Lynn Greenberg: Founder & CEO of Pivt
Episode 667
On this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, we’re joined by Lynn Greenberg, Founder and CEO of Pivt, a platform transforming the way relocated and mobile employees adapt to new environments. Lynn’s journey from working in finance and startups to launching Pivt was driven by her own experience of moving to a new city and feeling disconnected. Now, she’s on a mission to help companies reduce turnover and improve employee well-being by fostering social connection and belonging—key factors in both personal and professional success.
In our conversation, Lynn shares how Pivt is filling a critical gap in the employee experience, why companies need to rethink their approach to mobility, and how technology can be leveraged to create stronger, more connected workplaces. We also dive into the hidden challenges of relocation, how loneliness affects productivity, and what companies can do to better support their remote, hybrid, and mobile teams.
Whether you’re an HR leader, a business owner, or someone who has experienced the challenges of relocation firsthand, this episode is full of valuable insights on workplace well-being, employee retention, and the future of work. Tune in to hear Lynn’s journey and what’s next for Pivt, now on The Kara Goldin Show.
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To learn more about Lynn Greenberg and Pivt:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynn-greenberg-3515865a/
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https://twitter.com/lynngreenberg10
https://www.pivtapp.com/
Transcript
Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. Super, super excited to have my next guest with us here today, Lynn Greenberg, who is the founder and CEO of an incredible company called Pivt. And if you have not seen Pivt or haven’t heard of Pivt, we’re going to share all about it today, but really the biggest challenges in today’s workforce, helping relocate and mobile employees, making them feel ones that are working at home, making them feel like life is more right? And what can you do to really enhance their experiences. So Pivt is covering many of these aspects with their game changing platform that helps companies reduce turnover and improve the well being of employees who happen to work remotely or relocate and are constantly on the move in some way, shape or form, Lynn saw firsthand how difficult it was. I can’t wait to hear the story firsthand from her, but she had actually moved outside of the US, and had seen how difficult it was for her, so decided to solve a problem. Sounds so typical of a founder, right? But she’s been able to scale this business, and has done an incredible job doing it. So I cannot wait to hear more about this incredible company, Pivt that she has started, and also all of the problems and stories that she is solving. So welcome, Lynn, thank you so much for having me. Super excited for you to be here. We were introduced by a mutual investor in our company. So very, very excited that he did that. So talk to me first about Pivt. What is, how would you describe it? What’s the 32nd elevator speech? Let’s start there. So
Lynn Greenberg 2:39
I’ll make it even quicker. But Pivt is a platform really designed to reduce turnover and improve the social well being for relocated, mobile, remote employees and their families. And really when it when it comes to the problem, companies spend $90,000 on average domestically, $300,000 on average internationally, relocating a single employee, and a third of them will quit within a year or move back home because of their and their family’s inability to socially acclimate. And when we dove in deeper, what we found was that, though, that all of those expenses happen pre move and during the move, really focused on the logistics. And for years and years, the employee and their family would get dropped in a new location, and they’d be left on their own. And that’s really where Pivt comes in, is we really help you socially acclimate, find community, feel that sense of home, wherever you decide to be, and in return, we help those companies, help retain that talent, make them productive day one, and contribute to ROI back to the company.
Kara Goldin 3:51
So initially, when you started, you were all about relocation, but obviously there’s a lot of other people who really need this community and everything that you’re solving for in the initial launch of Pivt now you’re able to help with remote work. So can you talk a little bit about that?
Lynn Greenberg 4:12
Yeah, so COVID was a really interesting time, I think, for all of us, but especially for what we were doing in the sense that I’ll start by saying, but even before COVID, we had a really tough time getting in front of mobility professionals and having them understand why this was important. And then all of a sudden it hit COVID, and everyone started to feel the this the real need for social well being, not just relocated and mobile employees and remote workers, but everyone as a whole, and we started really being able to craft value around remote workers that might not be going into the office, but really need that sense of belonging and community, to really feel like they. Be productive and be their full selves at work.
