The People Make the Company: Why One CEO Demands Criticism From Her Team

Does your CEO insist on a founder interview for every potential hire?

How about a mandatory “What could I do better?” feedback question?

Do they take genuine responsibility for decisions not just when things go well but when they fall apart too?

Not many CEO’s probably check each of those boxes, but Roxanne Petraeus, CEO of Ethena, definitely does.

Enterprise organizations with 50,000+ employees rely on Ethena’s compliance training platform. And currently there’s just 60 employees at Ethena running the show. Their fully remote-first team also boasts a four-year average employee tenure.

That success with customers and employees isn’t incidental. In her episode of Culture Creators, Roxanne talks through those leadership decisions and the partnership with her Chief People Officer.

Here’s 3 themes that sum up Roxanne’s approach to building a workplace people don’t want to leave.

“Maybe” Isn’t An Option When Hiring

Of course every CEO and CPO will say hiring is important. But not many leaders put in the work to prove just how important it is.

Roxanne states it clearly: The people make the company. There’s nothing outside of the people.

What hiring looks like at Ethena:

Roxanne and her co-founder conduct a founder interview for every hire, regardless of seniority or role. Yes, that means Roxanne interviewed every single one of the 60 employees currently working at Ethena. This signals to the whole company that hiring is always the top priority, no matter what else is happening.

The team at Ethena also runs a dedicated values interview. That interviewer specifically looks for alignment with the company’s four values: humorous human, play to win, excellence, and embrace feedback.

Does Roxanne think every company should run a values interview? Definitely not. As she puts it, “Don't have a values interview if you don't want to make a decision based on it.” But Ethena turns down candidates who pass every other stage but fail the values interview.

When hiring managers feel under pressure to get hiring done, they may feel tempted to rationalize a borderline candidate, someone that could “maybe” do the job really well. (You’ve probably seen this happen.) But with the founder interview and values interview in place, “maybe” can’t survive as the standard.

This setup also helps Roxanne and the team identify strong performers who don’t look like strong performers on paper. Her Chief People Officer proved this. At the time she was hired, Melanie had no public profile and no history working conferences. But in the Ethena environment, she excelled.

Methodical hiring like this creates space to see past surface signals. But you have to hold the discipline in both directions. When it’s not working, act quickly.

Accountability Reinforces Culture

Roxanne credits the principle of “It’s always my fault” to Andy Dunn, Bonobos founder and Ethena angel investor. If something is broken in your professional environment, you have more agency over it than you’re currently using.

Roxanne is explicit about the underlying rule. It would be unfair to say “Melanie is in charge of culture” and then quietly undermine that authority through informal decisions. The CEO's behavior must stay consistent with what the CPO has actually been given authority over.

How responsibility shows up

In the CEO-CPO relationship, this expectation means the person who makes the call owns the accountability for it — and the other person backs them.

For instance, Roxanne and Melanie disagreed on back-channeling candidates. Roxanne told Melanie directly: “I am back-channeling, and you can know about it or not, but I am not going to tell you I won't do this and then do it anyway."

They worked toward a middle path with guardrails. From that point, it was Roxanne's call, but Melanie had Roxanne's full public backing if it went wrong. She would never let Melanie take the blame.

In another instance, Melanie announced a perk rollback at a leadership meeting and VPs pushed back. Roxanne stepped in and made clear the pushback was not welcome. The CPO made a hard call. As CEO, she defended it in the room.

Criticism Is Mandatory

When someone’s been sitting on something (a complaint, a worry, any sort of negative feedback) it’s easy to feel like they need to manufacture the right moment to bring it up. Roxanne combats this with her direct reports through Feedback Friday.

Feedback Friday acts as a pressure valve so that Roxanne’s people don’t hold back their feedback, especially the stuff that feels negative.

How Feedback Friday runs

It’s weekly and bidirectional because specificity decays fast. By the time you’re doing quarterly feedback, you can’t recall the particular moments that would make the feedback useful.

Both parties, so Roxanne and each direct report, fill in two boxes: 1) something the other person did well, and 2) something they could have done better. The constructive slot is mandatory. It can’t be replaced by a third positive observation.

Roxanne also gives in-the-moment feedback, like directly after a call or meeting, while the specifics are fresh. The Feedback Friday system and the in-the-moment habit work together to create a feedback loop.

Culture Is the Worst Behavior You’ll Tolerate

That’s Roxanne’s informal definition of culture. So it makes sense that the Ethena team sets high expectations from the start and throughout all the roles at the company.

By partnering closely with her CPO, they form a united front for culture and behavior.

Watch or listen to Roxanne’s episode of Culture Creators:

• YouTube
• Culture Creators

Culture Creators is produced by Nectar in partnership with SHRM.

What Is Culture Creators?

Culture Creators is the podcast for people leaders who want more than inspiration. Each episode delivers proven strategies, real frameworks, and hard lessons behind building great workplace culture — straight from the world’s best CHROs, founders, and executives.

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