and also just the types of problems that I was tasked to solve. And so really going to the Ninth Circuit was really about calling a time out and figuring out what excites me about the law, figuring out if I could figure out a place where within the law that I could solve the challenges that I wanted to solve, and be inspired to work with the people and the goals and be a part of something bigger than myself. And so, you know, that was really what drove me to go to the Ninth Circuit, to just sort of experience a lot of different things and figure out what that path was, and randomly at that time. And you know, I had a friend who was at Google who said, hey, you know you, you're he was at a startup that I had worked at when I was a software engineer, even before I was at law school. And he said, Listen, you like tech, you know you, you're a trained lawyer. Why not just have this conversation see if it's the right fit. And I was just lucky that I was in this mind space of I'm just going to try a bunch of different things and talk to a bunch of different people and figure out where the right fit is. And so I applied. I had a great conversation with all the Google legal team at that time, they were all so not only brilliant, but just really, you could tell mission focused, values driven people. And I really identified with the challenges that Google was trying to solve. And so I kind of found my way there. And just thought, you know what? This is worth, worth trying and worth seeing if this could be something that I really could be a part of. It did not factor in my mind of, like, I need to go in house and then I need to, like, advance my career in this in this way, it was really about taking a step back and really trying to figure out what type of challenges would really inspire me from day to day.

Tyler Finn 

I feel like now you're you're a legal leader. You're also, in many ways, someone who has a deep sort of interest in building a business operational side of legal and how a business runs and how legal fits into that puzzle. Was that clear to you at that time as you were joining Google? Do you feel like you learned or sort of developed that interest and mindset while you were at Google? Tell me a little bit about how that evolved.

Tina Hwang 

Yeah, again, I would love to say like that is something that I knew that I wanted to be a part of, and that and that I wanted to try and you know that I think it's a little bit of I have a mix of. I knew that I was excited about tech challenges. I did have already a software background, and so I had this intuition that this was something that I wanted to try to be a part of the tech business in a more holistic way. Did I knew? Did I know what it would take to be an in house lawyer and to solve this from the legal side? Absolutely not. It just so happened that I had this intuition I found the right opportunity, and it just really resonated with me, the type of thinking exactly like you're talking about in terms of you're not only trying to solve the legal problem, you're really trying to solve the legal problem in the context of The business strategy and and trying to figure out how, through the legal challenges, you can advance a business and help it grow, and hopefully also impact it in a really positive way, to grow in a way that's legally compliant and also will be healthy for the business long term. And so it's you know, if there's anything that anyone takes away from this, this podcast, it's, you know, I think it's about trusting your intuition of where you naturally tend to gravitate, and also having that mind space to try, because you're never really gonna know until you try, but trusting that intuition and then trying certain situations to test out that intuition

Tyler Finn 

And remind me you were at Google for how long

Tina Hwang 

I was almost there for 10 years. Yeah.

Tyler Finn  

So I mean, what a great training ground like you get to watch Google grow up in many ways, I guess, as an organ, like grow, but also grow up as an organization. What was it that led you to WhatsApp? And then I want to talk about, I mean, you've had such experience building. I want to talk about that and, like, sort of hone in on that for a minute.

Tina Hwang  

Yeah. Yeah. You know, a lot of my  ex-Googler colleagues on the legal side. We, when we get together, we, we like to joke that there was something magical about that time. And so I am so grateful that I joined during that time, could be a part of building that rocket ship from the business side and seeing it grow from, you know, a company that could take everybody to Disneyland on a company event too. So the behemoth that it is that is now and and, you know, when near the end, though, what I was realizing is that I also had this intuition that what really excites me is building and I think that when you are at that intersection of building the legal team, building the legal strategy, helping the business grow, there's an energy and there's a dynamic that just feels great, and it feels really impactful as your as a legal advisor in that period of time, because you really do have a lot of influence in terms of the business trajectory. At the end of my time at Google, you know, it's just a natural trajectory of a business as it grows and as it gets bigger, you're it's less about maybe building in that kind of, I would say, like rocket ship way, but more about building kind of internally, maybe refining and so that it felt to me there where I had this sense of, Well, I like this, I like the culture, I like the people, but it's not something that I'm super passionate about in the same way where I was passionate in the early days of building the team, doing many different things, helping the business grow in this super sized way. And so it just so happened at that time, I got connected to the General Counsel at WhatsApp, and the Deputy General Counsel, who are friends to friends, friends, friends to this day. And they were right at that at that place where they had a very small legal team, they wanted somebody to lead their product, privacy regulatory group and build it from scratch. And it just seemed like it was the right opportunity. And at that time to express like, why did you leave? I probably would have listed 10 things, but as I look back on it, I think it really, it was really about capturing that essence of building again.

