Employee Spotlight: Kim Tran, Head of Legal

Get to know the Butter team in our ongoing employee spotlight series. This month, we chatted with Kim Tran, Butter’s Head of Legal, to learn about her role, why she joined, and what it’s like working at a fast-growing startup.

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What does a typical day look like in your role? 

As cliché as this sounds, every day is different. Working at a startup on a high-growth trajectory like Butter requires you to stay nimble and flexible. Because my role touches many different pieces of the organization, my days vary wildly. I might spend a whole day working with Butter’s go-to-market team drafting and negotiating commercial contracts and then the next day work with our product and engineering teams on strategies for new products and intellectual property protection. Other times, I may be hyperfocused on internal initiatives like our corporate governance and risk management. My days truly vary depending on what the most pressing matters for the business are. I love the variety—it keeps things fresh and exciting!

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What drew you to Butter?

"I knew Butter was going to make a major impact in the market, and I wanted to be a part of it."

Before joining Butter, I served as outside counsel to companies of all sizes and stages, but I always felt that the work I did with startups was the most interesting and exciting. As outside counsel, you get to work on some of the biggest moments in a company’s life, but you don’t necessarily get to see the day-to-day. So, after learning about Butter and speaking to the brilliant team, I knew I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to join. I knew Butter was going to make a major impact in the market, and I wanted to be a part of it.

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What's your favorite Butter memory?

Closing our last financing round was an exciting time for the company. We raised at a 50% higher valuation than our previous round 1.5 years prior and during a time that was tougher for startups of our size and stage. It was a big win personally because it was the fastest deal I had ever closed, but it also ignited a fuse at the company—a sign of the market’s confidence in what we were doing and building. I could feel the excitement coming from the company when we announced the closing at one of our virtual all-hands meetings.

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How would you describe Butter’s culture?

My favorite aspect of Butter’s culture is how innovative the company is. We’ve built innovative tech, but it goes beyond that. Butter encourages people to look at problems and ask if the traditional way people solve them is the right way or the easy way. We’re constantly pushing ourselves to be creative, experiment, and improve—if someone has an idea, even if it’s outside of the scope of their role or expertise, we’ll consider it, challenge it, and if it makes sense, we’ll run with it.

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What has been your favorite project at Butter? Why?

A great thing about Butter is that everyone is welcome to step outside of their role and contribute to projects and initiatives that interest them. One project I enjoyed was completely breaking down and then rebuilding our go-to-market (GTM) pitch. It was a truly cross-functional effort—a group of us across sales, product, engineering, operations, analytics, and legal sat in a room and went through the entire presentation, slide by slide, asking questions, making suggestions, and rethinking our GTM philosophy. That project resulted in one of the best quarters the company has seen.

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What is your favorite perk/benefit of working at Butter?

"I love that we are a fully-remote company. It allows me to balance my work and my life in the best possible way."

I love that we are a fully-remote company. It allows me to balance my work and my life in the best possible way. I can travel, see my family more, and take care of personal matters like doctor appointments without added stress. It’s also been super fun getting to know my coworkers from all around the country, meeting their pets (we have a lot of cute ones), and hearing about interesting hobbies they have, like exploring abandoned places and following bands around the country, 

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Interested in joining Butter? See our open roles.