people-operations
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Lisa Mancini-Brzezinski Makes the Mortgage Back Office Worth Talking About
A veteran mortgage communicator joined a young AI company to give old servicing problems a clearer language - and to build the team that could act on it.
The HR Bot That Knows Where Everyone Lives
Deel fed a chatbot the paperwork of global employment, then taught it to watch payroll, route time off, and remember that France has rules. For multinational HR teams, that context is the whole point.
Becky Jones Has Spent 25 Years Making Advertising Feel Human
An internship pulled her toward cable. A research job got her through the door. At Viamedia, Becky Jones turned the supporting work of marketing into a 25-year study of how people, culture and technology move together.
BambooHR or Paylocity Depends on What You Need to Control
BambooHR makes the cleaner case for a growing team that wants HR to feel manageable. Paylocity earns its complexity when payroll, finance and IT need to operate from the same system.
Gusto and BambooHR Are Racing Toward the Same Desk
One began with the paycheck. The other began with the employee file. Their collision reveals the question every growing company eventually has to answer: which system should run the back office?
Cocoon Turned Parental Leave's Fax-Machine Maze Into Software - Then TriNet Bought It for $23 Million
Three former Stripe and Square operators started with one customer, one state and one leave type. Five years later, Cocoon had supported 25,000 leaves, won 400-plus employers and sold to TriNet - a neat lesson in turning regulatory sludge into useful software.
Pave and Carta Are Selling Different Truths About Pay
Pave starts with live HR-system connections; Carta starts with private-market cap tables. The better compensation benchmark depends on which version of the labor market you need to see.
Amy Spurling
After three tours as a CFO, Amy Spurling stopped treating employee perks as a shopping list. Compt is her attempt to turn a stubborn budget line into a system built on choice, evidence, and trust.
Bloom Talent
Bloom Talent is a woman-owned boutique recruiting agency in San Francisco that places Chief of Staff, Executive Assistant, and operations talent for tech startups, venture firms, and executives. Founded in 2015 by Amanda Christoff, the firm is known for a relationship-driven, white-glove approach that weighs personality fit alongside skills, and has placed candidates at companies including Y Combinator, Stripe, Airbnb, and Pinterest.
Sabrina Kelly
Sabrina Kelly is a people and talent leader who rose from technology recruiting to become President of Techstars, one of the world's largest startup accelerator and investment platforms. Over roughly a decade at Techstars she led People Operations globally, served as Chief People Officer, and built scalable HR functions across markets in the US and Europe. Earlier she recruited technical talent for names like Spotify, IAC, and Etsy in New York, and founded the HR function at CustomMade in Boston. She is known for an empathetic, direct, and pragmatic approach to building culture and managing distributed teams.
HelloTeam
HelloTeam is a Boston-based HR technology company that builds an all-in-one employee engagement and performance management platform aimed at improving employee retention. Founded in 2016 by Tanya Bakalov, the software combines performance reviews, goals and OKRs, recognition and rewards, surveys, learning, a dynamic org chart, and people analytics into a single system so managers and HR teams can keep employees connected, engaged, and productive.
ibelong
ibelong is a San Francisco-based consultancy that helps organizations build inclusive, resonant workplace cultures using a neurochemical framework grounded in affective neuroscience, relational neurobiology and epigenetics. Led by CEO and epigenetic coach Rajkumari Neogy, the company translates the brain science of trust and belonging into practical programs - immersive courses, leadership coaching, compassion circles and layoff (RIF) support - aimed at reducing conflict, burnout and turnover. Formerly known as iRestart, ibelong has worked with leaders at more than 175 startups and enterprises.
Tanya Bakalov
Tanya Bakalov is the CEO and founder of HelloTeam, a Boston-based employee engagement and performance management platform she started in 2016. A Bulgarian immigrant and University of Delaware accounting graduate, she left Deloitte in 2005 to co-found SevOne, the network monitoring company she scaled with her husband from three people to more than 500 employees and roughly $100M in revenue before its acquisition. A 2016 EY Entrepreneur of the Year and Inc. Female Founders 500 honoree, she raised a $10M Series A led in large part by payroll billionaire Tom Golisano and is pointing HelloTeam at AI-driven employee retention.