Kara Goldin 5:03
So when you think about your own experience, so you moved, you were relocated. Can you talk a little bit about that, and what were the kind of the pieces that you saw that were missing in that relocation, that if you would have had a company like Pivt, they would have been able to help solve that for you and for the company. Yeah, so
Lynn Greenberg 5:27
I relocated to London to work for Bloomberg three weeks after graduating from college. I had only been to London when I was 13 years old for two days with my grandparents and didn’t know anyone, and faced the issue that all people do when moving somewhere new, which is, where do you start to make your new city feel like home? And I struggled with things like, you know, finding information on my city from people I trusted. Where do I live? Which bank do I join? What are the answers to the questions I don’t know to ask? I actually ended up living in Notting Hill solely based on the fact that, you know, I was moving and then the next day starting work, so I had to find housing ahead of time, and I’d seen the movie Notting Hill, and figured, okay, if it’s good enough for Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, we’ll try. It might be good enough for me, but that’s all I knew, and I knew that I was given a life changing opportunity, and I didn’t know how to make the most of it. Had no intention of ever starting a company. I was I took one business class in college. That was it. The only Tech experience I had was what I was doing at Bloomberg. But I was really curious in the sense of understanding how to make the most of my own experience. And so I went into Bloomberg, the London office, being the international hub, and I started asking people, What are you doing to acclimate and understand the city and meet people? And I never got a straight answer. So I started reaching out to people that I found on expat Facebook groups, speaking to anyone that I could in restaurants and, you know, public spaces that had an accent of such. And I quickly realized it was much bigger than just myself. Yeah,
Kara Goldin 7:18
definitely it’s, you know, I think it is really challenging because also you have your job too, right? And so you’re trying to focus on that, but you’re also trying to figure out all these other aspects, like what you talked about. So employee relocation is not a new challenge, but Pivt has come in and differentiated what those programs look like, what, what are the key things that you’re doing that were not being done?
Lynn Greenberg 7:50
So I think, and I alluded to this a little bit earlier, there has been so much money spent on relocation, and all of it has been spent on the logistics. So moving you and your things from A to B, and no one has ever focused on the social side of things, and that sense of belonging, which is so important, because it’s that that actually leads to retention, and it leads to people feeling that sense of belonging within the company and their new home, which translated, so of course, into them being productive. And so we it was really, really interesting to enter this space. And a lot of what we were doing, while we were pitching it and understanding the relocation world was also educating why this was important. And when we dove in deeper, what we found was that there was a huge disconnect that actually a lot of global mobility professionals, their KPIs are done after they move someone there they their KPIs are not tied to whether or not people stay and so we really had to kind of craft a narrative to understand why, why this was so important, and how they could bring this to leadership to really parlay themselves into a benefit To the business.
Kara Goldin 9:17
So the biggest misconceptions companies have when thinking about relocating employees, and I’m so curious. I mean, when I think about your business too, there’s a lot of data, right? That you’re a ton of data diving into that would also be very helpful and very predictive, right for what these companies are gonna like, this is what happens within a certain period of time, typically in, you know, unless you’re able to do X. So really, really useful stuff. But is there something that is really kind. The big misconception that many companies have that you’re like, you know, Pivt is here.
Lynn Greenberg 10:06
I would say, first of all, from a mobility perspective, I think a lot of companies value mobility in different ways. And I think it’s a really awesome opportunity for you to expose talent to, you know, different locations, to different team members, to different cultures, and generate their learnings and bring it back to different parts of the business. So I think that’s one the second piece is how crucial the social aspect is, and feeling that sense of belonging, so not just for the employee, also for the partner, spouse, which so often are left out of the mix. And actually 80% of the relocations that fail it’s because the partner spouse have difficulty acclimating. And you know, you you can imagine the employee goes to work every day. They’re a part of a routine. All the relocation package is really catered towards them, and it’s really the partner spouse that needs a lot of the hand holding and to feel agency in the move, in that sense of purpose. And so what we’re really focused on Pivt, and I’m really excited. We recently rolled out a buddy system, a corporate buddy system, which we layered on top of our existing platform, and we’re working with companies to match using our algorithms and knowing what works, things like family, same family structure, goals and interests, same university, hometown, and pairing You with someone from actually your same organization that has relocated to that location prior and having that person be your support person prior to the move, and then getting coffee and making sure that you’re you’re acclimating and getting everything that you need after The move. And that has been really, really successful. That on top of our regular platform, I mentioned before the statistic that a third of people will relocate within or will return within a year, we’re actually seeing that 96% of our employees will stay beyond that first year anniversary. So to me, what’s excited and what keeps me going as a founder is that I’m no I know you, you, you definitely feel and you hear from so many of these guests. What gets me up at the more in the morning is that for me, my experience in London was life changing. I was able to build a life from scratch. I was able to do something I didn’t think I could do. And in that, in that vein, I feel like London is more of a home than New York, where I currently lived and I grew up. And we want people to feel like they can take life changing opportunities in unfamiliar places and make the most of it, because they feel that sense of belonging, because they have that support. And when it comes down to it, that’s what’s been missing for so long, and yet it’s so readily available, and people are so so willing to offer their expertise and support,