Tyler Finn  

And you know, when you were at WhatsApp team ended up growing pretty big, 30 folks.

Tina Hwang  

Yeah, in the end the legal team was like 30 folks, basically,

Tyler Finn  

Yeah, I don't know what was that experience like, and what were sort of some lessons that you learned scaling a team that quickly, that you've carried with you into other roles?

Tina Hwang  

Yeah, it that's a great question, because I feel like scaling people is so different than so process and so different than kind of substantive side, too. And so when you're in that environment, you're doing all three at the same time. Sometimes you're It's so chaotic, because you're trying to build out the process, but you don't have the people. But then you know that you need to support the business in this in this way. And so, you know, I think the very first thing that you have to do is really try to start back from the business goals, and really try to coordinate yourself as a legal leader, to understand where your business is going, where, where it's going, why, and really understand the why as well, and to be able to work backwards in terms of okay, in order to support this, in order to support launching in these countries, what type of legal support do we need? Do we need regulatory? Do we need commercial? Do we need? What do we need? And what's the volume? Also, if we can size volume, and then you look at the tools that you have available to you to scale to that need. Is it outside counsel? Is a contractor? Is there someone in house that we can repurpose for this expertise. And then you get to, okay, well, then what's the trade off against hiring, perhaps a full time lawyer to do this? And are we at the moment now where it's actually better for the business, more efficient and more not only time efficient, but budget efficient, to invest in hiring a full time employee to take this on and really build out that function. And so, you know, you have to go through that painful process, and it feels it sometimes it feels like mud, but at least, at least there you get, sort of the you get a very data driven approach of business need, map to legal need, map to the tools that you have to deploy. Map to, okay, here's, here's, then how we're going to fill this need in order to meet the needs of the business. And if there is a gap. Here is, here is what we're going to present to the business as to the gap and the trade offs of how to fill that gap.

Tyler Finn  

You mentioned interviewing with the GC, the DGC, you know Mark Khan, I think was the DGC at the time. I did agree that

Tina Hwang 

Mark Khan, By the way, shout out to mark Kahn because everybody knows Mark Kahn.

Tyler Finn  

Yes, I did a great episode A couple years ago with him, in which we had a very candid conversation, actually, around how he realized he needed to evolve as a sort of leader and manager in what was at WhatsApp, and that compelled him to get an executive coach, and I can't remember if we talked about therapy, and I'm not expecting you to respond to this question in the same way that he did, but I am curious, sort of like stepping into a bigger management role, right? This was an inflection point for you in your sort of approach to leadership? Do you feel like there are ways that your approach to leadership evolved over your time at WhatsApp or then, as you started to move into the other roles with really high impact?

Tina Hwang  

Yeah, it's such a great question, because, you know, oftentimes in the legal field, you promote the best person with best legal skills, because they are doing such an amazing job of managing the legal workload, delivering excellent advice. And then, you know, it's just natural that one would think that that is the person that should lead a function, and that is the person that should be made the manager. And oftentimes that is actually not the case. Actually, there is a very different set of skills that you need in terms of not just being, and I'm not just saying just is the wrong word, but you really have to kind of switch your mindset from I am the legal counsel delivering the excellent, pragmatic, pragmatic legal advice to the CEO, to, no, no, I am the manager of a team that delivers legal advice, and how do I develop the team to be able to do this, not just me, and it requires a different type of thinking and a different type of skill set, and I think it's particularly hard, and I self identify With this for people who are used to being commended and rewarded for being the problem solver, for jumping and solving the problem that's there's just a natural gravitation towards, oh, I'm just gonna fix it. I'm just gonna solve it. And it's almost like you have to as a leader, and then, as a, particularly as a leader of a large team, you really have to exercise the other muscle of, I am here, to develop this function, to operate in a way that someone could deliver this advice, even if I wasn't here. And so as a as a manager of a large team, you have to develop that opposite muscle of I'm here to almost make myself redundant. And I say this kind of fully, Felicia, what is the word

Tyler Finn

facetious?