Aeqium
Aeqium is a San Francisco-based software company building an AI-driven compensation planning platform for HR and people teams. Founded in 2020 by former Uber, Palantir, Walmart Labs and Braze engineers, Aeqium replaces spreadsheet-based comp cycles with an agentic system that builds salary bands, runs pay-equity and analytics, manages merit and bonus reviews, and communicates total rewards to employees. It integrates with common HRIS, ATS and equity systems and counts companies like Braze, Warby Parker, Hopper, WHOOP and dbt Labs among its customers.
Karen Bennett
Karen Bennett is Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Cox Enterprises, the privately held Atlanta conglomerate with nearly 50,000 employees across automotive, communications, and media. She oversees talent, benefits, HR technology, inclusion, and corporate brand. A Terry College of Business alumna twice over, she spent nearly 14 years at Turner Broadcasting before climbing through Cox Media Group and Cox Communications to the parent company's top people role in January 2023.
Gaurav Saini
Gaurav Saini is the co-founder and Chief Customer Officer of ChangeEngine, a San Francisco AI platform that merges marketing and people operations so HR teams can run employee programs the way marketers run campaigns. A go-to-market and customer success operator, he has spent his career turning early-stage SaaS companies into scaling businesses, including senior growth roles at WorkSpan and UserVoice, and a stint co-founding the advisory firm GTM Venture Studio. At ChangeEngine he leads the charge to collapse the sprawl of HR point tools into one platform, often citing conversations with more than 100 HR teams as the source of the company's roadmap.
Leapsome
Leapsome is an AI-powered people enablement platform that unifies the HR stack - performance reviews, goals and OKRs, engagement surveys, learning, compensation, and a core HRIS - in one place. Founded in Berlin in 2016 by Jenny von Podewils and Kajetan von Armansperg, it helps managers and HR teams run feedback, development, and alignment processes without juggling spreadsheets and disconnected tools. The company bootstrapped to profitability before raising a $60M Series A in 2022, and today serves more than 1,500 organizations including Spotify, Unity, and monday.com.
Jenni Ellis
Jenni Ellis is the Executive Assistant to the CEO at CompScience, a San Francisco insurtech building AI control systems that aim to prevent one million workplace injuries by 2035. The right hand to founder Josh Butler, she runs the day-to-day machinery behind a fast-scaling, Series B startup. Before CompScience she logged operations and office-management time across some of the Bay Area's best-known tech names - Replicate, DoorDash, Instacart, and Dropbox - building a reputation as the steady operator who keeps founders and offices moving. Colleagues describe her as vivacious and enthusiastic, a natural leader who keeps tabs on the day-to-day flow of a business.
Andrew Higashi
Andrew Higashi is the Co-founder and CEO of ChangeEngine, a San Francisco-based AI-powered employee experience platform that helps companies communicate with and engage their people the way the best brands engage customers. A three-time company builder, he spent a decade honing enterprise sales and go-to-market strategy at Gigya, WorkSpan, and Sendoso before founding ChangeEngine in 2021 with the same co-founding team he has worked alongside for ten years. ChangeEngine has raised $15.5 million in total funding, including a $10 million Series A led by Threshold Ventures in 2024, and serves 310+ employees globally with operations in the US, UK, and Latin America.
Meena Ramachandran
Meena Ramachandran is the Chief Product Officer and Executive VP of People at Seen Health, a Los Angeles-based startup building culturally-focused PACE (Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly) services for underserved Asian and Pacific Islander elders. With an electrical engineering foundation from Stanford and a dual MBA/MPH from UC Berkeley, she has spent two decades at the intersection of technology and healthcare - scaling product teams at Castlight Health, Myriad Genetics, and Brightline before joining Seen Health after its $22 million Series A in late 2024.
Anne Foor
Anne Foor is VP of Talent at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most ambitious deep-tech venture funds. She partners with founders across the portfolio to recruit exceptional talent for transformative companies - from AI labs to biotech startups. With stops at Uber, Afterpay/Square, Facebook, Apple, and Google, she has spent over a decade building the teams that build the future. She holds a B.A. in Intensive Psychology and Legal Studies from UC Santa Cruz and is known for operating at nearly twice the candidate volume of her peers.
