VC Voices: Owl Ventures’ Judy Park on ‘one of the largest issues of our lifetime’

For Judy Park, principal at Owl Ventures, “the future of our people, especially in our current state of increasing AI evolution, economic inequality, and political instability, is one of the largest issues of our lifetime”.

Despite this, learning and HR tech has historically faced underinvestment. Investors are starting to realize that there are massive opportunities from these technologies to solve societal challenges.

“It is inherently a hopeful and optimistic space looking to positively impact our future,” adds Park.

Her interest in learning and work tech is also “deeply personal and meaningful…as an immigrant who moved to the US when I was nine years old looking for better opportunities”.

The VC firm where Park works is the world’s largest focused on learning tech – it has invested more than $2 billion in the space over the past decade, and that’s in global opportunities and at all investment stages.

While Owl Ventures invests across the entire learning spectrum – “whether the learning happens in schools, home, or the workplace” – some standout portfolio companies for Park in the workforce segment include Degreed, Workera, Interplay Learning, Class Technologies and Thrive Global.

UNLEASH is thrilled to welcome Park as our VC Voice for November. In this exclusive interview, we dig in Parks’ career to date, and get her insight into the future of learning, and its transformative potential in the world of work and society at large.

Allie Nawrat: How did you get into investing? What is one piece of advice you would give to your younger self?

Judy Park: I honestly got into investing by luck. I knew that I’ve always wanted a career that was intellectually stimulating and generated positive impact; I’ve always loved learning about new things and thinking about an optimistic future.

In college, I picked an interdisciplinary social sciences major with a focus on inequality. I loved learning about different disciplines, and thinking about solutions to our world’s most pressing issues.

When it came to picking a career, I prioritized careers where I could learn the most coming out of college, especially in business where I thought I could pick up invaluable skills to apply throughout my career. Consulting and finance were recommended to me as great training grounds, and I luckily got a summer internship offer with an investment firm that valued analytical and research skills.

I fell in love with investing that summer. I honestly couldn’t believe a career like this existed, where you get paid to learn and try to predict the future – how societies will change, how people will behave, and which organizations might thrive in the long-term.

Doing all of this focused on a sector like education with immense potential for widespread societal and deep individual impact, such as the one that I experienced in my personal life, has been a dream. I love being able to work with various mission-oriented founders on their visions of making the world a better place.

One piece of advice I would give to my younger self is your career is long, but life is short.

When I was young, especially as a woman, I felt pressured to have my entire career ‘figured out’ in my 20s. Now I know everyone is continuously ‘figuring it out’ – always learning and taking it day by day.

Careers evolve over a lifetime, often in unpredictable ways. With that said, we should always remember that life is short – never forget to appreciate what you have, and the people in your life, on a daily basis.

AN: Who inspires you – and why?

JP: My dad is the most inspirational person to me. He has always stayed true to his passions and followed the path of becoming a martial art teacher from when he was young.

When I was nine years old, he took the immense risk of moving to the United States, where he didn’t know anything about the language, customs, or people, for his kids’ education and opportunities.

Over our immigration journey, our family has been through a lot, and my dad has been our rock – continuing to sacrifice himself and inspire us to dream bigger.

For over 40 years, he served as a martial art teacher-entrepreneur, running his own business and teaching martial arts to hundreds of students over the years. He is an incredible teacher, with the ability to read people. He encourages and pushes his students to the right levels and often shows that he believes in them even more than they believe in themselves.

I’ve had the privilege of being taught by him and seeing his interactions with students – I can attest that he has changed the lives of many individuals, and it is a reminder for me of the power of teachers and role models in impacting people’s lives.

AN: What gets you up in the morning, and what keeps you up at night?

JP: What gets me up in the morning is the opportunity for impact, learning, and connection. In many ways, I believe being a VC is a privileged job where you get to do all of this every day.

What keeps me up at night – there are definitely a ton of things you can stay up worrying about these days, but I try to meditate through it. I know I’m not helping anyone by eating into my sleep or [worsening my] mental health.

AN: You spend a lot of time talking to inspirational founders and companies. What do you look for in a startup pitch? What makes a company stand out in the overcrowded HR and education tech space?

JP: What I look for in a startup pitch is a founder who is deeply passionate about the issue and showcases the tenacity necessary to lead a startup through the highs and lows.

One question I have started to ask myself is whether I would want to work for this person, as one of the most valuable skills for founders, especially [in the] early stage, is hiring the right people.

Especially in a crowded space like HR and education tech, I want to see that the founder has had a new insight that we haven’t seen in the market, and has the ability to leverage this insight into scaling quickly and creating long-term moats.

One common mistake I see is not being aware, or being too dismissive of, competitors. Every successful company has competition or alternatives, and I want to see that the founder has done the research and has the healthy dose of paranoia necessary to win against competition.

AN: There are so many innovations in the HR and education tech spaces – what are the most exciting trends on the horizon?  

JP: Some of the trends in HR tech that I’m the most excited about:

1. Personalized, engaging, on-the-job training: We believe AI has significant opportunity to provide training that is personalized to each employee and their needs at the time. Gone are the days of all the employees sitting in the same general training seminar for hours – we’re hearing from enterprise leaders that there is a need for learning to be embedded into the work, rather than live separately from it. We’re seeing increasing innovation around tools that employees can use to get immediate help, whether by surfacing the right organizational knowledge or connecting to the right colleague to get “unstuck” in their workflow. We are also seeing innovations around the training methodology, including automated chatbots,simulations, and AR/VR”

2. Skills assessment, mapping, and inference: With the exponential evolution of AI, we live in a world where the nature of skills is changing rapidly. In the same way that ‘data skills’ or ‘AI/ML engineering were not things commonly discussed decades ago, there will continue to be skills necessary for organizational success that we can’t even fathom today. On the other hand, many skills will lose their value over time, creating significant risk to our workforce and society. We need to rapidly reskill and upskill individuals for these new skills. To do this successfully, we need tools to define new skills, create a common language, assess competences, and map out the current and future states of organizations.”

3. Supporting the whole employee and retaining the best employees: It is clear that people are thinking about jobs differently than the traditional mentality of having the same career for most of your life. Younger generations think about a portfolio of jobs and are not afraid to switch jobs if the opportunity presents itself. There has also been a ton of research done around how employees perform better when they feel that they belong and are being invested into. Despite the economic cycles, I believe that there is a long-term and necessary trend toward organizations supporting the whole employee, fostering acceptance of diversity, and offering more flexibility.

UNLEASH | VC Voices is a monthly Editorial interview series where we profile leading investors in the HR tech and future of work space. You can catch up on October’s VC Voice here, and stay tuned to see who next month’s voice will be!