Tina Hwang  

Facetious. There you go, facetiously. Because, of course, like you do need that strategic legal leader, and they're going to be there to for many different reasons, but day to day, you do want to take that mentality as a legal leader that your is to ensure that operations, process, training and mentoring, they're going so well that no matter who the CEO calls within that organization, they can get the same type of pragmatic, riskforward, calibrated legal advice and that that takes a different skill set, and you really do have to kind of step back and turn off your natural instincts as a problem solver to hone in and lean into that skill.

Tyler Finn  

Are there ways that you remind yourself to be good at that context switching. Because, I mean, I think that is sort of the hard thing for folks sometimes, is they find that 80% of it, they find that a bunch of the time, they will remember, okay, I'm not supposed to be approaching this situation as like the person who's coming up with the great idea that's going to get the company out of a bind. Instead, my job is to empower the AGC, who I'm working with, to do that themselves and give them guidance. But that also requires like remembering to do that and remembering to switch off from maybe the type of conversation that you have with your CEO or CFO to a different approach to talking to your AGC, etc. I'm curious if there are ways that you try to remind yourself of that, or that you feel like you do that well.

Tina Hwang 

yeah, I mean, I You're absolutely right, like it is a constant reminder and a constant mindfulness that you have to, you have to juggle, along with your your natural instincts of you know hey I I’m delivering this advice. I’m solving this problem. I think that what really has helped me is, there's this book. It's, I think it's a book called, like, 90 days, your first 90 days, or something like that. And there was a chart in there that I remember that was so helpful to me as I was entering into, I can't remember whether it was WhatsApp or Twitter, but it was like, map out, map out the what is your job like, map out what is your job, and make sure you have alignment with your boss on what your job is. And when I map out what I am as a legal leader. I map out like four different things. I'm a, first and foremost, I'm the legal strategist for the company. I want to be able to to deliver on that for the executive team. Second is, you know, I'm a program and operations manager as well. I need to build up process and programs. And then third, I am a mentor and coach to my team. And then fourth, I'm an escalation point for them, so that they are always, always know that I they have a safety net for me to for them to get advice. And so what I like to do is map out kind of those four quadrants of my job, and I then set personal goals as a leader that every single quarter I'm doing things to fulfill all four quarter quadrants of that job. I'm not just one quadrant versus the other. Now, given what's going on, you might be leaning more heavily towards one quadrant or another. I think it is that constant type of reminder, mindfulness, mapping out your career goals as well for your job as a legal leader to align to those four quadrants, and making sure that you're doing things every single quarter that can align with those four quadrants, and you're not forgetting about the training, the mentorship and providing being that escalation point, so that you know, you don't Forget about it from a quarterly level, and then you map that to like, Okay, well, then what I want to do is really emphasize training this quarter. And so I'm going to do three training sessions with my team about legal risk and how to define legal risk crisply to an executive team. And I think that's a way that you can train yourself very systematically. Over rotate to one thing or the other. Is to think about your job more holistically and to be really mindful about that.

Tyler Finn 

What an amazing framework. I really like that. I like that a lot. You mentioned Twitter. You spent some time at Twitter. You spent some time in ancestry more recently. Now you lead legal at ClassDojo. Earlier, you did mention intuition driving the move to Google. Other things that you think about when you're considering making a move between roles or between companies, ways that you evaluate whether or not it's the right opportunity for you. Even you know, are there things that you think about today that maybe you weren't considering when you made the move from Google to WhatsApp? Right? That you know now, now you realize, I'll give you an example. I look at the executive team and the CEO and who they are, and my relationship with them much more than I used to early on in my career.

