AUTHOR
Katie Brown
Partner
A company crossing $100M in revenue used to be a decade in the making. We are now watching that happen in a year or less, and in some cases, at $300M and beyond. The milestone has not changed. Everything around it has.
If the pace continues, and there is little reason to believe it will slow, organizations may expect the people leader of the next few years to build a culture, a performance model, and a talent strategy for a company that did not exist eighteen months ago and is already worth a billion dollars.
The conditions that produced every framework, model, and best practice the HR function has accumulated over the past thirty years did not include that scenario. This means the Chief People Officer (CPO) who arrives with a playbook, new or old, is starting from the wrong place.
The real differentiator is not a better set of answers. It is the ability to operate without the comfort of prescribed ones.
The foundational assumption for people leaders has changed
Revenue and headcount used to grow at roughly the same rate. That relationship was so reliable it became a primary measure of organizational health. More people meant more capacity, which brought in more revenue. Investors tracked it. Boards celebrated it. HR built entire operating models around it.
The build-versus-deploy question that companies implicitly weigh every hire against.
Which problem requires humans, and which do not?
”It no longer holds. Adding headcount can now signal inefficiency rather than growth. The org structure has a direct feedback loop with revenue that no longer runs through people in the same way. Companies now implicitly weigh every hire against a build-versus-deploy question: which problems require humans, and which do not?
The CPO is now operating in a context where the foundational assumption underlying their entire function has shifted. The people leader who does not start by interrogating that shift, who inherits the old model and optimizes within it, will spend their energy maintaining a system built for a company that no longer exists.
Organizational design is moving faster than the people inside it
In a high-velocity company, the organizational structure can change materially every six months. Teams form around problems, not functions. Roles that existed at Series A do not exist at Series B. The skills that got someone hired may not be the ones the company needs a year later.
This is not just an organizational design challenge. It is a human one. Careers do not follow a predictable path. Managers lead teams that look different every quarter. The traditional infrastructure of development, promotion, and progression was built for a slower, more linear model of growth. In companies scaling at this pace, that infrastructure often does not apply.
Building something that does requires reasoning about what this specific organization needs right now, and the willingness to tear it up and start again when the organization has changed. It also means knowing when to leave it alone. The pressure to always be moving is real in these environments. The CPO who mistakes activity for judgment will exhaust the organization just as surely as the one who moves too slowly.
A bottleneck in the business needs action. A team still absorbing the last round of change needs time. We have watched a CPO restructure the same function three times in a year because every quarter felt urgent. We have watched another hold steady on a team that looked broken and turned out to just need a quarter to settle. Neither one lacked effort. One asked the better question first.
We have watched a CPO restructure the same function three times in a year because every quarter felt urgent.
We have watched another hold steady on a team that looked broken and turned out to just need a quarter to settle.
Neither one lacked effort.
One asked the better question first.
The CPO who thrives here is not just managing people through a period of transition. They are building constitutively adaptive humans who view structural impermanence as a condition for growth rather than a hardship to be managed.
The window for cultural influence is shorter than it has ever been
Culture has always been a design problem for the people leaders who take it seriously. The questions are not new: who does this company want to be, how do its decisions reflect that identity, and is it still true? What has changed is the cost of answering them slowly.
In a traditional growth arc, a people leader who joined at Series B had time to assess, adjust, and course-correct. Culture drift was detectable before it became irreversible. At an 18-month scale, that window compresses to weeks. Foundational decisions about performance, decision-making, and values under pressure have to be made on day 30 rather than in year 3. By the time those decisions become visible in the organization, they are already the culture. The people leader who waits until they feel oriented enough to act has already missed the window.
The cultural decisions that matter most are the ones that cannot be lifted from somewhere else. The value a people leader brings in this environment is the judgment to figure out what is true about this specific company, quickly, and act on it.
The real differentiator for today’s Chief People Officer is not a better set of answers. It is the ability to operate without the comfort of prescribed ones.
