Laura Del Beccaro - From Software Engineer to Startup CEO to Successful Exit
Many of us might wonder what it’s like to lead a company from startup to successful exit. I know I have. To get a behind-the-scenes look at this journey I spoke with Laura Del Beccaro about her journey from co-founder and CEO of Sora to its acquisition by ADP. It was such an insightful conversation, especially how Laura learned to tame her perfectionist ways.
We talked about:
Why she started Sora
How she handled mistakes as a CEO
What she learned about perfectionism
How they decided to look to be acquired
The challenges of leading through acquisition
Why the job changes every six months
Can you share a bit of background about your career and what’s influenced you?
I grew up outside of Philadelphia and had a really lovely, frankly privileged childhood. My parents were those people who signed their kids up for everything. So I had like seven after-school activities. I did so many sports and musical instruments and all the things.
I went to school in California. I don’t remember this, but apparently I called my parents on the first day and said, “I thought you were smart. How could you have grown up in California and then moved to the cold?” They knew that I was never coming back. I have been in California ever since, although I love Philly and my heart will always have a place on the East Coast. I started my career in management consulting and then worked at a few different tech companies as a sales engineer, and a software engineer, and then I joined a VC as a software engineer.
In the back of my head, I've always wanted to start a company. I felt like joining the VC world would get my head space in that realm. I would meet a lot of founders and see for myself whether it was something I wanted to do. The biggest thing I got from that experience was realizing that founders are human. I don't normally suffer from a lot of imposter syndrome, but there was this glow around the word “founder.” After meeting a lot of founders, I was in awe of all of them, but I also saw “Oh, you are humans with some strengths and some weaknesses and I have some of those too”.
After a year at that VC firm, my husband was struggling with something at work in his new role as a People Operations Manager. I helped him with that problem and realized that lots of businesses probably have that problem. All the stars aligned and I got excited about the mission. I started Sora in 2018, and just sold it in August of this year.
I can’t wait to get into all of that. By the way, I grew up playing five instruments. What were your instruments?
Mine were piano and cello and a little bit of violin. What about you?
I played the piano and then I wandered through flute, oboe, flute clarinet, oboe, and handbells.
That's amazing.
I learned the ukulele and the guitar as an adult. I wish I could have played violin or cello. They seemed intimidating.
That's funny. I'm very intimidated by the oboe and all the things that you said. Like it's just what you're comfortable with, you know.
Totally. And the double reeds of an oboe are no joke. Which was harder, the cello or the violin?
Both are hard for different reasons. The parts that the violin has are typically more complex. Cello is a little bit more of a background piece, but the range of the cello, I don't know, different things make that one harder. It's been a while since I've played either, sadly.
On to the main topic. How did Sora come about?
Yes. So getting back to that problem my husband was having, he is Mr. Engagement. He's the life of every party he's ever been to. He's so welcoming and loving. He wasn’t loving his customer-facing role so his company created a People role for him. He was particularly excited about and in charge of employee onboarding — he was going to welcome everyone to the company and make an out-of-this-world onboarding process.
He had all these ideas for initiatives he wanted to implement, but he got to zero of those things, because onboarding meant all of the logistics and a lot of administrative work that he just didn't anticipate.
He improved the process a little bit and made things more efficient, but it was like 100% of his job was just getting a laptop and a desk set up for people. They were hiring 20 or 30 people a month – not that wild, but a volume to the point where it was taking up all of his time. He was miserable. He did not have this role created so that he could be setting up laptops.
I was a software engineer at the time, and I helped him write a very hacky script that sat behind a Google sheet to automate certain communications like emails and calendar invites. So if the new hire was a Barcelona office, but starting in London, they needed a different welcome email than if the new hire was a Seattle person starting in San Francisco. Our little hacky script accounted for all those things and saved him 15 or 20 hours a week, just from the communications part. Then he was finally able to start building some of the programs he was excited about.
