New employee DM’d me on Slack. He asked if he’s expected to work weekends. I said, “What do you think our founder would do?” He said he gets it, and that he’ll be online on weekends. Good that he took it that way. Our founder has been in Ibiza for two weeks now. Someone’s

We threw a farewell party for one of our engineers last month. He was moving to a Fortune 500 company across town. During his speech, he thanked his manager, the CEO, and his teammates. No mention of the HR team. Not even once. After the party, I sent an anonymous email to

Talked to a new hire today. He’s feeling a bit ill and asked if he could work from home. I told him, “Sure you can, but I don’t think our founder will be super happy. He has high expectations for you.” His eyes lit up. He understood and stayed at the office to continue

Talked to the CEO about our recruiting strategy He said he only wants to hire "A Players" I then came up with a way to filter out A players from the rest. During the initial interviews, I asked them to Venmo me $500. If they do it on the spot, it means they are A players with

There was an AWS outage this morning. No one could work, so we decided to do a team bonding activity to pass the time. We asked our Product Manager to do a trust fall, and the developers were supposed to catch him. The developers did not catch him. He’s now concussed and

Announcing our series E 🥳 Excited to bring new partners like @RibbitCap in for our next stage of growth!

Our startup is officially doing "996" every week 9 cigarette breaks per day 9 meetings per person 6 "can we hop into a quick call" every two hours Our investors love it. We aim to go public in 5 months

An employee sent me a two-page resignation letter. Said he's burned out by our "toxic startup culture" and how he's been working 60 hours per week. He said he need to prioritize his mental health. I told him I understood. Then I forwarded his letter to the CEO. Subject line:

Had a 1:1 with our CEO yesterday. She said she wants the company to be "fully AI-native" I agreed. Today I asked the board to relieve her from the CEO position. Our dev team is vibe-coding the new CEO as we speak.

We launched our new DEI program last quarter. The goal is to make every employee feel included, no matter their background. So far, we have one woman. She’s also our Head of Engineering, Head of Design, and our office manager. She's working 16 hours a day, 5 days a week.

Employees feedback is everything. Our employees complained that we have to many meetings. Starting next week, we're introducing a “No Meeting Wednesday.” Now we just have all the meetings on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Always protect your team members' productivity

We took the entire company to a cabin in the mountains for this year's Team Offsite. On the first night, our CEO made everyone write their biggest fear on a piece of paper and burn it in the fire. The Head of Product wrote “failed product launch.” The Head of Sales wrote “not

Our marketing lead cried during our all-hands today. I didn’t interrupt. It’s important to let employees express themselves. After the meeting, I sent her a calendar invite titled “Emotional Regulation Workshop.” It’s a 2-hour solo session starting at 5pm every Tuesday.

Talked to our founder yesterday. The company isn’t growing as fast as we want. He said he wants the team fired up for Q4. “I got it,” I said. Starting this week, every Wednesday and Friday we’ll have a mandatory team hype session. Everyone will share their challenges,

Talked to our new engineering intern today. He mentioned how helpful his mentor has been. What he doesn’t know is that his mentor’s getting put on a PIP next week. Probably fired next month. Once he’s gone, the intern will take over his job. Now we’ve got a new engineer for

The People Team is having a meeting about the office Halloween party. One team member suggested making it an "Alcohol Free Party" to respect employees who don’t drink. Another suggested a "Sugar Free" party to respect those trying to lose weight. Then the newly hired Gen Z

Had a 1:1 with our engineer today. He said he's feeling burned out and unmotivated. This is a terrible sign for the company. So tomorrow we'll have a 7pm Pizza Party for the engineering team. Always listen to your employees.

Our founder kicked off Q4 with an all-hands. The company’s had a rough year. He told the team, “Make no mistake. We are in wartime.” He even dropped a Ben Horowitz piece on Wartime vs. Peacetime CEOs on Slack while tagging the whole channel. Right after the meeting, he headed

Had a Zoom call with a candidate yesterday. He asked about our PTO policy. I said, “We have unlimited PTO.” He laughed and said, “I bet nobody ever actually takes days off.” I laughed back, “No, it’s true. Our CTO’s been on PTO since the pandemic.” The last time we saw him

Today is Bring Your Kids to Work Day at the office. HR team also prepared a fun game for the kids. Every child will help their parents and the sales team update Salesforce. We call it the Salesforce Whack-a-Mole. Of course, there’s a prize. We’re not cheapskates. The winning