Meet Caroline Baas, who after 3.5 years at Loyens & Loeff (Corporate Litigation and Banking & Finance) decided it was time to leave the law, moved to Australia and co-launched Rocket Internet’s food delivery start-up Foodora in Sydney. Initially focused on the operational launch, HR, recruiting, budgeting, finance and legal, she took on a number of different roles before becoming Head of Partner Operations for Foodora Australia. After moving back to the Netherlands in November 2018, she joined Booking.com (“Booking”) as their Global Operations Manager, Partnerships, responsible for the global operations of Booking’s fast growing partnership department (~40k partners) and after sales support for ~250 account managers.
We had our coffee chat with her back in May 2022 and she was recently promoted to Senior Operations Manager. Congratulations Caroline!
1. You can only make one more trip your entire life to a place you’ve never been. Where would you go?
A trip combining the Galapagos and Hawaii is very high on my list. Hawaii is on there for its gorgeous coast, and the Galapagos because of the special animal species that live there. I love nature and animals. I’ve lived in Australia and explored that part of the world, but haven’t been much to the other “other” side of the world yet. And if I’d have to pick somewhere I’ve already been, it’d be Barcelona. When I was 18, I lived there for a year and loved it. Also spent some time studying in Madrid and am currently working remotely from Mallorca, so I guess you could also say I have a thing for Spain.
2. So, who are you?
I’m Caroline, I’m in my thirties and spend as much of my life as possible travelling. I love discovering and experiencing new things. This doesn’t just apply to travel, but also in my work. I decided to study law because I wanted to work with people and use my brain to make things better, but also because I figured studying law would keep many doors open. After graduating from a Master’s degree in Informational Law & Intellectual Property in Amsterdam, I started working for Loyens & Loeff. After about 3.5yrs, I decided it was time for something new. I moved to Sydney, Australia, and made a big career change when I joined Rocket Internet’s Foodora. Foodora gave me the opportunity to explore different areas and naturally I grew towards a role managing people and setting up operations. To be honest, initially I thought I’d be more interested in sales and having external contacts, but I figured out quite quickly after joining that I was more interested in optimising the internal operations.. After moving back to Amsterdam, I joined the head office of Booking and in my current role, I’m responsible for and work on optimising and improving global processes, people management, coaching and leadership.
As we speak, I’m working remotely from Mallorca for a month. Booking set up a policy to facilitate this type of remote work during COVID; they’re very flexible and open to this kind of thing. Before COVID, I travelled a lot for work. My team supports ~250 account managers and Booking’s 40k partners, and they’re based all over the world. We help them with contracts, payments, support, technical aspects, basically all of it from start to finish. We need to be able to fully understand regional needs & also regional differences to be able to do our work the best we can as a central team. As a global company and with partners based all over the world, I also have team members in NY and Singapore (in addition to Amsterdam) responsible for direct operations in those regions, time zone differences make that a must.
3. How would you explain what you do to a 20 year old? What does your day to day really look like? And what challenges do you tackle and problems do you solve?
My work can be split into two parts: (i) people management and (ii) the actual Ops in a Tech company on a strategic and substantive level.
As to the people management part: I lead a team of ~15 people who are based in Amsterdam, NY and Singapore. I’m responsible for making sure they work together well, I help them make difficult decisions, help them grow and develop and do what I can to make sure everyone on the team is engaged. How do I do that? Through, for example, weekly check-ins, team meetings (domain based or on a more specialised team level) and team and department “All Hands” meetings. We also conduct quarterly employee engagement surveys during which we evaluate about 20 areas related to work, from management to productivity to career progression. I spend time analysing what we do well, what we need to improve and what we can actually do to improve. In a nutshell: what I try to do is make my team a good team. The majority of my time is spent on this part.
As to the actual Ops in Tech: before we dive into that, let me explain what it is. Operations in offline and online companies are very different. For us, operations facilitates working with our partners, from onboarding to optimising the relationship to - in cases - offboarding. Examples of these Partnerships are airlines, banks or other online travel agencies. You’ll have probably seen them: we put a banner on e.g. KLM’s website or put a banner in the ticket confirmation which invites you to book a hotel for your stay via Booking. My team makes sure we can actually work with the partner. This covers everything from contracts, payment, but also supporting them with technical integrations or on a more commercial level helping them get more visitors and bookings through, for example, temporary marketing campaigns. Account managers manage our biggest accounts, and my team is responsible for all longtail sales - about ~30k small to medium-sized partners like travel bloggers. My team consists of specialists, including for example a specialist in process innovation or contracting, and also managers to which certain team members report. My work leading the team is more focused on the general strategy. I lead departmental working groups, get the right stakeholders on board and involved, determine priorities and set roadmaps to achieve our priorities in line with big Booking.com’s long term goals. I’m also involved in deals with partners, but usually only when things get escalated or when there are certain - special - exceptions to the way we work with a partner. Less than half of my time is spent on this part.
