Welcoming Taylor Rose to Rival — our Head of People!
At Rival we are building a technology platform to transform the $200B live event and ticketing industry, bringing world-class business tools to operate live events, putting fans first in line to connect with their favorite teams and artists, and make the experience safer for all. Rival is an innovation engine for an industry that hasn’t seen much of it in 20 years, so we are laser focused on building product and empowering our clients with new commerce tools.
Yet the joy of building new companies is about so much more than product. After all, products don’t build themselves, people do! As COO of Rival, I think constantly about how we can empower our talent, invest in our kick-ass technology team and design our way of working to scale.
Jason Fried put it so perfectly: “Your company better be your best product since it’s the product you use to make everything else that you do”.
I couldn’t agree more.
That’s why I’m delighted that Taylor Rose is joining Rival to help us build a world-class tech company in LA. Taylor brings with her a remarkable ability to tune in to what is most important to start-up teams, especially the builders behind it all — engineering, product, design, data science, operations. Coming from People Ops leadership roles at Bird, Factual and Bouqs, Taylor knows how to guide high-potential companies through periods of rapid growth. She has a fresh take on how People Ops can empower a young tech team and her joyful optimism is a great fit with Rival’s core values.
What makes Rival special isn’t just the LA sunshine (ok, maybe that’s part of it). It’s who we are as a team — committed builders, creators and operators who prize integrity, humility and solving hard problems. We believe in investing in our team from day 1 and that’s why even at this early stage we sought an exceptional leader to build our People Ops, Talent, HR functions.
OK, but here’s the real real deal. People Ops at start-ups is as much of an innovation battlefield as the product you are building.
Creating dynamic, diverse, healthy, high-performing organization (yeah it takes all that) can’t be done with old school HR tools and tactics. I wrote about one of the glaring gaps here. So Taylor and I plan to experiment, a lot! We’ll test new ways of making People Ops work for tech teams, and whatever we learn we’ll open source and share with you.
So follow us on Medium,Twitter, or LinkedIn to see how we build Rival and lessons along the way.
P.S. Are we hiring? Yes! Builders welcome. Look here.
About us: Rival is building the technology platform for the most coveted live events on the planet. With investment from Andreessen Horowitz, Upfront Ventures, teams from major sports leagues around the world, and tech leaders from some of Silicon Valley’s most innovative companies, Rival helps teams make more money, gives fans fair access to amazing experiences, and keeps the environment safer for everyone.