Kelly Kinnard
Kelly Kinnard is Operating Partner and Head of Talent at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms. She leads the talent function across 500+ portfolio companies, advising founders and CEOs on how to recruit and retain exceptional leaders. With a career that spans elite retained search firms, Oracle's cloud transformation, and Battery Ventures before landing at Khosla, Kelly has helped shape the executive teams driving some of tech's most ambitious bets. She is known for treating recruiting like relationship-building - equal parts strategy, empathy, and persistence.
Rohini Mukand
Rohini Mukand is a Partner on the HR team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. With a career spanning HR leadership at some of tech and retail's biggest names - Amazon (AWS and Alexa), eBay/PayPal, Ross Stores, and Delivery Agent - she now helps shape the people strategy behind a firm managing over $39 billion in assets. Educated at Swarthmore College in Sociology and Anthropology, she brings a humanist lens to the high-stakes world of building technology organizations.
Samson Wu
Samson Wu is a Recruiting Operations Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. With roots in economics from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and formative stints at AIESEC, Uber, and CloudKitchens, he has become a key architect of how a16z and its portfolio companies find and hire world-class talent. He supports the firm's New Media team as an HR Business Partner and brings operational rigor to recruiting functions that span early-stage startups to growth-stage companies across the a16z portfolio.
Tina Ferguson
Tina Ferguson is a People Practices Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she has helped shape the human infrastructure of the venture capital world since 2012. She was the first person hired to build and scale the People Practices function at a16z, advising portfolio founders across consumer, web3, fintech, and gaming on organization design, DEI, executive team integration, talent management, and compensation strategy. With prior stints at Cisco Systems, Morgan Stanley, Opsware, and Trend Micro, she brings a rare blend of enterprise rigor and startup agility to one of the most influential VC firms in the world.
Tom Hammer
Tom Hammer is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he leads People Practices for a16z speedrun, the firm's early-stage accelerator investing up to $1M in pre-seed startups. A veteran people operator who has scaled teams at Riot Games and Bird Rides, Tom coaches founders on talent strategy, organizational design, and building high-performance cultures from day one. He is known for his direct, founder-first approach and his belief that strong hiring is the single greatest lever a startup has.
Zahabiya Gabaji
Zahabiya Gabaji is a Compensation Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the world's most influential venture capital firms. Based in San Mateo, California, she leads compensation strategy and people operations for a16z's portfolio and internal teams. With roots in education and arts — she studied English and Education at UC Berkeley and worked at the Berkeley Art Museum — Gabaji made a deliberate pivot into tech HR, scaling compensation programs at Snowflake before joining a16z. At one of the most closely-watched firms in Silicon Valley, she architects the compensation frameworks that help a16z attract and retain world-class talent across its 950-person organization and advise portfolio companies on competitive pay structures.
Natalie Ledbetter
Natalie Ledbetter is a 3x startup People Ops executive, TEDx speaker, and former Operating Partner & Head of People at Boldstart Ventures who scaled Stash from 27 to 350 employees in 2.5 years. A self-described 'third culture kid' who grew up attending school in Jakarta, Indonesia alongside students from 90 countries, she now runs Ledbetter Global Advisory, offering embedded fractional people operations leadership to Series A-B companies. She has partnered with 100+ founders across the startup ecosystem, blending strategic executive thinking with hands-on execution to build high-performance, psychologically safe teams.
Ulili Onovakpuri
Uriridiakoghene 'Ulili' Onovakpuri is a trailblazing venture capitalist who spent 10+ years at Kapor Capital, rising from analyst to Co-Managing Partner and co-raising the firm's largest-ever fund - $126M Fund III in 2022. One of very few Black female managing partners in VC history, she backed 70+ companies with a focus on digital health, health tech, and people operations, while also founding the longest-running VC fellowship program for underrepresented individuals. Her own childhood diagnosis of Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis in Hunter's Point, San Francisco, where she grew up, directly shaped her conviction that healthcare access is a systemic justice issue. In May 2025 she departed Kapor Capital for what she called 'a purposeful pause,' and has since joined Motley Fool Ventures as a Venture Partner.