Kara Goldin 13:18
that’s awesome. No, I think what you’re doing is incredible. So thinking back when you were first starting out, I would imagine you wrote maybe a mini business plan to kind of get going. But what was the first step that you took beyond that business plan to actually feel like this can work, like people really do you need this? Do you remember that first moment? Maybe it’s the first partnership, or, you know, the first story that you ran across. So
Lynn Greenberg 13:50
I actually started Pivt originally with my brother. So I mentioned I had only taken one business class in college, and so I called my brother, who currently was studying entrepreneurship in college, and he was studying abroad at the time, and felt similarly to what I was experiencing in London while he was studying abroad. And so we started working on this together, first just interviewing people, seeing what we could gather from that understanding from those people, what are you doing? Because this doesn’t exist, because there’s, even, if you don’t have a direct competitor, as you know, there’s always a, you know, a variety of resources that they’re doing to get to the end result. And then we started really just drawing things out, and we contacted a an outsourced development team just to build a prototype that we could take into coffee shops and some of the people we had reached out to on the Facebook groups and just get a sense for whether or not it would be helpful. At the time we were building a consumer. App for people moving and traveling to help acclimate in their new city. And so when we ultimately launched, we had everyone from backpackers, study abroad, students, expats. And it was really interesting in that first wave of being a consumer app to to launch that, to really understand the need to do go through very scrappy mechanisms and failing fast in that first iteration of the product.
Kara Goldin 15:32
That’s incredible. And what was the point then, where you switched, where you moved over to the business side of things?
Lynn Greenberg 15:39
Yeah, so after about eight months being live, we were approached by HSBC, and they said, we came across your platform. We love what you’re building. This is actually something we’re struggling with internally with our relocated employees and business travelers. Can you build this for businesses? And we went back to the drawing board and we said, we have a good, you know, we have 1000s of users, but we built a good product for a lot of people. We didn’t build a great product for one and marketing is extremely expensive. And, you know, we had a free app that for us to generate revenue, we’d have to hit 1000s of more users to get advertising money and it, you know, it, it came down to a lot of soul searching, because we had poured so much into this business as it was, and my brother was very focused on the consumer side of things. That’s where his heart was. But ultimately, you know, what I learned to do was be really stringent on the mission, but be flexible on how you get there. And to me, again, it came down to helping people take those life changing opportunities in unfamiliar places and make the most of it. And this was just a different mechanism to get to the end user. And so made the tough, tough call to refactor our app to feed a, you know, go to B to B. My brother, at that point, actually lost interest and, you know, joined another startup. But it was, it had ended up being a really great avenue for us for a lot of different reasons.
Kara Goldin 17:21
So starting a company, it’s great that you started it kind of with your brother initially, but starting a company can be super lonely, right? You had been in a larger company, and, you know, Pivt is is really founded on the premise that community is so important. I What have you found helps you as a founder, because it can be very lonely, right? You don’t have a boss, right? Who’s sitting here telling you, you know, here’s the direction to go in. So how do you find your community? What has been the most helpful for you to kind of keep going and keep focused on what’s important for Pivt?
Lynn Greenberg 18:05
Yeah, it’s a great question, and as you as you said, it is so difficult. It’s lonely at the top for a variety of different reasons, but also because there are certain things, as you know, that you can’t parlay to investors, that you can parlay to employees or your stakeholders. And so I think it’s really, really important to have a network of other founders that have done it before you, that are going through it at different stages. I’m lucky that I have a variety of friends that have either, you know, are further along than me or have gone through it in the past. And it’s so helpful to be able to call them and say, I’m having this really difficult challenge. How did, how do you go about it? And so often they’re able to give you perspective, and they’re able to give you, you know, unbiased advice, which is super helpful. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, I’ve really relied heavily on mentors, advisors and our board, and I have been very proactive in terms of finding people that could potentially help think through things in the best possible way. So even if I’m maybe not connected to that person. And again, I think this comes out of my experience of moving somewhere new and overcoming something I didn’t think I would be able to do. I have no problem now reaching out to someone on LinkedIn that’s a subject matter expert and asking for their time if they would, you know, offer it up to kind of help me understand things, to solve the problem that I’m going through. But, yeah, community is huge.