Tina Hwang 

Yeah, it's such a great question. You know, I think when you're early on in your career, you're probably looking at like the substantive issues a lot more in terms of, what am I going to be doing? What is the scope of my responsibility? Who am I reporting to? How big of a team am I and I am I going to have? And so I think you, you're looking at a lot of those things and kind of judging, is this the right opportunity for me? I think as you get more senior, the people aspect of it becomes a lot more critical. And I'm sure this is something that you've heard from a lot of legal leaders from all around that when you get to that more senior executive team level where you're working a lot with the management team and boards, it's really about the chemistry and the relationship and the feeling that you have that you're going to be able to work with this team, day in and day out, and that you trust this team. Because ultimately, you know these legal jobs are hard at the legal leadership level, because you are sitting at the intersection of being the legal strategist, but also another element that we didn't talk about, which you you have as a senior legal leader, is your fiduciary duty to the board And to the company as a whole. That is, you know, that fifth dimension of the job that you know makes these jobs very challenging at the very end day, because you're not only managing the day to day legal issues, but you're also keeping in mind that fiduciary duty, and what does one do with that, on a, on a, on a, on a day to day basis, and so for these legal jobs at that level, that relationship and building that relationship of trust is so critically important. And I team is, what is the one that you're going to be able to hit your wagon to from a substantive perspective, as well as that trust relationship perspective,

Tyler Finn  

you're now building up the legal function from scratch at ClassDojo that's a new experience for you. I guess. What's most exciting to you about building, building a team, building a function from scratch?

Tina Hwang  

I think it's one of those things where there's an excitement there in terms of, you know, so often time, oftentimes, that you know you're walking into a situation and you have to learn the rules and the and the dynamic, and you're like, don't talk to this person, or don't do that. Or here's the process. And then when we walk into a situation, like like I did at class Center, where there is no legal function, you have carte blanche to create like you nobody did. There's an excitement there for me, as you get to create it the way that you want to create it. You you get to create the relationships. You get to create the you know, the process, and you have no one to blame but yourself, if it turns out badly. So to me, that that's an exciting challenge to be able to establish that it is it does also come with great responsibility, and so that that is the flip side of it, in that, you know, when you're creating things from scratch, you do need to really think thoughtfully about, is this the right process? Is this the right process for the company at its time, and really kind of adjust for the dynamics of the people, as well as where the company is? But the opportunity to do that. I think I mentioned I'm a builder, and so I identify with being a builder, and to me, that succeed is like having that opportunity to to do it in the way that that I think it should be done and and, you know, hopefully you build something good, and you're able to have that also be a legacy, when, when, and if you ever move on, if, like, man, I was a part of that. I was a part of that from the ground up.

Tyler Finn 

I feel like this is a question that I usually put more to folks on the legal ops side, as they, you know, often enter a business or enter a legal department that doesn't have an ops function to it, but you've already mentioned, right? You like to think about the people that you're investing in, you're bringing on. You like to think about process and building that out from an ops perspective. You know, the third sort of component of this that people often will focus on or think about is, to what extent are we leveraging technology as a legal department? How do you think about those three things? Like people process tech as you grow the team, as you grow the function, how do you decide what to invest in, what to focus on?

Tina Hwang  

Yeah, it's a great question, because oftentimes, like, like we mentioned, you're trying to do all three at the same time and figure out, like, how to what to prioritize. I will say that modern day legal departments, you have to build out all three eventually in order to be successful. I think gone are the days where, you know, you can throw people at the problem. Management teams. Do not expect you to be building out 1000 people, legal teams, who you are, even at the fang companies, you know, I think there's a shift in you. You are not, you are not going to be able to just throw bodies at the problem. You really have to attack it from operations, process, people, you know, all that has to be all part of the the equation, which is really exciting to see, because when I started, you know, legal operations, that that was not part of the equation. It was actually, like really emerging. And I'm so, so happy that Akshay and others have basically, kind of taken that mantle and really shown what legal ops and process and technology can do to help improve a legal department. But to answer your question. You know, to figure out what to prioritize first. I think you really do have to go back to the business problem that you're trying to solve first. Are you trying to solve contracting? Are you trying to solve regulatory? Are you trying to solve what is the most pressing legal issue that you're trying to solve for the company stack from there to figure out which one you're triaging first, if it's a contracting issue, I think you have to start with operations and process and technology before you start with people, to figure out if you're getting the efficiency that you need already, and it's just a matter of you have the right people, but you need, you need better process to solve for the for the problem. If you're solving for a regulatory problem, then that that's probably not something necessarily, that you would solve for technology or process. You probably at Do I have the right advice? Do I have the right outside counsel? Do I have the right people on the ground to give me the insight that you need? You really have to start with the with the with the problem at hand, the biggest pressing legal risks that you see, and work backwards from there, all things being equal, though, I will say, if I had carte blanche and could start a legal department and not have the realities of legal pressure or business pressure. It's all about setting up the right foundations of a legal department. My first hire would be a legal ops hire, and that's not actually did not pay me to say that, to say that, because, because that, that is the foundation by which you can really scale the legal department in the right way, and is really hiring someone with that type of purview and efficiency lens such that you can build and scale with that lens always going forward and and looking at the problem, because you're going to look at it from the legal point of view of like, I need to respond to x with y, but yes, have that partner who's looking at it from the process, Operations and Technology lens. That's how you get to the right equilibrium, I think, in terms of if I was building a legal team in a in a vacuum,