The new hires’ feedback was amazing, and then we started getting feature requests, for lack of a better word, from other teams. IT wanted its version of the spreadsheet, but with a subset of fields because they didn’t need to see payroll stuff. Sales Ops wanted their version of the spreadsheet, but only for sales new hires. It got hard to keep this up. It was becoming its own mini product, like an internal product within the organization — but I had a full-time job elsewhere.
That’s when we started realizing this was a multi-stakeholder problem, and there were serious needs here. We tried to look around to see if there were any existing solutions, but couldn't find anything. So that’s how the idea for Sora was born.
Sora morphed into a company that helped empower HR teams to spend more time with people and less time in spreadsheets, because we were automating the tedious work — from communications in email or Slack or texting, to integrations with all the different HR tools, to data collection, and all kinds of things to cover as much of the employee experience as we could.
Our goal was to help teams scale employee experiences. Even as you get large, we still wanted to make it feel human, both by enabling the HR team to spend time with humans and by making sure our product was meeting employees where they were, sending emails that felt like they were coming from a human (not like you're part of this giant, automated system).
One of the partners at First Round advised me to start by interviewing people. Just do a bunch of customer discovery — and keep talking to people until you're not learning anything new. Because engineers and product builder types tend to just start building. But it’s very easy to start building something that nobody wants. So I started interviewing a ton, trying to find the focus of the problem we would solve and the features that would be super necessary, and painting a picture of the product we would build to pitch it to them and hear their feedback.
I love that. When I was COO I also ran the people department. I’m not sure folks outside of that area understand the amount of administrative minutia that’s involved. Most get into those roles because they care about people and they want to make a better experience.
Right, right.
What was that transition like? Did you go get funding? Was it a slow burn? How did that transition from software engineer to co-founder and CEO of Sora?
I was working at First Round Capital, and they're one of the best early-stage VC funds. They were so supportive of me leaving to start a company, which helped a lot because I probably would have had guilt about leaving otherwise. I decided to take a month off for myself because I thought I was probably not gonna have a break for a long time, and then I got started.
One of the partners at First Round advised me to start by interviewing people. Just do a bunch of customer discovery — and keep talking to people until you're not learning anything new. Because engineers and product builder types tend to just start building. But it’s very easy to start building something that nobody wants. So I started interviewing a ton, trying to find the focus of the problem we would solve and the features that would be super necessary, and painting a picture of the product we would build to pitch it to them and hear their feedback.
I used a lot of First Round connections and my connections to try to talk to as many People and HR leaders as I could. Along the way, a few investors found out what I was working on and approached me. That felt so cool. I still remember the feeling when X person reached out to me — I felt so, so special. At some point, a very prominent angel investor said to me, “It seems like you're doing all the right things. I think you could accelerate if we started to raise a seed round for you.”
It mattered to me that First Found participate in my investment round. I had wanted to impress them while I was working there so that they would invest in my potential future company. If they didn't, everyone would ask, why did these people who know you so well not invest in you? So I was nervous. But in the end, we did end up raising a sort of pre-seed. First Round and the angel investor who was helping me (Elad Gil) led the round. We filled in a bunch of investors, tried from the start to make our cap table as diverse as possible, and brought in a lot of different voices that could help.
In July 2018 I officially started working on a business plan and talking to people. In September I recruited my co-founder, who had been my favorite manager in my career. In December 2018 we raised this round. We’d just started coding.
The job changes every six months. It's not just every round, it's all the time. I remember a lot of the inflection points like, I should not write code anymore. Then I should not look at code anymore. The job keeps fundamentally changing, which keeps it interesting.
When did you begin hiring?
That round enabled us to start building a team. We got a mini office — it was very small and did not have any windows. I can't believe they passed that as an office. But we hired a couple of engineers. We hired a marketing person, which was more of just an opportune timing kind of thing. We had worked with him, and he was brilliant. Marketing probably wouldn't have been our first hire normally, but he happened to be the right fit and helped a ton in the early days and is still with Sora today. So yeah, we started hiring pretty soon after that first round of capital was raised.