”The orientation that actually separates successful CPOs
We have watched the gap widen between what these roles demand and how companies typically spec them. The foundational capabilities still matter, but listing competencies misses the point. The differentiator in this environment is not a skill set. It is an orientation.
The people leaders who are succeeding are comfortable not knowing. They see uncertainty as a standard working condition. When the board asks a question they cannot yet answer, they say so clearly and come back with something real rather than something safe. When their instinct from the last company points one way and what they are observing at this one points another, they trust the observation. They hold the tension without resolving it prematurely.
They ask better questions than they give answers. In a room full of people performing confidence, that is more distinctive than it sounds. It requires a particular kind of security: the ability to admit the edges of your own knowledge without losing your authority in the room.
The CPO who can hold what they know loosely, who treats a strong instinct as a hypothesis rather than a conclusion, is the one who adapts before the problem becomes visible.
They are as skeptical of their own prior experience as they are of someone else’s model. Most people who have been successful carry their experience as an asset, and it is, until the conditions shift enough that experience starts pointing in the wrong direction. The CPO who can hold what they know loosely, who treats a strong instinct as a hypothesis rather than a conclusion, is the one who adapts before the problem becomes visible.
This orientation shows up in the practical decisions too. Recruiting is either a growth lever or it is not. In a lean, high-velocity company, every hire is a significant allocation of capacity, capital, and culture. The people leader who reasons from first principles about what acquiring great talent actually requires, who builds an outbound motion and integrates recruiting into business decisions rather than sitting downstream of them, is running a different function than the one who inherited a process and kept it running. Same title, fundamentally different job.
To be clear, this orientation is not indecision. These people leaders move, commit, and act. What distinguishes them is that they do not confuse commitment with certainty. They hold a direction firmly while remaining open to being wrong, and they treat being wrong as information rather than failure. Strong conviction is an asset in this work, right up until the moment the conditions change faster than the conviction does.
Successful CPOs ask better questions than they give answers. It requires a particular kind of security: the ability to admit the edges of their own knowledge without losing their authority in the room.
For hiring managers trying to assess this, the challenge is real. It does not show up on a resume. It surfaces in how someone talks about a decision they got wrong. How they describe a moment when their own experience led them astray and what they did next. It surfaces in the questions they ask, not just the answers they give. Instead of asking what they would do, ask them to walk through a time when their first read of a situation was wrong, and listen for whether they treat that moment as information or as something to explain away.
We find ourselves having a version of this conversation regularly with candidates trying to understand current market conditions. For years, clients came to us asking for the person who had scaled an HR function from X headcount to Y, at a similar revenue trajectory, in a comparable industry. Increasingly, early stage clients are saying something different. “I care much more about slope than what is on the resume.” “The characteristics and how they operate will tell me more than what I can see on paper.” The spec is changing because the most thoughtful hiring managers are starting to understand that the context is too new for the resume to be the proof.
The instinct to screen only for people who have already done this in an AI-native environment is understandable. It is also limiting. The capacity to operate here, to hold ambiguity, move fast, reason from first principles, and build for a company that will look different in six months, exists in people who have not yet had the chance to demonstrate it at this pace and in this context, because the context itself is new. The companies that figure out how to find it, wherever it lives, will have access to a talent pool their competitors are overlooking. It is part of why our firm built the True AI Capability IndexSM, to give hiring teams a more reliable way to evaluate that orientation than a resume ever could.
The opportunity ahead for people leaders
None of this is cause for alarm. For the right people, it is the most interesting leadership challenge in business right now.
The companies growing at this pace need people leaders with both the aptitude and appetite to operate at the edge of what is known, who are energized by building without a map, and who understand that the people function is no longer a support system for the business but a design function within it. Harder than it used to be, yes. More consequential, absolutely.
The organizations that get this right will not just build better teams. They will build organizations their competitors cannot replicate, because the capacity to adapt, build, and keep going without waiting to be told what comes next will be embedded in the culture from the start. That is what this moment is asking for, and for the people leaders ready to meet it, the work ahead is worth doing.