What I've learned building People functions
Short pieces on hiring, managers, org design and building teams in India — written for founders and GCC leaders. More going up regularly.
The most expensive promotion in your company.
Why your best performer may struggle as a manager, what nobody teaches on day one, and four questions to ask before promoting.
Your culture is whatever your most senior person did last time it was inconvenient.
Values only work when they’re rewritten as behaviours specific enough to fail. The four mechanisms that actually build culture, and where to start with just two.
Growth doesn’t break companies. Undecided questions do.
Six decisions worth closing before you scale: what you’re optimising for, where the work happens, what you’ll never outsource, pay bands, budget authority and the values you’ll enforce.
A culture test. One afternoon. Costs nothing.
Six questions that reveal what your culture actually is, not what the engagement survey says. A practical culture diagnostic any founder or leadership team can run in an afternoon.
Not an HR function. Three systems.
At 30 people, three HR systems carry the weight: how people join, how they know where they stand, and how pay is decided. Plus what to skip.
Automate the admin, keep the judgement
AI won’t run your people function, but it will clear your desk. What startups should automate in HR, what to keep human, and where to start.
The hidden cost of skipping HR early
Skipping HR looks like a saving for a year. Then the bill arrives: turnover, compliance risk, a culture that stops scaling and lost founder time.
Culture is built on purpose, or it isn’t built
Every startup has a culture by employee 20. It isn’t perks or a values page. It’s who you hire, reward and tolerate, and how you act under pressure.
Nothing under this topic yet — more going up regularly.
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