How fast did you scale up the team? How big did the team get before you sold?
One of our first principles was that we wanted to grow thoughtfully rather than grow for the sake of growth. We’d seen a lot of startups, including one that we had worked at, scale sales because they thought that would scale revenue and that's just not how it works. So we tried to be intentional about every single person we brought onto the team. Sometimes we did better at that than others, frankly. Sometimes when we had a lot of investor pressure about revenue, we did give in and occasionally we had to correct mistakes of hiring too quickly. But in those early days, we only had five, or six people for a pretty long time. Then COVID happened. That's when we raised our second round. We started raising in February 2020, which was the absolute worst timing. We barely cobbled together a round in March 2020. We were still meeting VCs in person, but they were starting to pound instead of shake hands. Like everyone was starting to not touch, but we weren't quite on lockdown yet. After that round, we hired a few more engineers and grew to 10 - 13 employees and stayed around that size for a long time. Then we raised our series A, which was a lot larger and we scaled to about 25 - 30 people.
It’s an interesting question about who we bring on board and how we think about the roles because as you add more people you spend more time managing and leading people not just on the product.
The job changes every six months. It's not just every round, it's all the time. I remember a lot of the inflection points like, I should not write code anymore. Then I should not look at code anymore. The job keeps fundamentally changing, which keeps it interesting.
You're constantly evaluating the cost-benefit. Also, frankly, there are many times when I don't want to do X thing anymore. It's affecting my mental health, or it's affecting my time spent on other things or whatever it is. But it will cost this much and we have to ramp that person up and there's all kinds of different variables to consider for every single hire you're making, especially when you're trying to be so intentional about it.
Before that, had you been in leadership and management roles?
No. I am very, very type-A and obsessively organized — I have a life plan and I've been going according to it the whole time. My life plan involved first becoming a manager. I think management is the most important thing. I think almost all startups get it wrong. I wanted to be the most amazing manager and then start a company. But the timing didn't work out that way, which is probably the only thing I've ever not followed according to my plan.
The timing happened such that I hadn't yet gotten into management or leadership at all going in. I remember talking to a mentor of mine, Whitnie at First Round, who said, “You don't have to have been a manager to be a thoughtful manager. You have been managed by multiple people and you know what has and hasn’t worked for you. Caring about your team is more than half of management anyway — you can definitely do it.”
That helped pump me up and not freak out about this gap in my skills because as I only really understand in hindsight, there were eight million gaps in what I was about to do as a founder and CEO. I could not have prepared no matter how type-A I was, but no, I had not technically had any management experience.
I remember the first person I managed was a thoughtful manager himself. It's part of why we hired him to be our head of engineering at the time. I was nervous — “How am I going to learn to manage this guy who already is a better manager than me?” But he made it easy and I ended up loving it a lot.
One thing I struggled with was that when I saw a problem, I wanted to have the perfect solution. I never wanted to deal with this problem again, so I would spend so much time to come up with a whole new communication strategy. It took me so many times to realize that the next step just has to be the next. It can’t be the last step. Even if I found the perfect solution, it would need would change in six months again. So what is the point of spending so much time and energy to make it absolutely perfect?
I love that you had a plan and then you made a different one. As a leader, you hadn't done these things before but you just jumped right in and did it. What were the indications it was time to stop looking at code or stop doing some things? How did you figure that out when to move away from doing? It’s important for startup leaders.
Yeah. I think it usually stemmed from a problem bubbling up. I wasn't able to review the code as quickly anymore and it's slowing us down because I'm doing all this other stuff that's at a higher strategic level. If I keep doing this I'm blocking the team, I need to let it go. It's often like some kind of trigger that forces you to decide that X needs to change.
Our communications were so easy when we were six people. And everybody talks about growing pains — even from six to 10 people, it's different. You're not meeting with everyone, you're not seeing them every day. Also, right around that time, we all went remote because of COVID and decided to stay fully remote forever. That changed communication a lot. My job changed a ton when we went remote and when we went from six to 10 people.