Kara Goldin 19:50
Community is massive. Definitely. What’s one of the hardest things that you’ve had to tackle in building Pivt that you. Yeah, obviously you did and and you’ve come out on the other side, but something that really scared you, because I think there’s a you know people, people see you when you’re when you’re getting awards, the third 30, the Forbes 30, under 30, or the Europe speaking, but there’s hard stuff. Being an entrepreneur is really, really tough, and you get faced with challenges every single day. So what was something that was really, really hard to sort of push through, that you did it and now you’re happy that it’s behind you, I guess.
Lynn Greenberg 20:39
Yeah, so, so, so many things. And I actually, you talk about what, what keeps you going. I actually have, first of all a journal where I can write things down and think through things. But I also have a book that I keep, and it’s, it’s the cover of it says, And nevertheless, she persisted. And I keep all of those challenges, you know, the nose from investors to, you know, the real personnel challenges, which, by the way, I think, is always the most difficult things. And when I am going through a tough moment, I look back on that book and say, you know, I’m have 100% win rate of getting through these days. You know, this is just another speed bump, but I would say it always comes down to the personnel. Yeah, those are always really, really the most challenging things, because they’re so vital to your business and your culture and the others on your team. And it’s always the most difficult matters. I always find
Kara Goldin 21:45
definitely, how big is your team now?
Lynn Greenberg 21:49
We’re about 15, so still relatively small, but we’re growing. We’re hiring a couple of people right now and probably several more in the next year or so, that’s
Kara Goldin 22:01
awesome. I know you’ve raised a bit of capital. We met through a mutual investor. So how has that process been? I mean, you had worked in venture, as you mentioned, for a couple of years, but being on the other side of venture, where you’re asking for people to partner with your idea is different. You talked about, you know, getting no’s definitely not everyone is going to sign up to invest. But what have you learned in that process that is really, really key.
Lynn Greenberg 22:34
Yeah, I think, I think a lot, and I can say what I learned on the other side of things too, from from being an investor, I really going back to personnel learn the importance of team, of surrounding yourself with subject matter, people that are better than you, that can enhance the product, and you know, your leadership. So so that’s really key, and especially something that investors will look for. I think the other thing is really understanding why you are a founder market fit, and what your product market fit is. I think that is, you know, really, really important. And then I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned, luckily from being an investor, is the importance of it being a two way street. So you really need to be very careful about who you bring on your team and your journey, because the investors, obviously, it’s a marriage. You they’re along for the ride. You know, once you have a board, there’s certain things that they can really change in terms of your vision, in terms of the direction of the company, and so you really need to make sure that you’re aligned on your mission, on where you want to be, on, you know, personnel, and really make sure that it’s a great fit, not just, you know, in the sense of their them giving you a good amount of cash, but the sense of, are they a strategic do they help you in other ways beyond the capital? Do they believe in you? Do you? Are you aligned in your vision, in the vision of the company, and where you see it going? Because that can be really, really key to getting you to the next level, or breaking you because they’re expecting you to grow, you know, 10x and if that’s not what’s best for the business at the moment?
Kara Goldin 24:29
Yeah, definitely. So, so key. Well, Lynn, it’s been such an insightful conversation. I love what you guys are doing at Pivt. Everybody needs to check out what you’re doing the app is Pivt app.com RIGHT TO to check it out, and definitely we’ll have all the info in the show notes. But thank you, everybody too for listening. Lynn, you are just super, super inspiring. And. And like I said, best of luck with everything moving forward. It’s such an important thing that you’re doing at Pivt, so very, very happy and honored and grateful that you came on to share a lot more about it. Thank
Lynn Greenberg 25:13
you so much, and thank you for all that you do for for women founders. Oh,
Kara Goldin 25:17
thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you, too, so feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and Building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now you.