Tyler Finn  

I've got a few more questions for you on this. Actually, this is really interesting. There's a lot of focus on metrics, right? And ops folks thinks, think a lot about how they can help drive decisions with metrics. Is there a metric around contracting, or are there data points that that you feel like your ops team people are surfacing for you that it's not just you care about this, but the rest of your exec team actually cares about this too.

Tina Hwang  

Yeah, it's such a great question, because legal work is just one of those, one of those things where it's hard to quantify outside of certain areas, and yet, as a as a function, you want to be able to demonstrate efficiency as much as the next function like you want to be able to demonstrate as well that you're hitting your goals with X amount of people, but you need y. And so it is such a really interesting, interesting, interesting challenge, I think, as a legal leader of, how do you demonstrate metrics to an executive team with commercial, you know, it's actually, I would say, easier sometimes, because you can always judge it on volume. Now, a contract is not a contract, as you know. You know, a big business development deal is going to be different than than a small, small deal by and so you know you have to factor in, factor in that, but in in other functions, there's just, there's just less to gravitate towards in terms of qualitative metrics. And so I like to think about it for those areas, as probably a mix of qualitative and quantitative. And quantitative. So one would be, you know, from kind of the business support perspective, how many launches did we support? How many, you know, how many privacy reviews did we? Did we? Did we get looped into and successfully complete? Did we? Did we holistically, sort of support the business on meeting their goals? And so I think it's a mixture of kind of honing in on that element of legal, which is really we're here to enable and empower the business, and what are some of the metrics or numbers that we can pull there to to demonstrate that not only have we done the volume, but we've also successfully kept up with the business and met their needs in terms of what they needed, in terms of whatever projects, like launches, privacy, reviews, rebate, the tech stack. How have we met those standards, and how have we enabled them to do what they need to do as well?

Tyler Finn 

I mean, clearly you have a very strong grasp on commercial and ops, and maybe I should have asked this earlier on, but I'm curious, you know you came into Class Dojo with your more sort of like immediate leadership experience or career being in a regulatory background, or in a privacy and product counseling background. And that sort of work is like deeply intellectual a lot of times, but it's also sometimes a little less focused on revenue enablement or closing transactions, or which CEOs care a lot about. I'm curious if you have advice for folks who might want to, sort of, like, take on something broader, or who may have, you know, built in an expertise in regulatory and now are thinking, I actually want a sort of bigger problem. How did you make that possible for you?