Introspection was a really important piece. When something felt off, I had to just dig into it and figure out why that was — because I could tell I was not giving this the attention it deserved, I could tell I was kind of holding on to something because of whatever psychological thing is going on in my head, etc. It was important to be able to see that stuff as objectively as possible and figure out the best next step.
One thing I struggled with was that when I saw a problem, I wanted to have the perfect solution. I never wanted to deal with this problem again, so I would spend so much time to come up with a whole new communication strategy. It took me so many times to realize that the next step just has to be the next. It can’t be the last step. Even if I found the perfect solution, it would need would change in six months again. So what is the point of spending so much time and energy to make it absolutely perfect?
Although I didn't wanna lose the thoughtfulness of trying to make sure it was a good solution. There was a constant battle.
What was one of the biggest lessons you learned as a new leader and CEO?
I have read hundreds of times that all CEOs make mistakes. But I convinced myself that if I read enough of the articles and was careful enough, I would somehow never make mistakes. Of course that didn’t happen, so I had to learn to accept them. I’ve seen leaders react to mistakes very differently — some blame others, some just act like they didn't happen, etc. The importance of admitting things, both admitting mistakes and admitting that you don't know things — those were really big learnings for me. I gained way more respect from my team when I admitted I didn’t know something than when I did know the path forward.
There are nuances to this. I can't say “I'm really freaked out. I have no idea what the direction of the company is.” That's genuinely more distracting than helpful, but saying, “I feel really strongly about this, I don't know exactly where the roadmap needs to go for us to get there, but I want us to all think about this” empowered the team and empowered me to not feel so much pressure to know it all. That is a huge learning that has helped me in my entire career since then.
It’s so wonderful. I’m chuckling because I so relate. I’m a recovering Type A and always will be. I know that about myself. To go from being admittedly Type A to accepting that you’ll make mistakes is a pretty big transition.
Yeah, recovering type A is such a good way to put it. I'm working on applying that everywhere in my life. My husband and I are thinking about starting a family soon. I’ve already read 12 parenting books and we're not even trying to get pregnant yet. And I do love learning about these things, but I'm working in therapy on figuring out how to be okay with things not being perfect.
I get that. As a CEO your role changes every six months. That’s not a lot of time to prepare.
Right. Every strength and weakness I've ever had is a double-edged sword. The over-preparing did help me a ton in some ways and in other ways, I had to blow it up. The perfectionism kind of streak that I have has been hard for my mental health, has been hard in other areas of my life, *and* it helped me get my career and the company to where it got. So I'm both trying to work on it and trying to accept it as a beautiful thing in some ways, you know.
I have read hundreds of times that all CEOs make mistakes. But I convinced myself that if I read enough of the articles and was careful enough, I would somehow never make mistakes. Of course that didn’t happen, so I had to learn to accept them. I’ve seen leaders react to mistakes very differently — some blame others, some just act like they didn't happen, etc. The importance of admitting things, both admitting mistakes and admitting that you don't know things — those were really big learnings for me. I gained way more respect from my team when I admitted I didn’t know something than when I did know the path forward.
I don’t know about you but what I’ve learned on my own journey is that hyper-responsibility is part of my Type A perfectionism. I will not let things drop. I got it. Operationally you can trust me to get it done. I don’t know if you felt that way too.
Yeah, and knowing that is important. It was important for me to work with people who also wouldn't let things slip because it would freak me out — it wouldn’t be a good match. I often joke that my husband is not like that. Sometimes he says he'll do something by Friday and he doesn't do it by Friday and I am flabbergasted. I cannot imagine that happening — it gives me physical anxiety. But then I realize everyone at his company would die for my husband. They love him. They would never care about this random Friday deadline, like he is adding so much value just in a completely different way. It was hard for me to open up my mind.
