Savvy early-stage marketers often find themselves with a team constructed mostly (sometimes entirely) out of external collaborators. From PR agencies to brand strategy consultants, copywriters to designers, and advisors both formal and informal - the talent orbiting your marketing department can be what makes or breaks your brand. Treating these essential contributors like employees or simple transactional service providers can blunt their efficacy, limit their contributions, and even sour their willingness to keep you as a client.

We recently gathered a group of founders together for an intimate discussion with Stacy Brown-Philpot, CEO of TaskRabbit and founding member of Softbank’s $100 million Opportunity Growth Fund. Structured as a fireside chat between Stacy and Fuel’s General Partner Leah Solivan, the conversation covered topics both important and uncomfortable.

Pulling from her enviable track record of diversity and inclusion - an impressive 60 percent of the company’s leadership is women, 48 percent of its employees are Hispanic, African-American, Asian, or two or more races, and 16 percent identity as LGBTQ - Stacy shared valuable insights about how companies can drive substantive change during this pivotal moment.

Drama is part of our nature - it’s going to pop up pretty much anywhere humans interact. In fast-growing startups, drama has a way of seeping into developing cultures, wasting time, and causing resentment between coworkers. Navigating through dramatic situations requires understanding the patterns behind them. That’s exactly what we discussed in a recent workshop with Conscious Leadership coach Kaley Klemp. This approach, which Kaley calls “Taking 100% Responsibility,” starts with identifying the known patterns of drama.

With most of us now six weeks into staying inside, it’s become clear how difficult this working from home thing can be. We asked Hiten Shah - founder of work collaboration app FYI and one of the smartest WFH minds we know - to talk us through his methods of optimizing performance for distributed teams, his learnings on people management from afar, and even his advice on how to keep the peace at home. Jack Altman - founder and CEO of Lattice, currently working from home with a 4-month old - ran the interview and asked questions that yielded real, actionable takeaways.

Friday marked the second installment of FUEL’s dedicated webinar series on navigating the COVID-19 crisis. General Partner Leah Solivan invited thredUP CEO James Reinhart to discuss building a business during a time of crisis. Both Leah and James started companies on the heels of the 2008/2009 financial crisis, and came ready to talk candidly about their decisions, learnings, and mistakes during that time.