The first month was about understanding. She met everyone in the organization whose work touched technology investing, which was more people than she had initially mapped—research analysts, relationship managers, two economists, a data team, a risk assessment group. She listened more than she spoke. She asked questions that surprised people slightly, because they were not the questions they expected from someone in her position—they were not the questions of someone managing impressions, but the questions of someone genuinely trying to understand how things actually functioned versus how they were described. There was a difference, she had found, in almost every organization. Understanding the difference was where the real work lived.