After graduating from Texas Tech University with a degree in early childhood education and mathematics, Samantha Villanueva-Meyer spent the beginning of her career teaching math and science to elementary and middle school students at Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District just outside of Houston. She eventually left teaching and began work at Rice University developing science and math curricula structured around STEM initiatives for K–12 students. While still working in education, she volunteered with foster families and worked with several lawyers over the course of three years in Houston. She says that experience inspired her to become a lawyer and go to the University of California Hastings School of Law. During her second year in law school, while working as an intern at Stamos Capital Partners, she met Ron Johnson and Tom Suiter, the founders of the Menlo Park, California-based personal commerce startup Enjoy. She was hired as the company's first lawyer after graduating in 2015. Now, Villanueva-Meyer is the chief legal officer at Enjoy, where she leads a small legal department and encourages her team to think outside of the box to better serve the business.

CC: What were some of your struggles going in-house right after law school?

SVM: As the first in-house lawyer coming straight out of law school, you have no safety net. There are no law firm partners or associates sitting next to you to help, which can be a challenge. This is why you have to rely on mentors and must build strategic networks of excellent outside counsel to help you through. Another struggle is self-doubt. You are constantly relied on to guide the business through challenging issues. Doing this on your own, especially as a lawyer young in your career, can be a daunting task. Thus, you need a healthy mix of both confidence and humility.

CC: What is the size of the legal department and how did you build the in-house team?

SVM: We have a five-person team that consists of four in-house lawyers and one in-house compliance team member. The compliance wing is growing. I run our global legal and compliance teams. We keep the teams relatively lean, and we work with about 10 outside law firms to make sure that we're getting the best subject matter expertise. The way I built my team was in direct response to the business needs. We're a growth company, we're very innovative and we have a very large field team. I found that in order to have a nimble and agile team that could support the business we needed strong support on the employment side. We needed strong support on the partnerships and commercial side and the compliance side.

CC: Is there anything you've taken from your time as your teacher that you apply in your legal work?  

SVM: Yes. The analogy I always go back to is to be the best teacher you have to meet your students where they are. You have to show them kindness and respect and you're making sure that they're living in this idea of a growth mindset. What's been really interesting about my journey from being a teacher to now, is that (my core principles) are almost equivalent. To be a stellar in-house attorney that can lead business, you have to meet the business teams where they are. You have to listen to them and understand what they need and why they want to do what they want to do. You have to show them kindness and respect through the process. As a lawyer, you cannot be telling them what they're not allowed to do. You're really there to say, "I respect you as a business leader and let's talk through this together." Then you live in that world of a growth mindset. The answer is very rarely no. The answer is almost always "yes, and how can we work through these additional choices together?" It's been very gratifying to see those parallels between my prior career and what I'm doing now at Enjoy on the legal side. Even though the substance is different, the core tenets are very much the same.