4. What makes your work great and what makes it a little less great?
Great is how much I learn and how varied and diverse my work really is. Looking back to private practice, there’s a huge difference for me there. When I was still working as a lawyer, sometimes I’d spend a few (long) days working on an agreement or piece of advice or litigation brief non-stop and solo and I’d really start looking forward to having a quick meeting for a change of scenery. Now, my day flies by, I’m constantly taking decisions and working with people. The dynamics of the work are great. I also love the fact that Booking is very international. There’s 15 people in my team, and only two are Dutch (one being me). I love the culture and the people that work here, they are very talented and open. And there’s a lot of room to learn, develop & grow in the company and in the culture. And lastly, I love that I really get to work my brain and are being challenged and developing every day.
Less great is that because I never pursued any formal qualifications in the field I work in now is that I don’t really feel like an expert. I learned - and still learn - an incredible amount on the job, but when I look around there’s also plenty of people who have a lot of formal training and actual qualifications in my area of “expertise”. What can also be challenging at a company like Booking is the constant change, new tools, migrations and the fact that we face lots of bugs. You might think in a company of our size tech bugs don’t happen, but they do. Things break all the time and to be honest, that can be a bit of a pain.
5. What motivated you to make your career changes to become Head of Partner Operations at Foodora Australia and then the move to Booking?
The main reason for my move from private practice to Rocket Internet’s Foodora was actually the reason I decided to study law in the first place: working with people and solving problems in an - ideally - dynamic environment. I didn’t feel I got enough of that in my work as a lawyer. Private practice was too academic, dry and slow paced for me, especially to want to specialise in it more. I learned a lot when I worked in private practice and also enjoyed myself, but really wanted something new.
After helping co-launch Foodora, really pioneering and scaling, I wanted to see how things were done at a bigger player in the tech field. Booking had been in the business for quite a long time, but at the same time still really has that start-up mentality, especially my department. I wanted to learn more from how things worked at a bigger global company - and also make the move from a regional office to central operations. Very happy I did!
6. How did you manage to make the changes and get to where you are today? For others looking to make a similar transition, what would be the #1 advice you would want to give them?
When I realised I wanted something new, I cast a very wide net. I spoke to a career coach and figured out what was most important to me: people, optimizing processes / making things better & all that in a dynamic environment. I created a framework for what I was looking for and started mapping jobs on that framework. I applied and interviewed for a lot of different types of jobs, from a sponsoring type job at the Rijksmuseum to a role as policy advisor with the municipality of Amsterdam (which I actually got but declined as it didn’t fit the dynamics / speed). I also considered roles as legal counsel, figuring it may be a good in-between step before transitioning to a non-legal role in business. However, I also knew I didn’t really want to practise law anymore, so I wanted to try to make that real career change there and then. The online & tech world also had my interest, I’d pursued a masters degree in the field of internet law & privacy after all.
Shortly after I left Loyens & Loeff and whilst I was in the midst of a variety of application processes, my partner was offered the opportunity to work for Nestlè in Sydney, and I decided to move there too. Before the move, I’d joined a networking dinner for young professionals (Kula) and when I moved to Australia, I shared in that group that I was looking for an oppor
tunity in Australia. Once there, through a mutual connection I got in touch with an MD that worked for another start-up for Rocket Internet and had coffee with her. She said Rocket Internet was always looking for smart people and that I should just go and talk to them. She put in a good word and Foodora’s MD reached out to me saying we should have a chat, and I gladly took him up on that. I walked him through my reasoning behind going into a career in law and subsequently leaving it, and after that also spoke to a few other colleagues at Foodora. I really had my own story and an intrinsic motivation.
At the time, the idea was just to come “help out”, there wasn’t a job description or anything like that. We “closed” the deal very quickly and I was at work two weeks after my move there. As I was one of the first of a team of six to set-up the Foodora business in Australia, I was able to try lots of different things and grow very naturally into a role that was best for me. What I tried to do was to approach everything in a very open-minded and humble way & what helped to get there was that I was prepared to work very hard. I had no issues getting my hands dirty. That kind of attitude and approach helps you figure out what you’re really good at, what gives you energy, and you can then also decide what kind of thing you’d like to pull towards you.
As to my job at Booking: when we were preparing to return to the Netherlands, I posted a message on LinkedIn saying we were going to move back and that I was looking for a new challenge. That post got the ball rolling and before I knew it I was interviewing for the job at Booking!
