She trained to jump out of airplanes before she ever pitched a venture capitalist. Today she runs the company making the most ignored hour at work - compliance training - into something people actually finish.
Annual compliance training is the hour everyone clicks through with a second browser tab open. Roxanne Petraeus built a company on the bet that it doesn't have to be.
Ethena, the New York startup she co-founded in 2019, ships harassment and ethics training as graphic novels and short videos instead of glassy-eyed slideshows. The pitch is deceptively simple: make the content worth watching, automate the busywork around it, and treat the lessons as "moments that matter" rather than boxes to check. People & Compliance teams at Pinterest, Zendesk, Notion, Figma, Netflix, Zoom, and Carta signed up.
The unusual part isn't the product. It's the person selling it. Before Petraeus was a SaaS CEO, she was a U.S. Army officer who went through airborne training and deployed to Afghanistan. Before that, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. In between, a McKinsey consultant rebuilding the org charts of the Fortune 500. She has raised roughly $50 million to fix the one corporate ritual nobody defends.
"You have to be willing to ask for something that you don't think you necessarily deserve."
That line is how she landed Netflix and Zendesk as customers before the product was finished - by, in her words, "shooting our shot." It is also a decent summary of a career built on walking into rooms she wasn't supposed to be qualified for and walking out with the deal.
In uniform, Petraeus noticed the military trained two different ways. There was outcome-based training - jumping out of planes, handling a weapon - where engagement was total because the stakes were obvious. And there was the other kind: check-the-box compliance, where critical subjects like sexual harassment got the same dead-eyed treatment as a parking-lot safety memo. She found it genuinely puzzling that the topics that mattered most were taught with the least care.
That observation became the thesis of a company. Years later, sitting through corporate compliance training at McKinsey, she had the same reaction. If the content is forgettable, people forget it - and then companies act surprised when nothing changes. Ethena's whole reason to exist is to close that gap.
The Army gave her something else too: a clear picture of a leadership archetype she would never fit. She has described the dominant model she saw - tall, loud, stoic, hypermasculine - and the freeing realization that she couldn't be that, so she'd have to lead some other way. Her version leans on asking questions, listening, and saying "I don't know" out loud. She credits it with working precisely because it breaks the mold.
Her one-line theory of leadership: blame flows upward. When something breaks on the team, the leader owns it. No exceptions, no deflection.
In high-pressure rooms, the leader's job is de-escalation. She compares building a startup to going to war - every day, a fire to put out - which makes calm a competitive advantage.
People working together will make mistakes. She separates the non-negotiable - physical and psychological safety - from the growth-and-learning zone, and refuses to treat them the same.
"Feedback Fridays" give managers and reports a standing bilateral check-in. She'd rather catch a problem as a hiss than a blowout.
Annual engagement surveys are a still photo of a moving thing. She wants continuous signal - culture as a live feed, not a yearly autopsy.
Ask for the thing you don't think you deserve yet. It's how Ethena won marquee customers before the product was fully built.
"Building a startup is also like going into war - every day is a fire you need to put out."
"You have to be willing to ask for something that you don't think you necessarily deserve."
"Zero tolerance policies are fundamentally flawed."
"As a leader, everything is your fault."
She is the daughter-in-law of retired Army general and former CIA director David Petraeus - the man she once posed beside as a Harvard cadet.
Her father flew for the Dutch Air Force; her mother was a U.S. Air Force nurse. Service runs in the family.
Part of her childhood unfolded in Walt Disney World's planned community in Florida.
Before Ethena, she bootstrapped a meal-delivery business, sold it, and walked away with one lesson: get leverage on your time.
Ethena teaches compliance through graphic novels and short video - the format you'd never expect for harassment training.
She qualified to jump out of airplanes years before she walked into her first VC meeting.