My Biggest Lesson: Joy Ekuta

Joy Ekuta is co-founder and chief strategy officer/COO at Retrospect. A serial founder and former People and Operations Leader in the tech industry, she is passionate about working in spaces that sit at the intersection of people, technology, and culture. 

An MIT alumna, she has an interdisciplinary background with roles that span research, program management, and recruiting at Pinterest, Two Sigma, Humu, and Exos Financial. She has operated in building fully integrated recruiting processes end-to-end; and has scaled teams from seed, Series A, and Series B Startups to medium and enterprise level companies. She was also previously founded Hostowambe, an end-to-end marketplace to hire affordable party planners; as well as a Co-Founder at ImpactLabs, a non-profit organization based in Nigeria that teaches hands-on engineering skills to high school and early college students. Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, dancing, and traveling.

The piece of wisdom that ha stayed with me is to build a community around you with people who are at the same stage, six months ahead, and two years ahead. 

I indirectly first learned this lesson in undergrad when I was ~20 years old. I went to MIT where I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by a lot of classmates who were starting and creating things in their free time. And it encouraged me to get really clear on what I wanted to - make an impact in the world, understand how to get there - finding a complimentary team and understanding how to raise funding to test things out, and learn how to navigate the many twists and turns to starting something from scratch - which there were many.

I was studying brain and cognitive science at that point and thought I was going to med school. But that curiosity had me exploring things outside of my major (specifically chemistry and computer science), which opened me up to a lot more possibilities for what careers could be. 

I didn’t recognise it at that point, but that was the beginning of my journey in learning from those with and ahead of me.

There were a couple of different stages where I practiced this insight - knowingly and unknowingly, before someone gave me the language for it.

In undergrad

The very first entrepreneurial gig I was part of was for a program under a company called Mbadika, led by Netia McCray. She was a year ahead of me in school, and had started a program to provide hands-on engineering skills and entrepreneurship to students in Brazil. She brought myself and a fellow classmate along her journey to expand to Mexico (where I had interned the previous summer). In working with her, I was able to learn the process for proposing an idea to get funding, the communications required across the board, how to develop the curriculum, get together logistics, and then how to successfully run a program. And I loved it. This was foundational to me eventually going on to do and lead similar work in Israel, Jamaica, and Nigeria. 

I relearned it at my first corporate job (Two Sigma)

• Professionally: After going to my first corporate job (Two Sigma), I was entering a field that I had limited context and never trained in: recruiting. As I learned more of the day-to-day role, I realised that I missed using more of my technical skills. As I was focused on recruiting for senior software engineers, I naturally became close with some of the engineering leaders. When I shared my aspirations with a few of them (specifically at that time, a senior manager [James Keiger] and the CTO [Alfred Spector]), they introduced me to Product Management. I didn’t know what it was before but after learning about it, I went on to secure a budget from the company to enrol in a Product Management course at General Assembly. There, I was able to connect with so many classmates from a variety of backgrounds who were trying to make the similar career shifts, talk with my instructors [Gil Kim and David Choi],  who had made the change a few years before us, and understand the real world application of that field at Two Sigma. This was foundational to me eventually starting my first company.
• Personally: In another vein, while I was at the company there were a limited number of people who looked like me. And I wanted more community. I had actively connected with the current and new Black employees at the company, and was a member of the two existing ERGs at the time - one for women, one for the LGBTQ+ community. But there wasn’t one for people of colour. I wanted this to exist, but didn’t know how to get started. I expressed this to one of my mentors at the company, Katy Knight, who had been an active member of a Black ERG at a former employer. She gave me a lot of guidance on how to get buy-in (from my manager, with an executive sponsor, with other employees) and how to get from proposal to budget. This was foundational to me eventually co-founding and leading the company’s first ERG for people of colour (BE@TS).

When I left it to go work for two separate start-ups

I knew that I wanted to formally start my own company one day, so it was important that I learned from other founders. I worked for two separate start-ups as their first recruiter, working directly with the founders and leadership of each. This was foundational to me learning how to build and scale a team from scratch, do investor management, understand day-to-day trade offs, and quickly pivot on ideas.

I learned it explicitly again starting my first company.

Finally, I was given language for this while starting my company as a cohort member of Founder Gym, by Mandela Schumaker Dixon. In this program, we were connected to other founders to co-learn the fundraising process and get support. This was foundational to getting introduced to our legal counsel, founder communities, resources for incorporation, and eventually resourcing and understanding how to navigate our first term sheet.

And put it into practice daily for Retrospect

And to wrap it up, Retrospect was and is my first delve into the creative space, so it’s been important for me to learn from co-founder, Quinnton Harris, and our team’s previous (Aida Ngolo) collective experiences, connect with other strategists (Myrlene Laroche), creative leaders, and business leaders to understand how to best position and successfully thrive in the space. Since founding the company in 2020 I’ve leaned on my community for advice, encouragement, and direction for most decisions through our continued evolution. 

I believe this struck a cord because I had innately been doing this. But having the language for what I was doing and why, made me more reflective of my own path and made me comfortable and willing to take more risks. Because you can learn all the information in the world, but what will actually help you get places is a well rounded community to push and guide you. 

It changed me as a person and in my career as it made me more intentional - both on a professional and personal level of who I was surrounding myself with.

I tend to be more open about what I’m trying to do and learn, because the people who have known that have accelerated my learning and career in so many more ways than they know.

So personally, as I’ve grown in my career, I’ve re-evaluated it on two fronts:

As a founder + leader

I look for a lot more guidance on how other people were able to successfully transition between being an IC, to a founder, to a leader. Not all the advice sticks, but it’s helpful for me to understand how to own those roles with smaller teams to larger teams.

Where I seek balance in my personal life

The other side is that the more time I spend in entrepreneurship, the more value I place on a life outside of work. So understanding how to better balance that when the two are intertwined has been key. 

And then, it’s really important that I also play a role in passing on that information so for my mentees and/or reports I’m honest about my successes, mistakes, and how I navigated things to give them another perspective. And for other founders, it’s important that I can save them time. From what’s worked, what I wish knew and would have helped me move faster, or connections that were valuable.

I find myself sharing it more with people who want to start a business - of any type - and who are at the ideation stage of just figuring out where and how to get started. People respond well, but almost always the next question is - how do I find those people?

My response to that is:

Actively seek out that community

Whether that’s meetup groups or events you know there will be a higher concentration of like minded people, seek out those spaces and get to know people and 

Tell people what you’re looking for:

Looking for community is one thing, but also being vocal about what you need is another. And more times than not, when you share that you’re looking for help with people will have at least one person that can help directly or point you in the right direction.