Maven AGI provides AI that delivers the experience your customers deserve.
We connected with Whitney Hazard, Chief of Staff at Maven AGI, to learn about her background, what drew her to Maven, her career path, and more.
In this video:
Whitney answers.
- Her Role and Responsibilities
- Whitney’s Career Path
- What attracted Whitney to Maven AGI
- Why now is a great time to join Maven AGI
Interested in working at Maven AGI? Check out all of their job openings here: https://venturefizz.com/mavenagi/
Video Transcript
Her Role and Responsibilities
My name is Whitney Hazard and I am the chief of staff at Maven AGI. As a chief of staff at Maven, my job is to support the CEO as well as the rest of the leadership team with a range of strategic projects. So I sort of sit as a generalist in the seauite who’s there to help enable the organization and bring out our full potential. This could look different on any given day.
Sometimes I’m working on projects within a specific function like finance or operations. Other times I’m working on more companywide initiatives like what we share in our all hands meetings and how we set our OKRs and how we do our planning. Other times I’m more externally facing like working with our current board members or thinking about future investors and fundraising. It’s really a mix of projects based on what’s a priority for the organization right now. So I sort of serve as cross functional connective tissue, a generalist in the seauite, but really my job is to help the organization reach its full potential.
Whitney’s Career Path
So my background was a bit winding. It wasn’t intentional but I’ve loved the path that I’ve taken. I started my career at Google as an APMM which is an entry-level rotational program in product marketing. And I loved starting my career in product marketing because it was very crossfunctional. I got to work with product and engineering and figure out what we were building, why we were building it, how we should launch it, and then work with go to market across marketing and sales to help bring that product to life. And so I had the opportunity from an early stage in my career to interface with many parts of technology organizations and teams which I really loved to help set a foundation of working cross functionally.
I spent about 4 years at Google doing that, after which I joined a growth stage fintech startup based in London called go-kardless. I was there for a bit to lead product marketing. So again focused on really enabling the organization, working cross functionally and helping us acquire and activate new customers.
After that I joined a seedstage AI startup called relay which was in the AI agent builder space. So think similar to Zapier or NADN but truly AI native from day zero. And there I was the first non-engineering hire. So I was primarily responsible for growth and marketing but did a little bit of everything across the company all the way from when we were just eight employees when I joined.
I after that decided I had sort of seen tech companies of all stages from big tech to growth stage to early stage and I wanted to take that experience and see what it would be like to invest in tech companies. And so I joined a venture capital firm called M13 where I was on the investment team for about 2 years primarily investing in seed and series A AI startups. One of those startups that M13 invested in was Maven AGI. And so from the early days I had exposure to the company and the leadership team and loved what they were building. And after a couple years investing I felt I really was eager to be back building and to be alongside a team handinhand working together building the future of technology and so decided to make the leap back to operating and joined Maven AGI on our leadership team about a month ago.
What attracted Whitney to Maven AGI
I was excited to join Maven for a few reasons. So first and foremost, I think there’s just a huge opportunity to transform how enterprise work using AI. Maven has started in customer support and success. And so we’re focused on helping companies better serve their customers, answering their questions, help them get answers, help them better use the product, find more ways, more opportunities and solve things. And so doing that with AI enables the organization to really focus on what they do best which is building and delivering their product. And Maven can take care of the customer support and success.
But what’s really exciting about Maven, and is why I joined, is we’ve built a very foundational platform. So the platform that enables us to do AI powered customer support is actually very modular and can be built for all different functions within the enterprise. And so we’re excited to go beyond just this reactive model of customer support to doing more proactive support and outreach to customers to then moving into what would feel more like sales or marketing. And so we have this vision to be the endto-end customer platform that helps companies serve their customers with AI all the way from before they’re a customer to when they’re a happy customer renewing, you know, time and time again. And so I love the foundational technology we’ve built. I think it’s incredibly interesting from a future of AI perspective. And so that was a big piece of it.
The second piece is just the team. It’s an exceptional team that has worked together for many years across amazing technology companies like Google, HubSpot, Adobe, Stripe, etc. And the team brings all of that background together to build the future. And so I was really inspired by the ambition of the team, how well they work together and how they’re tackling this opportunity hand in hand. So for me it was really a combination of the technology and the opportunity that created and belief that this is the team to make it happen.
Why now is a great time to join Maven AGI
Now is an incredible time to join an AI startup. We are seeing a technology shift like never before. I’ve been around tech companies for 10 years and I’ve never seen a shift like the one that we’re going through right now. And so I think it’s an amazing opportunity to join Maven or any AI startup to really be at the forefront of the future of technology. I think we’re finding that with the rate of change now is the moment to be on board to be part of that change, to help create that change, and the opportunities that come from it are really endless.
And so even at Maven, we’re finding that the employees who join, there’s so much opportunity to like uplevel what they’re doing with AI to do their jobs better and be more effective. And so one of the great reasons to be at one of these companies right now is to be a part of that and to be at the forefront of this cutting edge technology shift that’s going on. And it’s a lot of fun. We’re, I mean we’re having a blast. We’re like figuring things out as we go, building the plane as we’re flying it, so to speak. But that’s what makes these companies so exciting right now. And so the energy is high. There’s a lot of positivity. And it’s a great opportunity to be at an AI startup right now.