Episode 4: Interview with Jessica Zwaan, COO of Whereby

Inspiring Legal

Thank you for listening to Inspiring Legal.

Full episode transcription:

Welcome to Inspiring Legal, the podcast for in-house legal.
Get insights, learn from peers, life lessons from some of the most influential GCs.
If it's related to in-house legal, we cover it.
For more inspiration, go to Openli.com slash community.
Welcome to this episode of Inspiring Legal.
I am sitting with a person that has a super inspiring background, career, and also a journey that I am stoked about telling you.
I am sitting with Jessica.
She is with a legal background, working for a Norwegian company in New York, and is the COO.
Welcome, Jessica.
Thank you so much, Stine. I am really excited to be here.
We are, as you know, a community of people with legal backgrounds working at tech companies and inspiring each other to really get a sense of what it is like to be a legal professional.
A sense of what opportunities lie ahead.
Where can we take ourselves and the journey and our careers?
Can you maybe tell people a little bit about you and your background and where you are today?
Absolutely.
As you mentioned, I am the Chief Operating Officer of a company called Whereby.
Whereby is a Norwegian company.
We are based in Norway, but we have multiple entities and we are fully remote.
We have a presence in the US, which is where I currently am in New York.
I look after the people, talent, legal, customer support, finance, and general business operations functions at Whereby.
Prior to that, I have had a background primarily in people operations.
I worked in people operations for a very long time.
I actually finished my law degree doing my dissertation in the legal implications of remote working cross-border in the EU.
I have always been more on the employment side of things.
Employment contract.
What made you transition into people, then legal, and then such a broad role that you have today?
I think, first of all, asking 17-year-olds to pick what they want to do for their career and their degree is insane to me.
But, of course, when I was 17, I, like everybody else, was picking which path I wanted to walk at university.
At the time, I actually was all set to go into a law degree in the University of Queensland in Australia.
Then I had worked so hard to get into that program.
All of my family kept saying, well, I have a very large family, which I think makes a difference to the story.
A lot of my family kept saying, it's going to be so difficult.
You're going to be studying for years and years.
It's going to be impossible.
There's so much reading to do.
You know how hard law exams are.
Everyone is always crying.
Me, being 17, was like, oh, my gosh, I've only just finished finishing high school.
I don't want to do this.
It was really scary.
So I actually pulled out of my law degree.
I didn't even start it.
I pulled out two weeks before I was due to start and moved into a communications degree.
I did my communications degree.
I've got to say, I think the whole time I kind of didn't really enjoy it.
I kind of picked it at the last minute because I wanted something else and I thought that maybe this was a line to do things I was good at.
And I ended up starting to work in people operations a little out of, you know,
I think a lot of people kind of fall into something when you're kind of 19, 20.
And I was offered an internship and then a graduate role at BHP Billiton.
But I actually really loved it.
And I really particularly loved industrial relations.
Again, a lot of the team there had legal backgrounds.
And I really loved HRBP work, which again, HR, so much HR work is very,
very close to the kind of law that I probably would have looked at doing anyway,
which is on the contract and employment side.
But I also really like the commercial side of things.
And I think that's actually something that I'm really grateful that I had the chance to do.
I think that if I would have just gone down the law path when I was 17,
I would have probably ended up working in an employment firm, maybe would never even gone in-house.
I don't know. You never know these things, right, with retrospect.
But it gave me the chance to really get to know how much I liked the kind of commercial side of the business as well,
like workforce planning and understanding organizational design.
And that's what really drove the next couple of years of my career as I moved into more
and more strategic people operations positions.
And then I reached this point where I, you know, life is short.
And I said, well, I finished my CIPD diploma and I really enjoyed the employment law portion.
And it was something that I was kind of sick of paying for employment lawyers to be advising me on everything.
And I thought I've always wanted to do this.
I might as well just do my law degree finally after all these years.
So I enrolled and I worked full time and finished my law degree with full time,
which was an extreme couple of years of my life.
And I really haven't looked back.
Yes, it's intense. It's intense. But it was great. I loved it.
It was. Did you feel like it was a nice compliment?
I feel like work can be so chaotic, but like law degrees are so like read this book,
complete this, you know, practical, whatever it needs to be, just like check the boxes.
And I was like, this is almost like meditative.
It's so easy to like I can I can read this and then you go back to work and it's like everything spinning around you and changing all the time.
I know. Anyway, I really enjoyed that. That part of it.
I'm thinking about how do you go from being in Australia and then like working with people,
taking your law degree full time and ending up in Norway as the COO.
So I never actually worked in Norway.
I was working in the UK for the Norwegian company.
But how the transition happened to the UK is, I mean, so I'm a first generation university graduate.
My parents had never been to university.
And for them, really, their vision of success was finish your degree, whatever that is, and get a job.
And once you've done those two things, then you don't need to do anything else for the rest of your life.
And like I, you know, the world is obviously so much bigger than that,
but it's really difficult if you haven't got role models in your life that have done more than,
like that haven't got more experience than they're expecting from you, if that makes sense.
So I started working for BHP off the back of my graduation and I was there for almost four years.
I really loved the job and I really loved my team.
And I had a dog and a house and a car and furniture and all this stuff.
And my manager slash mentor at the time, Monica, actually, we had a one to one together.
And I just explained to her that I was looking for something bigger to work on at work.
I felt like there's more things that we could be doing and I was working on interesting projects.
We just wrapped up this really great project around increasing representation of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander members of the community and into the business.
And she said, have you thought about just leaving and moving to a different country?
And I was so offended at the time. I was like, oh, my God, she's trying to fire me.
This is so unprofessional. And then I, you know, we obviously had a long conversation
and I realized that actually what she was trying to get me to do is just to make my world bigger.
And she did say, like, you're always welcome back. You can always come back to the team.
We still are connected to this day. But I really think that without having somebody
that had kind of like this broader perspective on life really just say to me, like, try something di...