Tina Hwang  

Yeah, yeah. One I would also, I also want to say, like, if on paper it looks like I, like planned out my career, and then I can be like a privacy regulatory lawyer. And let me just say, I stumbled into that too. I started out my career at Google as a commercial attorney, advancing emerging businesses and and helping them with whatever, whatever that they need. So I would say that as I think I have different different different buckets of advice for different different levels for attorneys here. So for junior attorneys, if you don't know what you want to do, do a bunch of different things. So when I got into Google, I was a commercial attorney, but if a team needed help, it just helped them. You know, they're like, I don't understand this. This, this area of the law. I'm not, not going to sit there and say, like, well, that's not my purview, but I will, yeah, you just, you just lean in and you find you. If you're intellectually curious, you will be served well, because you will just say, like, Okay, let me look into that for you. Let me go talk to a bunch of people for you, and then I will, I will give you the the advice, and try a bunch of different things. Also lean into that mentality of, I'm not just ex lawyer. I'm here to give good legal advice to my client and to package it up as holistically as possible for them, regardless of middle or my remit. And now some people are so we were gonna take that advice to the Instagram. Tina told me that like you have to also calibrate for the environment, and there are certain environments where you know your remit will be, hey, you should loop in XYZ specialist, but then you should also ask yourself, like, is that what you like? Or if you if you want to learn more, then maybe if that's not the right environment for you. So that's what I would say for juniors, junior to mid level, is you don't know what you want to do, and you want to try a bunch of different things. Find that right environment, and also lean into being that holistic council so that you get a broad range of skills. And for the more senior like, let's say you've been doing X, and then you're like, I want to, I actually want to do something broader than just x. I would say, look for opportunities in terms of either a job that offers you that right, that next kind of opportunity of taking on more of a broader skill set, or even within your current role, start talking with leaders of like, hey, like, I'm really interested in why, like, Could I help you out? Leaders are always looking for help. So if you say the magic words of, I want to help, you're gonna, you're gonna find opportunities of that mentality. I think the other thing I would say is be also proactive in terms of identifying opportunities for yourself. When I you know, I'm certain, sometimes in certain jobs, I saw a gap where I was like, I don't think that anybody is doing this. By the way. I feel like, as the product Council, I am recognizing that we have all these regulations hitting us, but we don't have anybody synthesizing any of these regulations and developing a strategic framework for how to deal with that, those regulations. So I'm just going to work up a plan for how we should deal with it, and I'm going to present it to my boss and leader and see what they think. And no one tasked me to do it. Nobody said like, go do this. But I saw the need, and so I and it was something that I was again, naturally drawn to, and said, Hey, I'm gonna work up a proposal and see what my bosses think. And you know, my boss also instantly recognized then, of like, yeah, that is a need that we have. And then leaned into, well, Tina is a natural person. Then she has this natural curiosity, natural skill set for this. Why don't we just have her run with this and lead this project? So I would say, for more senior folks, I would not only ask your legal leadership for those opportunities if you want a more broad experience, but also find the opportunities yourself in terms of identifying those gaps at your current level which you could really lean in and help the organization solve.

Tyler Finn  

That's great advice for folks who want to grow or move, or think about whether or not you know something really is actually better out there, or maybe the opportunity actually lies in the organization that you are before. What are things that you how do you approach hiring? I guess is the way that I would, I would frame the question, right and and evaluating folks, how do you try to evaluate not just like, are they a great lawyer, like we've talked about, and they're going to be a professional, maybe they have management potential. I also think there's something to be said for someone being the right fit for where the company is in its life cycle, right? Talk to us about that, how you think, how you think through that, and how you evaluate candidates.

Tina Hwang  

Yeah, it's it is so important and and again, I think my my thinking has shifted as I've caressed in my legal career. You know, early on as a manager, if you asked me, What are you stress testing for in your interviews, I would say legal acumen, problem solving, ability to solve the hypothetical or case study that I put in front of them and be able to, you know, do it another two hours or something like that. Like that would be my mindset of, like, really stress testing whether or not they have that legal acumen. I think now, well, first of all, now, you know, by the time a candidate gets to me, usually they have, they've already gone through that, that hurdle with some other folks and other peers of like you know that they are they can do, they can do the legal work. I think so my focus now, really, when I think about success of a person within an organization, it's really about the more softer skills of Do you communicate clearly? How well do you deal with curve balls that I throw at you during the interview that you probably didn't have time to prepare for? Or Google Chat GPT, mixing up? Yeah, Google. Chat GPT, sorry, chat GPT, sorry, Google, and you can't really chat, search on chat GPT or try to try to game the system for because I'm just gonna throw you a curveball in the interview and to say, well, what would you think about x, y, z, if you you know, if the CEO said, why? And it's something really novel to you, like, how would you situation? So I'm stress testing for those type of skills now, in terms of that type of ability to adapt, to communicate, and as you also said, I'm really also stress testing for can you do that in the culture that I understand the company is going to be in? And so I also really stress test candidates and give them the types of questions that I know they will be facing from their clients, and really see how they react, not substantively, but just emotionally, as well as from a communication perspective. Do they get frustrated when I ask the same question again and again? Which will happen? Do they get flustered when I throw them a curve ball that's not necessarily on the four corners of the page. And so when you build a legal team, I really think that as the leader, you really have to understand the culture of your company and what they need, and their environment, the challenges of the role that you're hiring for, and then you also have to really stress test that candidate, that soft skill level of whether or not they're going to be able to adapt that challenge and that adaptability component to it. It's so, so critical in a small team, because when you're hiring for a large team, maybe you you know exactly what you're hiring for. For a small team, you really have to find those athletes that can adapt to many different situations. Of you're doing commercial today, but you could be, you could be the privacy attorney tomorrow, and can you adapt those circumstances?