It feels like you really transformed who you are as a human, manager, and leader by jumping into the cold, deep end of the pool. All credit to you for that.
Yeah. Totally. I think that is a great way to put it.
I got unlimited data points for therapy through this founder journey. You are thrown every kind of thing. You have to examine every piece of yourself. I often say making the jump in the first place was by far the hardest part. It was terrifying to do the jump. Then as soon as you're in it, it's like, oh, this is just my job. I have to figure out the pieces of the job.
It’s a harder job than I've ever had before, but it doesn't feel as terrifying once you're in it. It’s just, “Oh, I know the next thing I have to do. Then I figure out the next thing I have to do and go from there. With everything changing every six months, it’s obvious we need a change and we’re going to do it. It happens naturally but you need to be adaptable for sure. That was a learned skill in my case.
How did you support your growth and learning as a CEO? Was there anything in particular that you did? Because clearly, you're being introspective and that takes time or energy or resources or people or something.
Our circle of investors was particularly special. That was by design. We wanted to work with a thoughtful, diverse group of investors. Any question, concern, or insecurity I was having, it felt like there was someone I could go to about that thing. And First Round, in particular, Elad Gil, and a couple of others were so proactive, not just reactive. It was like “It sounds like in your last couple of investor updates, there's some wavering sales confidence. Do you want this completely free program with a sales expert who's unbelievable, who will work with you over the next six weeks on revamping your entire sales process?” First Round did that for us and it was life-changing. There was a lot of support from the people that we had placed around us. It was invaluable.
I got unlimited data points for therapy through this founder journey. You are thrown every kind of thing. You have to examine every piece of yourself. I often say making the jump in the first place was by far the hardest part. It was terrifying to do the jump. Then as soon as you're in it, it's like, oh, this is just my job. I have to figure out the pieces of the job.
How did you know it was time for acquisition?
The initial thinking about the acquisition process started because of a couple of things. One, a few companies started approaching us so it put the idea in our heads. Two, the tech market had just melted (it was the latter half of 2022) after all the wild somewhat bubbly growth. We were facing a much harder go-to-market strategy with the market in general. And we were at this interesting inflection point. We had a lot of really happy, amazing customers, but sales were tough in this market. We had a decent amount – two years of runway — in the bank and we could double down and figure this out. Or we could become part of an existing go-to-market motion — some larger HR company that's already selling and already has hundreds of thousands of customers, we could join forces to sell to those and achieve the same impact and scale. The impact our product had on customers was very important to us. That was a lot of what kept us going. We thought we could scale that by getting acquired potentially much more easily than by somehow figuring out the very tough market, which by the way, was particularly tough for HR tech because HR budgets are some of the first to go.
My co-founder and I had this whole long day where we sat and drew out all of the paths. We decided we were going to throw everything at the wall. “We’re going to start the acquisition process but in the meantime, we’re going to throw everything at the wall to see if we can find some kind of long-term go-to-market strategy that will work.” We didn’t give up on either path.
As we started the acquisition process, we started asking ourselves, “Okay, what are the outcomes we care about?” We wanted everyone on our team to get a job. We wanted to pay back investors. We would have loved to have some kind of financial outcome for ourselves. We would have loved to have roles at the new company that we were excited about and that maybe we couldn't have gotten if in a normal case, we're just interviewing for them. We talked about our best case scenario and our minimum requirements before the acquisition process started, which was very helpful — because as soon as the acquisition process starts, it is such a roller coaster, and your emotions and all the logic are all over the place.
The other really important variable was that we only had one outside board member. Our board was only my co-founder, myself, and our series A lead. She approached me to say that she would be supportive of acquisition, which was very helpful because there's this kind of taboo that you're not supposed to talk about acquisition with your investors. They might think that you have one foot out the door. They might think your heart's not in it. And the next time you need to raise from your existing investors, they might say, well, we don't know if she's really in it for the long haul. I don't think that's true anymore because, in this market, investors want you to do the practical thing and the thing that's right for the company. Sometimes that is looking for acquisition, even if it's earlier than they would have wanted. In this case, the fact that she came to me lifted a huge weight off of our shoulders and was a big catalyst for this.
