Startups rarely get derailed by one big people disaster. It's the small stuff, over and over, that slows you down.
- A great hire is a month in and still not sure what they're actually meant to be delivering.
- Every offer turns into a negotiation because nobody really knows what "fair" is.
- Two people at the same level find out they're paid very differently.
- Every manager does feedback their own way. Or doesn't do it.
- "When's my review?" and "How do I get promoted?" land in the founder's DMs. Again.
None of it is a crisis on its own. But add it up and it's a lot of noise. Slack threads, one-off decisions, precedents you never meant to set, founders spending time on stuff that should already have an answer.
What I mean by foundations
They're what let you grow and what hold it all together when things get rough. They're not the sexy stuff, so they slide down the list behind product, customers and fundraising. Understandably. But they don't need to wait, and once they're in, everything moves a lot quicker.
I break them into five (although nothing in life is that neat):
- Culture & Connection. How people behave and work together.
- Hiring & Onboarding. The right people, up to speed fast.
- Compensation & Benefits. How you pay people, and why.
- Performance & Growth. What good looks like, and how people get there.
- Becoming AI-Native. Running through all of the above.
I've done it both ways
I joined a healthtech startup as employee number 10 and stayed until it was over 2,000 people. After the Series B the growth was crazy, and our people foundations hadn't kept up. We built a powerful hiring engine, then spent ages untangling decisions, bolting process onto teams and fixing things at scale that would have been easy to get right early. It was unnecessarily painful.
I then got the chance to do it differently. I joined a data startup as the first people leader at around 18 people and built the foundations before the growth hit. We grew 4x across 20 countries in one year, fully remote, while revenue grew 20x.
Because the foundations were already there, the growth felt manageable. Engagement hit 96%. Offer acceptance sat at 100% for long stretches. And when something broke, we tweaked a system. We weren't building one from scratch in the middle of a crisis.
How to build yours
Ideally it's all in place before you hit 50 people. Something shifts at that point. Everything gets more complicated.
Culture & Connection
Everything else builds on it.
Include the behaviours you actually want to see, not just vague values that sound impressive. Then build them into hiring, onboarding, reviews and recognition.
How decisions get made, which channel is for what, and proper time to connect. If you're remote, design that on purpose.
Ask people how it's going, regularly. Have actual conversations (call me old-fashioned) to understand your people. Claude and a Google Sheet is also enough to start (although Lattice is great). Share the results, commit to two or three actions, then measure again. Doing this consistently is what got engagement to 96% at my last company.
Hiring & Onboarding
The right people, up to speed fast.
Agree the roles you need for where you're heading, and what each one will actually deliver. Don’t fall into the trap of listing what they’ll do. What outcomes do you want from them? Then run the same hiring process every time: same stages, a scorecard agreed upfront, and a clear answer on who makes the final call.
A proper welcome, a clear 30/60/90 plan and regular check-ins. We halved the onboarding admin and email back and forth with agents and Notion AI.
An open wiki with an agent on top. I've found around 80% of questions get answered there. Keep your people data in one system too, so headcount, attrition and time to hire are a few clicks away.
Compensation & Benefits
Leave it too late and it's one of the hardest things to unpick.
Where you sit against the market, global or local pay, and your mix of cash, bonus and equity. Every decision here has trade-offs that founders and leadership need to agree on.
Three to seven levels per track, with salary bands from real benchmark data. Keeping them broad leaves room to grow within each level. Otherwise healthy retention quickly turns into a top-heavy org.
Share how it works and the trade-offs you've made, explain compensation (especially equity) clearly, and review it once a year. Transparency (and that doesn't mean sharing every number) makes everything 10x easier for everyone.
In practice
Want to see a real one? Here's the live hub I built at Dune, covering philosophy, levels, growth and performance: Dune's Careers, Growth & Performance Hub.
Performance & Growth
What good looks like, and how people get there.
Sounds simple, but it's often where things fall apart. Be clear on what good looks like for the company, each team, each role and each level, and add a basic career path so "how do I get promoted?" is answered before anyone asks.
Give them the basics (setting expectations, giving feedback, having the hard conversations) and keep backing them. For me, manager coaching is the single biggest unlock for a healthy, happy, high-performing team.
You cannot have high performance without feedback, so build in a light, regular checkpoint. And someone has to bang the drum on managing underperformance, so decide who.
Becoming AI-Native
Runs through every foundation.
Where you're all in, where you're more careful. Make it clear everyone's expected to use AI, and give them the tools.
Into hiring, reviews and every new role. Make usage visible and give people space to share what's working and what's not.
Let AI handle the repeatable stuff so people can focus on the calls that need human judgement, the hard conversations, recognition and actually getting to know each other.
In practice
Zapier is a great example of embedding AI. They made AI fluency a requirement for every new hire in 2025, and they've published the rubric they use to assess it: Zapier's AI fluency rubric.
Already feeling the cracks?
Don't try to fix everything at once. Look at where the noise is coming from right now (the same questions that keep landing in your lap, the decisions you keep making from scratch) and start there. If you only do one thing this week, write down the five people questions you get asked most. That's your list.
If you want a second pair of eyes, let's talk and I'll tell you where I'd start. I can help you deliver it too.