Field notes.
No fluff.
What the research actually says about running a team — and which bits of HR theatre to bin. Written for founders who'd rather read evidence than a culture deck.
Unlimited PTO is a pay cut dressed as a perk
Unlimited vacation sounds generous. In practice people take less time off, the company quietly deletes a liability it used to owe you, and everyone calls it a benefit. Here's what the policy actually does.
Read →Your onboarding checklist is lying to you
A checklist can make onboarding look handled while the new hire is still stuck. Here is the operating system that actually gets someone productive.
Read →You can fire HR. You can't fire the work.
A fintech CEO fired his entire HR team and called it a turnaround. Look at what he quietly kept, and the real lesson shows up.
Read →The cost of HR theatre
One sick day shouldn't cost a 12-message Slack thread. Here's the hidden tax of performative people-ops, and the maths founders never run.
Read →Ruinous empathy — the kindest managers do the most damage
The manager everyone loves is often the one quietly wrecking careers. The research on why caring without challenging is a failure mode, not a virtue.
Read →How to run people ops in three hours a week
For a 10-50 person team, people-ops is a handful of recurring workflows — not a full-time job. Here's the system that keeps it to a weekly block instead of a daily hum.
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