My 🔝 8 Crushes People Ops Should Follow 💘
It's time to finally introduce you (not) all the extraordinary people I've met or stumbled upon last year. Some of them are people who helped me to think about my future role as a talent partner, some of them just shared a helpful resource & others contributed to my growth within this People Operations & Tech Talent space. Learning from these people can't be to anyone's detriment, it can only enrich your actual knowledge. Here you are. My 💯 recommendations to follow the below stunningly sharp ikons.
1. Lauren Illovsky, Talent Partner — (ex) a16z, Gradient
Lauren is one of the latest addition to my People Crushes, but on the other hand, she's one of the most helpful ones. It was like hunting for a treasure and finding her means I am beyond successful.
Lauren currently leads Talent at Gradient Ventures but she's also spent the majority of her career working with VC-backed companies at Accel and Andreessen Horowitz.
I approached Lauren on LinkedIn, I found her background very impressive. She offered me a hand straight away. She pointed me in the right direction, guided me through my transition period, helped me with my terrible decision paralysis around my career growth, and finally empowered me to speak up when I should. She is a total kickass, she is a mum, she is fun and she is a woman I aspire to be. When I actually happened to be accepting the offer at Credo as our first Talent Partner, she sent many introduction letters immediately to everyone within the VC Talent community and helped me to make the connections I needed within my role.
❤️ Follow her: LinkedIn
2. Maddy Cross, Talent Partner — (ex) Notion Capital
Two most important takeaways: try to hire one VP/CXO per quarter, and make sure that some of the people you’re hiring are very experienced (25+ years).
^These are my key takeaways from The Unicorns Maddy’s research that other companies should definitely learn from!
This is genuinely my most recent crush. A few weeks ago, I spoke with Maddy Cross from Notion Capital. Maddy ingested a huge amount of data on hiring habits. For example, see her analysis that compares people hired into leadership teams of B2B SaaS Unicorns and B2B SaaS companies that raised the same amount of VC money at the same time as Unicorns — but did not managed to succeed. This is a great foundation for the founders out there. For founders who are for example struggling or not fast enough in building a leadership team. She is leaving Notion VC, but I cannot wait to see what she’s up to next.
💙 Follow her: LinkedIn
3. Daniel Hyde, CEO — Erevena
Daniel is a Founding Director of Erevena which is an executive search firm. Dan has over 20 years of experience from typically VC-backed SaaS companies. Getting in touch with him was recommended to me by my amazing mentor Ben via one of the Slack community spaces I recommended in my last post.
I remember prior to our call I happened to be in the state of mind that “I am giving up, never ever collaborating on my search with any agency company EVER! My time is not worth it.” I felt that agency service just cannot reach the quality of the internal recruitment. In internal recruitment so much passion, empathy, and caring of your candidate experience, but also the little bit unfair position with untouchable context, personal approach, cristal clear priorities, and deep focus.
But then it just happened. Dramatic music playing. July 22, 2020. I jumped on a call with Dan. And I was honestly blown away. He knew everything about our product, B2B software, SaaS industry, tech teams, fees, relocation people, he was hiring for the coolest companies I knew.
I wanted to provide very candid and specific feedback after my first call with Daniel. It’s really spot on.
I wouldn't expect that I can actually find such an amazing hiring partner within Erevena. Then on this first call with Dan — I found myself writing down like four of the A4s of notes and begging him to shadow his calls with candidates, and share his secret sauce with me. He knew much more about SaaS space, about Productboard, about how to work with hiring teams, he knew what is important to set ourselves for success and he always spoke up when it was otherwise. He said what's wrong with our hiring process and did a retrospective with me after the search was closed.
Since that, I opened myself to meeting other exec search firms and that actually changed my mind and approach. I created a list with a bunch of the firms I recommend working with based on location, the tech industry, stage of the company, role specs plus I made a quick checklist with what to focus on while evaluating this kind of company for your successful search. Happy to share with you or write a blog post about it.
🤎 Follow him: LinkedIn
4. Jamie Bott, Talent Partner — Sequoia Capital
I e-met Jaime via our community group of VC Talent Partners. She is very helpful when it comes to sharing all the VC Talent resources. I find it particularly handy in my new role as I am trying to design the new talent function for Credo Ventures. Most of the time, she would be sharing things that she's already developed and they'd be working for her and her portfolio founders.
The specific example could be the best practices recommended by Sequoia Capital for unlocking the memory 🧠 We also started to use this template with some of our portfolio companies to run the guided conversations with their teammates to systematically unlock the best people from our employees' past. Or look at this recruiting calculator. That one can on the other hand help you to generate a recruitment team plan and think more long term!
💚 Follow her: LinkedIn
5. Jess Lee, Partner — Sequoia Capital, CEO of Polyvore
If there is a woman in VC world who paved a way for women who follow — it is, my superstar Jess Lee.
Jess Lee is a partner at Sequoia and the former co-founder and CEO of the social commerce website Polyvore. She is also a founding member of All Raise, a nonprofit dedicated to diversity in funders and founders — as well as an avid cosplayer. Jess is simply world-class at what she does. You can usually meet her giving opening talks at events that are made for inspiring successful entrepreneurial women. The world needs more women-led companies, and she's definitely here to empower many of them and lead by example! 🙋🏻♀️👩🏻🎤👩🏾💼
💚 Follow her: LinkedIn
6. Tracy Young, Construction Engineer Turned Startup CEO
Oh gosh. I just love the brave Tracy Young and her powerful story. After reading her article or watching her TED talk, you understand why! The way she experienced and then talked about building a startup is exactly what the authenticity and real leadership mean. There is so much you can learn as an HR, a startup founder, any other female entrepreneur or actually anyone in this world from her. I feel like this high pace startup world needs to listen to more of the female founders’ perspectives and learnings. Women do not deserve to feel insecure or be judged for being women — entrepreneurs. Her 6 mins TED talk summarized that all. You can also read Tracy’s authentic article!
💜 Follow her: LinkedIn
7. Mary Jantsch, People — Buffer
Mary served as founding member of the People team at Buffer. Since then she contributed to the people ops community tremendously. One example can be the spreadsheet of her favorite resources for remote work. She curated what she thinks are the best 5 blog posts on hiring, onboarding, communication, leadership, compensation, and career frameworks. And recently she also introduced her new People Ops School!
❤️ Check out her People Ops School: Youtube
8. Adam Grant, author, WorkLife podcast, TED host
Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and Wharton professor. I think he does belong on my list even though we have never personally met. I wish!
I just don't get that Adam is able to deliver a million eye-opening and at the same time moving conversations.
Recently I have been totally blown away by his newest release, Think Again. Where we break down the different modes that we as people tend to go into when we're looking to defend our previously held opinions. Adam talks that there's preacher mode, politician mode, and prosecutor mode. But then Adam argues that we should be actually approaching these things like scientists — where we have an original idea of how something might work we're continuously testing it making sure it holds up but if it does not — we are ready to abandon it because we are not looking to be RIGHT. We are looking to find the truth. You are basically excited about being wrong and you should find joy in it.
Follow him on: LinkedIn 💙 AND! You have to listen to his insightful podcast with many special guest speakers (such as Brené Brown, JJ Abrams, Sheryl Sandberg, and many more!).
Who does belong between your most recent crushes?
Let me know. Join my network here LinkedIn 👋🏻