The acquisition process involved making a very long list of companies that could potentially acquire us, figuring out how we could get introduced to all of them, and talking to them about our basic story, where we have come so far, and why we're thinking about acquisition, which was, again, this inflection point in our go-to-market strategy. We talked to quite a few companies. It was very time-intensive to talk to all these different companies, to pitch the entire team — not just the product, but the team and everything about your business that you've ever thought of.
Acquisitions are hard. I was COO when Travis CI was acquired. It is a roller coaster. It’s like having two jobs at once. And then how transparent can you be with the team?
Yeah. On that last point, a big part of what made it so difficult is that the leading advice says “do not tell anyone at your company that this is happening.” It can be distracting — some people really want it to happen, and then if it doesn't happen, they're disappointed and they want to leave. Some people really do not want it to happen and they'll leave because of it and that could mess up everything. I mean, there are so many things that can go wrong.
And that was very different. Not telling the team was very different than the way we'd been running the company for five years. There was a lot of emotional strain for me to not only talk to the company in a different way than I was talking to my co-founder and behaving behind the scenes, but also to throw everything at the wall to try to see if we could get go-to-market off the ground. That required a lot of energy.
I had to meet new people and get them extremely excited about our business on a call in the middle of the day, and then immediately go back to, “okay, what's the next go-to-market play?”
I typically love being under pressure. I have always kind of liked that about myself, that I like pressure, but this pressure was unlike anything I have ever seen and I hope it is unlike anything I will see in the future. It was really, really stressful. A lot of founders talk about that, and that was helpful to kind of set my expectations, but it was even worse than I anticipated, to be totally frank.
It was two jobs that both required a hundred percent. Leading through acquisition was probably one of the hardest parts of my Sora journey.
We did at some point bring our leadership team into the fold and let them know that the acquisition was happening and we were thinking about it. I think one of the things we got right was building trust with employees from the beginning. I had confidence that when we told them, whatever the outcome might be, they would have trusted that we were always thinking about their best interests and what was best for the company.
When we did announce, on the day that the acquisition closed, we explained the history of how it came about. It was very helpful to be able to share that retrospectively. I wish we had been a little more transparent earlier, but this type of process does require a certain level of confidentiality. Everyone was extremely understanding, which made it a lot easier and made me happy.
Emotional strain is a great phrase. There’s a lot of strain trying to do two things at once. I felt like I wasn’t doing either one very well.
Yes, totally. And there's a lot of identity. I mean, I've been a founder for five years, I might not be anymore. I love certain pieces about this job, but there are pieces about the job that I don't like and I want to stop. I care a ton about the employment of all 30 people here. There's just so much want and so much on the line.
I typically love being under pressure. I have always kind of liked that about myself, that I like pressure, but this pressure was unlike anything I have ever seen and I hope it is unlike anything I will see in the future. It was really, really stressful. A lot of founders talk about that, and that was helpful to kind of set my expectations, but it was even worse than I anticipated, to be totally frank.
I love that you talked about that. What advice would you give to someone else in a similar position wondering about acquisition?
The first thing I would do before you start any conversations, or even if you're already in the middle of the process, is just sit down and write down everything that you're proud of. Because it's very hard not to get wrapped up in “if the exit isn't successful, I am not successful, the company wasn't successful at all.” But writing down ahead of time: “We created this really special culture where we didn't have any regrettable attrition;everyone loved working there. Even if we failed and sold for zero, that is a success and I am proud of that.” That really helped me.
This type of process is just constantly up and down in your own head and it's way too easy to spiral. So having those things to fall back on meant that no matter what, I'm not a failure. In fact, this was successful.
Take care of yourself and do not wrap too much of your identity around it. You are doing the best you can and you have already done so much. And that is hard but very important to keep in mind.