Tyler Finn  

Usually, I'm pretty prescriptive with my questions, but before we move to my closing questions, I mean, you have such experience building teams, hiring, growing the team, sort of alongside the business. Any other lessons you'd want to share around building that you feel like I haven't asked sufficiently about?

Tina Hwang  

It's a big question. I think the maybe one one question is, if you're a builder, and this is actually like a question that I have an answer for myself, of, if you’re a builder and you know you’re a bulder is it always the small company that you gravitate towards? Or are building role, like, what? What are building roles? Maybe that's the better question of like, what are building rules? If you know you're gravitating towards that and it is it, is it a startup, or is it, is it a startup, necessarily? Or can you do it at these larger companies? What What are, what are, how do you identify a building role? This question, I have not not complete the answer for myself, by the way, and so I'm curious and curious, what, what, what others think. But I think for me, the answer is probably no. It does not necessarily mean that you need to go look for a startup to join and hit your wagon to I think you building opportunities are really about the circumstances by which you are joining a team. You could be joining a legal department of 100 people, and this is a brand new function that you're building out for people. When I joined WhatsApp, it was already a part of meta, so ostensibly, I was part of a very large legal team. But as WhatsApp was so new at that time and we were siloed, the dynamics were such that we were still in the building stage. So I would say that if you are a builder and you self identify with that, don't necessarily think that that means you're hopping from one startup to a startup. It could mean a big company. It could be a medium company or a small company. But really stress test the circumstances and understand the dynamics of where, where that role fits in within the overall picture of the company.

Tyler Finn  

If this was a slightly different podcast, that would be like the perfect way to end the episode. But I think people listen all the way to the end, and I like to ask the same set of closing questions to each of our guest, so we can compare across guests, maybe with that building mindset in mind, what's your favorite part of Your day to day right now?

Tina Hwang  

My favorite part of the day today, right now, is being able to see the intersection of so many different things, and being able to offer the insight as the head of legal being at the intersection for many different things. I'll just give you an example. I i can now see across what finance is asking me, what product is asking me, what end is asking me, asking me, and be able to identify trends and strategies that span across all those functions and be able to advise my management team what I'm seeing. By the way, five different people have asked me for this, and so therefore we should do why? And that, to me, is the joy of being in house counsel. Really, it's just not only being that legal leader, but being that true leader for the company, and being able to offer a strategic lens for the company in a way that no other function can

Tyler Finn  

I have a feeling that you're going to have a good answer to this one? I don't know why I just maybe when I do have a professional pet peeve.

Tina Hwang  

Oh. You know, It's not necessarily a pet peeve. But I encourage anybody in their career to do this, if they want to, if they really want to grow, and if something I hit upon already is that intellectual curiosity, and I really feel like the way learn on a job is by asking why. Is by asking why, by asking hard questions, by learning through asking those questions and and trying to understand the past of what happened and also the present. I think so often we go into this mode of, I want the answer, and I think that sometimes we miss the boat, myself included, of not taking the time to really understand why, and to be intellectually curious of how we got to where we are. And so I just urge anyone who is working in a in any environment, is to remind themselves of that, of taking that moment to really be intellectually curious, to understand the context and to understand the why, because I think they will, it will serve them well, no matter where they are. So maybe the answer to that, it was my pet peeve, is when I, when I, when I sense that that not, that has not happened, and the focus is on, what is the answer? What is the answer? And there's a time and place for that, but yeah, I think that organizations are better served when you can take that, that intellectual curiosity component to all of your problems.

