Jon Lowe

▶0:00HostWelcome to the Built by People Podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top executive leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. Now let's jump in and get started with our next guest. I'm excited to welcome John to the Built by People podcast. John, thank you so much for joining us today. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey and and love to get an understanding too about the work that you're driving at DailyPay. Yeah, cool, Dave.

▶1:00GuestFirst off, appreciate being invited to be on the podcast. My career journey has been kind of wandering. I think, you know, there's doctors that doctor and engineers that engineer and dentists that, you know, know that they really want to go and look at people's teeth. I don't know if I necessarily knew I wanted to fall into HR. I grew up in Canada. I started in like more of like an economics, KPMG finance world. And practically speaking, I realized that just vis-à-vis evolution, evolution, some of the things that I was good at and some of the things that I just wasn't nearly as good at. And so I would say that it's been a wandering journey of being shaped by a number of really phenomenal organizations, early stage Amazon, early stage Revolut, early stage, early stage eToro, and now at DailyPay. And so yeah, it's been, I will tell you that my career has been very generous in being able to teach me a lot of things along the way.

▶1:50HostJohn, when you, when you reflect back on your career journey, is there a particular experience that most shaped how you lead today? Yeah.

▶1:58GuestYou know what, I would say that people's careers are, I think, probably most akin to like relationships. And so like there's that, you know, that Ariana Grande song where she's like talking about her previous relationships and like what she learned from each of them. I think I learned about like core HR, like working as a team as part of like a broader HR function from my time at Atlantic in collective bargaining. I learned grit at Amazon and so really being multifaceted and like being able to think on your feet and a really high degree of grit at Amazon. I spent 8 years there, which believe it or not, started with like selling books and DVDs, which sounds like such a far stretch from like AWS running all of the internet. Uh, Revolut, I learned the idea of like agility and that speed matters. Etoro, I learned that process matters. Uh, again, like public company readiness and being able to go and think through things through not just being able to build it, but being able to build sustainably. And I think DailyPay, I'm not sure yet. I've been with DailyPay for 2 years and I don't know what the catchphrase for DailyPay is going to be. But I'd say that again, I don't think that there's necessarily one thing that you take away. It's kind of this evolution. It's this culmination of experiences that you pick up as you're journeying through different firms.

▶3:11HostJon, I want to switch gears and talk about the state of HR in 2025. As you reflect back on this year, what do you view as the biggest challenge HR leaders are navigating right now that we're not talking about enough?

▶3:24GuestYeah. I know that this is going to sound gimmicky. I think the thing that we're talking about already, but we're probably still not talking about enough, is the impact of AI on the practice of HR. I think that a lot of the things that we're— the initial onset of the way that HR teams are starting to think about AI through the lens of analytics and insights and expediting process, I think that that allows us a vision out 12, maybe 24 months, but is probably pretty uninspired with regards to where it's going to take us from a journey perspective. And so, as I think about the idea of rolling it into workforce planning, but also rolling in the exponential impact that it's going to have to workforce capability and productivity and how we think about modeling that in from a go-forward perspective, I think that we've only scratched the surface on it. The other thing that I don't think that we're talking about enough is the evolution of what work looks like for a lot of Americans. And part of that is really challenging the norm of, you know, not every— a lot of our functions are based off of, you know, you join a firm and you hang out there for 20 years and then you get a defined benefit pension program and then you retire. All the while having a two-car garage with a fresh car every 3 to 5 years, which I think in a lot of ways is like an operating model of the past. And I think we've been slow to adopt a lot of our processes and thought processes to be able to go and adopt against that.

▶4:52HostJohn, I want to talk about DailyPay's mission, their impact, and the people strategy. DailyPay's a market leader in the earned wage access space, and they're transforming how people access their earned pay. From your vantage point, how does on-demand pay change employee behavior and outcomes?

▶5:10GuestYeah, so I mean, I think that, you know, it's a foregone conclusion on what the outcomes are from a, how it shifts and changes employee behavior. We find that, you know, the moment that on-demand pay is implemented within organizations, a market uptick with regards to attendance, show rates, reduction in attrition rates. And again, I think that it varies depending on the sector that, that people are, people are, employees are operating in. Um, but I would actually say that it's largely a win-win. I would say that, you know, one of the things that, uh, and maybe it comes back to kind of your opening question around what's changing and what are we now talking about. One of the things that we're not talking about is the evolution of what work looks like. And what work looks like is, you know, you work your job at, I don't know, Walmart or Target, but you probably have a bunch of other jobs. So you have your side hustle bartending job and you also do Uber Eats. A good portion of what reality looks like is real-time. It's on demand. And so one of the things that's been really slow to be able to keep up with that is a lot of the HR systems that we have. And so, you know, 2-week pay cycle. Which is effectively like, I'm going to go mow your lawn or I'm going to help you move. And then you're going to catch me later in 2 weeks for like what it is that you owe me. It's such a foreign concept, but it's something that for some reason we've been willing to go and adopt from a payment perspective and your relationship with your employer. I get that, you know, 10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, we didn't have the technology to be able to go and do it. Now that all that technology, that tech stack exists, you know, the monetary rails exist to be able to go and do it. It seems remarkable that like there's a resistance for us to be able to go and continue that level of evolution within that space.

▶6:49HostJohn, what cultural values or practices at DailyPay have been most essential to helping scale the organization?