The advice I’d give people looking to make a similar change is to really think about what, intrinsically, suits you. Create a map of what suits you, roles that you can “map” onto that, as well as industries. If an opportunity checks two out of three boxes, that’s a great start. Also, if you already know you want to leave law, I’d say: dare to make the switch, and do it as soon as possible. In order to then make the change, it is key that you’re able to formulate what you’re looking for and that you’re confident in what you can bring, what value you add, and that you’re honest about what you still need to learn.
Not really, I don’t think. When interviewing for Rocket Internet, they thought my experience at a top firm corporate law firm was interesting and definitely saw the upside. And then when I moved to Booking, Booking also saw the value in me having the Rocket Internet experience combined with my Loyens & Loeff experience. It was considered an interesting combination, and an advantage, having dealt with large complex deals and clients under pressure while keeping out eye for detail and delivering high quality work.
7. What were the most valuable things that you learned working as a corporate lawyer that you still use in your work today?
There’s quite a few, but the ones that come to mind are:
Prioritising
Finding/getting to the core of a problem or issue
Being able to work under (high) pressure & not get stressed
Putting things in perspective
8. What habit or skill that you’d been trained for as a corporate lawyer did you really have to let go of when you transitioned out of law? What did you have to unlearn? What key skills or habits did you have to take “next level” in your new roles?
I had to learn to really be much more proactive and think outside the box. In private practice, there’s a lot of “this is the way things are done” & not a lot of room for creativity. In my roles afterwards, doing things differently and thinking outside the box was (and is) encouraged. Also, I had to learn to be more pragmatic and work in a much more assertive way.
We’ve all heard the stories about partners shouting across the hallway at associates or checking their work after hours while it has to go out that day and was handed in on time, and this happens. In my opinion that’s unnecessary, harmful & can really have an impact on people’s self-confidence. It also just made me wonder: where will that kind of behaviour get you? When you leave private practice, you realise even more that the way some people interact with each other really isn’t “normal” or acceptable and you need to find your professional bearings again. What I had to learn was to step out of the hierarchy, step up, really say what I think and explore how you can make an actual impact.
9. What - if anything - do you miss from your time working as a corporate lawyer in private practice, and what are you most happy about having left behind?
I’m grateful for my current work-life balance. That’s - as you well know - not something I had when working in private practice. I also didn’t have much of that working for Rocket Internet, but at Booking I do. I don’t miss the long nights behind my computer. I also don’t miss being a small cog in the (deal) machine. I was just “placed” in a team to work and there wasn’t a lot of room for true self-development. And I’ve already said it a few times, but I’m also very grateful for the room for creativity and sea of opportunities to change (both quick wins & longer term enhancements) that I have now vs. back then in the more “traditional” field of law.
What I look back on very fondly is how comfortable it all was and all the good times. In private practice, everything is arranged for you (same goes for Booking by the way, but it wasn’t like that at Rocket Internet when we launched!). There’s so much support, so much experience and you can look everything up. The facilities are incredible. And hello, automatic annual raise? Haha. And the good times, there were so many: parties, drinks, cabaret, Christmas dinners, office humour, lots of training, and so much more. It can be really hard work and pretty tough, but I had so many great times and laughs too.
10. If you weren’t doing what you’re doing, what would be your dream job?
I’d kick off and host an ongoing travel program similar to Floortje Dessing’s “Naar het einde van de wereld” (“To the end of the world”), ang bring my partner, kids and a bunch of good friends for a few years and travel the world. Or I’d just write and publish columns about the ironic stuff in live.
If you hadn’t studied law, what would you have studied?
I’d have studied labour psychology with the aim of doing work similar to what I’m doing now. I may have ended up in the same place if I’d studied that, but then again you never know. The path I’ve taken has brought me to where I am now, close to what gives me most energy, and I’m very happy with that, who knows what would have happened if I’d studied Psychology.
11. You can choose, work or life or both. What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given, read or heard?
Stay true to yourself, don’t pay too much attention to what others are doing. Do something you’re really good at and what makes you happy. Other people will see that. For me, it was a very rational choice to study law. When I really started thinking about what I wanted to do, I grew into a role that suits me very well naturally. I feel like I can really help people now and thrive in my role as it’s close to what I’m best at. Everyone has their own unique skills, become aware of yours and use them.
How did you figure out what you “really” want to do?
What I find useful is asking myself what gives me energy and what drains energy in my current and/or previous job? The same question can be asked about what you enjoy and what you don’t enjoy in your life more generally. I also asked family and friends: how do you see me? What characterises me? When you spend some time abroad, you meet different types of people who may see you in a very different light which is also very interesting. I also like to believe that being away from “home” before university, during university and then in Australia helped me step back, open my eyes and come closer to who I really am.
*Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the interviewee alone and not their employer.
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