Tyler Finn  

I definitely agree with that, and we don't need to have an extended conversation about it. But I think that um

Tina Hwang  

Tell me more. Tell them we’ll do a little switcheroo on this podcast.

Tyler Finn  

I thing, I thing that we live in very outcome driven sort of society and organizations are very outcome driven, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but like maybe we're a little too consequentialist. And I also think that there's often a lot of there's an over emphasis on urgency and so, yeah, I think that this sort of curiosity you're emphasizing gets pushed to the wayside, and environments that over index on both those things, , something for us to continue to Talk about in future.

Tina Hwang  

I haven’t heard it’s called the quiet. I think it's called the quiet brain, but it, it's, it's one of those books where it talks about exactly what you're talking about, where the tendency of certain corporate environments or work environments is on the Quick, quick, quick, quick, quick, yes. How better some challenges are better served through the slower pace of thinking and really kind of understanding context. But yes, another future, another future podcast.

Tyler Finn  

Would you like that to be your book recommendation? Because you anticipated my next question, is there a book that you would like to recommend to our listeners?

Tina Hwang  

Wow. You know, I what I am reading now, and is a smorgasbord of different of different things, but yeah, I feel like that's what I would recommend. I would also recommend careless people. And I'm listening to it on podcast right now, and it's, it's not necessarily that I that I feel like everything in that book is true and about that experience, but I do think it is a good, a good book for people to understand sort of corporate America and how different dynamics sort of play out. And I think that when you work these jobs, sometimes you get so caught up in the day to day that we for we don't zoom out and like really think about the ramifications of technology on the world and and how there's there is this interplay. So I would recommend that one, not so much that I again that I believe that every single word of that book is true, but so of like, that kind of holistic what I like about the author is they do have this holistic view of tech and how it intersects with all these different areas of society.

Tyler Finn  

I actually, I mean, I chose well chose not I read the reviews of it, and I decided I don't know if I trust that everything I saw i i will give that another chance.

Tina Hwang 

Yeah, don’t read it as a barometer of truth. Read it more more so for the that there is this, this processing of tech issues through that lens.

Tyler Finn  

Really interesting. Tina, my last question for you, my traditional closing question for my guests, it's if you could think back on your days as a young lawyer just getting started. One thing that you know now that you wish that you'd known back then.

Tina Hwang  

Yeah, well, I wish I would have known Mark Khan like earlier in my career. He would have plugged me into a whole bunch of different things, and now I I think I would tell my younger self to be less anxious about not knowing what I was going to do with my legal career, because I think you when you're trained as a lawyer, to be future driven and to understand and predict what's going to happen, the different outcomes. And I think I would tell my younger self, be less anxious about the outcome and where you are going to go. Now, easier said than done. When you're coming out of law school and you have debt and you're like, What am I going to do? But I that is, I think, one word of advice that I would give to myself and others of you, really have to think about your career, less about outcome driven, and more about leaning into that intuition that we're talking about and and also kind of finding those opportunities that meet that intuition. I think that's where you're going to get the maximum career satisfaction. And if you look too much on the out the outcome, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Like some people are like, I want to be the president states. Look what happened. Barack Obama became the president United States, and that's me. But I think you're going to get better satisfaction not being outcome. If you're just mere mortal, I think you want to look at intuition and also like what leaning into those opportunities that we talked about, that feed into that intuition.

Tyler Finn  

Tina. This has been, it's really been a conversation. And I love the framworks that you’ve brought. This has been a lot of fun.

Tina Hwang  

It has been. So, we’re doing part two, right? That’s what I’m hearing.

Tyler Finn  

Yeah, let’s do it. you could be my first part two. Uh I haven’t done that yet.

Tina Hwang 

That would be great.

Tyler Finn  

Thanks so much for joining me today.

Tina Hwang 

Thank you so much.

Tyler Finn  

And to our audience. Thank you so much for tuning in, and We hope to see you next time.