▶6:57GuestYeah, you know what, I'm a really strong proponent of looking at the relationship with our employees and you're really using one of my core barometers is what I call reciprocal value, reciprocal value creation. I think our average age at DailyPay, you know, I think that we've evolved a little bit. So I think had you, had you asked me this 7 years ago, we would've been a whole bunch of fintech Patagonia-wearing fintech bros in the garage. I think that we've since evolved from that. But that being said, like our average age at DailyPay is what, 34 or 35 years old. We have a pretty solid contingent of people that sit in New York and San Francisco. And, you know, a lot of these people recognize that DailyPay is one stop on their career journey. And so one of the lenses that I use to be able to go and evaluate where we want to go and deploy our resources, how we want to go and think about our people, is really evaluating whether or not, like how we can go and create a reciprocal amount of value for our employees. How do we, it's not only about the idea of pay and benefits, which I think is kind of an archaic way of thinking about things, but it's about really taking a look at the full basket of value that we can go and create for people as it relates to career development projects that they can go and work on. Line items that they can add to their LinkedIn. I think like being competitive with salary and benefits is like a baseline cost of admission. So it's really understanding those intangible values that cater themselves to those, you know, those people that are in those high growth years of their careers. You know, I recognize that while our average age is 34 years old, that's not everyone within our organization. But again, I think that the framework of reciprocal value creation and making sure that again, we are competitive with the totality of our basket of value that we create for employees is just like a really helpful way of being able to go and think about the universe.

▶8:42HostJob, we talked earlier in this conversation about AI, and more broadly, we're probably not thinking enough about that and how it's going to impact the HR function as well as other functions within the organization. I'm curious how you are thinking about AI inside your HR function and where you see real value versus just market noise.

▶9:05GuestYeah, so I, I think we're in the I think we're in the second inning of AI. Don't tell that to all of, like, I, maybe I'm, I'm probably overweighted in NVIDIA right now from a portfolio perspective, but I do think that we're in the second inning, at least as it relates to the way that it's being deployed within HR teams. Where are we using it right now? We're using it from a general data and analytics perspective. We're using it to be able to go and improve our overall compliance. We're using it to be able to go and review documents and write hinder emails, screen resumes, and those types of things. The things that I think AI are going to go and affect is wholesale across the organization. I think that every organization in the back of their mind has an improvement factor just around continuous improvement. That factor during stable periods, maybe it's 10%, maybe it's 12%, maybe it's 13%. But as we think about AI and what it's going to do to organizations, and we've already seen it, you take a look at the big tech sector and like, you know, some of those coveted engineering jobs. Jobs and what it is that FAANGs are doing right now, there is a wholesale change about the way that AI is restructuring these coveted positions that historically we have never really taken a hard look at around automation and really changing the nature of those functions. And so where AI, I think, like where I, where I think that HR teams are not thinking hard enough about AI is not necessarily from how do I go and make my job incrementally a little bit easier, but How do we look around the corner about how AI is going to revolutionize the way that organizations are going to look? And it's not on the horizon. This is like in the next 12 months, in the next 24 months. And I'd say that if you're not thinking about that now, you are behind the curve because I can tell you that every single like Fortune 500 CHRO, CPO is like thinking about that and trying to figure out what does that forward-looking organizational view look like. So Sure, maybe AI will help us as it relates to workforce planning, skills of the future, figuring out where we're going to go and have gaps. But the long and short of it is it's, it's really not necessarily only thinking about AI as an incremental tool to HR, but like, what is AI going to do in revolutionizing the way that organizations look? And then how do we pivot the HR function to be able to position ourselves ahead of that curve?

▶11:19HostJohn, are there any surprising places where AI has already made an impact on how your team is working?

▶11:26GuestSurprising ways? I mean, our, our meme, our meme game has gone pretty mean pretty quickly. Sora is no joke. You know, and then I, you know, I think that like part of this is like this, what do we do? What do we do on these fringes? Like, I think that, you know, places where AI has had like a surprising impact is I think a lot of those policies that we had, which were really buttoned up based off of like a conventional view of like a kind of static technology, we've had to really take a hard look at around like, what do we use it for? How do we use it? How do we control usage? How do we control usage of it? How do we, you know, control protecting IP within the organization? And so I think that that's actually one of them, which is like how I don't think had we had this conversation 12 months ago, I would have been able to go and hit half of the items around, you know, where AI has had impact to the organization, how we, we could go and proactively get around it. And so as a result to it, again, we've been reactive, which is a terrible place to play from.

▶12:23HostJohn, what's a book, habit, or tool that's had an outsized impact on your leadership? And what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶12:31GuestBooks? I don't know, man. I like, I didn't grow up in the TikTok as part of like TikTok as being part of the nomenclature of how I grew up. But man, I think that the ADHD element has really kind of parsed my soul. So it's definitely not on the book front. I would say mindfulness. I think that we went through this period of time during COVID where mindfulness was front of mind. And I think that like, you know, there's a lot of surviving elements of it. Like I think, I don't think that mindfulness was necessarily a that we all went through, there's— we will always only have 24 hours in the day. And so I think being able to be mindful about the way that you allocate it to be able to create balance and maintain perspective is really, really important. So I don't know if that falls into— it's definitely not a book, but it is one of those kind of life hacks that I've had that have served me well in being able to go and continue the grind for many years, irrespective. I know this is a podcast, but you can't tell I have a lot of whites. At this point.

▶13:31HostSo, John, thank you so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶13:35GuestCool. Thanks, Dave. Appreciate the time.