HRTech Interview with Kenny Freestone, Chief Product Officer

Kenny, welcome to HRTech Cube. With over 20 years of experience in product management and development, can you share the highlights of your professional journey and what led you to your current role as Chief Product Officer at Eddy?

I’ve spent a lot of my career in product management trying to make complicated things be as simple as possible. In my first job I spent 7 years building software to teach English as a second language. When I joined Ancestry we worked to make family trees and research more accessible. While at Ancestry we launched AncestryDNA (in late 2011) which was a lot of fun to build, and was an extremely complicated project involving not just building software but also working with scientists and with shipping and manufacturing partners. When I left Ancestry after 13 years we had built tools and products that over 90 million people had used.

Building software for millions requires that the tools be easy to use. I think a big takeaway from all my experience is that software needs to be simple to use and easy to understand. I was very interested in the HR and payroll space in part because I thought the existing tools were just too complicated and there was a lot of room to build something much better. I joined Eddy in 2018 with the goal of making HR software that is simple and even fun to use.

After your successful tenure at AncestryDNA, what motivated you to transition to Eddy, and what excites you most about working in the HR tech space?

AncestryDNA was an amazing experience and we had a phenomenal team. I had spent most of my career at later-stage companies and was excited to build not just a product but a business. I love that smart people can work together and build a company that benefits its employees and the community overall.

I think what is exciting about the HR tech space is how much people need and appreciate tools that save them time and let them focus on bigger and better things. There is a lot of room to automate tasks in HR and remove pain points.