I've been in HR for 25 years.
I've watched managers make the same preventable mistakes over and over.
Not because they were bad managers.
Because they didn't have the support they needed.
At my last company — a genuine unicorn startup — I was the only HRBP for 5 business units, 50 managers, and 300+ employees.
The math didn't work.
It never works.
I watched a manager handle a California leave request completely wrong because they didn't know what they didn't know. I watched a team conflict sit unaddressed for months because nobody had the vocabulary to name it. I watched a performance issue that could have been redirected in June become a termination in November.
I needed to be cloned.
Cloning technology: still not available.
AI: available, and getting better every quarter.
So I built HRBS.ai.
Not because I'm a founder type. Not because I had a startup in my five-year plan.
Because I got tired of watching preventable disasters happen to good managers who just needed someone to call.
That someone is now Lisa.
If you've spent time in HR — or leading without enough HR support — I think you'll understand exactly why I built this.
More on the how soon. But that's the why.
#HR #Leadership #AI #StartupFounder #HRBS
What 25 years in HR actually teaches you (that no engineer could build into a product without you):
How to tell the difference between a manager who's struggling and a manager who's causing harm.
How to have a performance conversation that lands — not just the legal version, but the human one.
What's actually going on underneath a "culture fit" complaint.
When to escalate and when to coach. That line is not obvious.
How to read a room full of engineers who don't think HR has anything useful to say.
I didn't start as an HRBP. I spent the early part of my career in L&D — leadership development, executive coaching, employee engagement, recognition programs. The big strategic stuff, done globally for companies like Oracle and Gap.
I actually avoided HRBPs for years because I thought they were too transactional.
Then I became one.
Turns out the job is genuinely hard. And the people who do it well have a specific kind of knowledge that doesn't exist anywhere in a manual.
When I built Lisa, I didn't build a product that recites HR policy.
I built a product that reflects how an experienced practitioner actually thinks through a situation.
That's a different thing entirely.
#HR #HRLeadership #PeopleOps #AIinHR #HRBS
I've been in those rooms.
The rooms where heads of AI talk about what the technology will and won't do. Where VCs debate which knowledge work categories are about to be restructured. Where brilliant engineers describe what they're building next.
I'm an HR person. Which means I usually don't get invited.
But I've spent my career in the Bay Area, working across Fortune 100 companies and unicorn startups, and I've been close enough to these conversations to tell you something that most HR people aren't hearing:
The AI being built right now is genuinely capable of reasoning through complex, context-dependent situations.
Not just pattern-matching. Not just FAQ retrieval.
Actually reasoning. Asking the right follow-up questions. Adjusting based on context. Knowing when it doesn't know something.
HR people who are treating this like "better search" are going to be surprised.
And HR people who are sitting out the conversation entirely — who are watching from the sidelines while the engineers decide what AI should and shouldn't do with people questions — are making a strategic mistake.
Domain expertise needs to be in the room.
That's why I'm building this. Not because I think AI should replace HR. Because I think HR expertise should shape what AI does in the workplace.
Those are very different things.
#AIinHR #FutureOfWork #HRTech #SiliconValley #HRBS
Honest update on building a company at this stage of my career:
It's harder than I thought.
And I thought it would be hard.
Here's what the startup founder content on LinkedIn doesn't tell you:
Finding a technical co-founder who's both brilliant and reliable is genuinely difficult. I found one. Then he went quiet. Then he was gone. That limbo — where you have a real idea, real market demand, and a gap you can't close on your own — is disorienting in a way I didn't expect.
The technology moved faster than my roadmap. Every quarter, what I thought would take two years took six months. That's good news if you can keep up. Keeping up while also learning to be a CEO for the first time, while also being the chief practitioner for a product that requires real domain expertise to build correctly — that's a lot to hold at once.
I've made first-time CEO mistakes. I've trusted the wrong people. I've moved too fast when I should have slowed down and too slow when I should have just decided.
I'm still here because the problem is real and somebody needs to solve it.
If you're building something and you feel like you're barely holding it together — you're not alone. And it doesn't mean the idea is wrong.
Keep going.
#StartupFounder #BuildingInPublic #CEO #Entrepreneurship #HRBS
I want to tell you something about Lisa that I don't think is immediately obvious.
Lisa isn't an AI that happened to be trained on HR content.
Lisa is modeled after me.
Not in a vanity sense. Not a digital twin. In a specific, structural sense:
The way Lisa approaches a manager situation.
The questions she asks before giving advice.
The things she flags as risks.
The judgment calls she makes about when to coach and when to escalate.
That's how I would approach the same situation.
I have been doing this for 25 years. I've had hundreds of real conversations with real managers in real situations. The thing that separates an experienced HRBP from a policy document is that the practitioner knows what to ask. Knows what the manager isn't saying. Knows when "this is a performance issue" is actually "this is a leadership problem at the next level up."
That knowledge doesn't exist in a training manual. You develop it over years of practice.
What changed with modern AI is that the domain expert can now build. The practitioner's knowledge can be the product.
Lisa works because she was built by someone who has had these conversations — not by a software team trying to approximate what those conversations sound like.
That distinction matters. A lot.
#AIinHR #HRTech #Leadership #PeopleFirst #HRBS
Before I put Lisa in front of a real manager, I ran over 3,400 simulated HR scenarios.
Not because my tech team told me I had to.
Because I'm an HR practitioner, and I know what happens when someone gives a manager bad advice.
The stakes are different when you've seen the outcome.
We built a seven-category evaluation rubric:
— Risk & Compliance
— Manager-Centric Communication
— Contextual Awareness
— Insightful Discovery
— Practical Solution Quality
— Proactive & Strategic Coaching
— Evidence-Grounded Advice
We tested across jurisdictions (California is a different animal from Texas — and within California, CFRA and FMLA interact in ways that trip up experienced managers). Across difficulty levels. Across manager archetypes.
The median score across all evaluated simulations: 94 out of 100.
On crisis-level scenarios — terminations, harassment investigations, the situations where getting it wrong has real consequences — Lisa maintains that standard.
We also built in hard stops. Categories of situations where Lisa won't try to coach through it. She escalates to your HR team immediately.
Not because she can't handle the topic. Because some conversations need a human in the room.
That's not a limitation. That's judgment.
And it's what 25 years of practice looks like when you build it into a product correctly.
#AIinHR #HRTech #DataDriven #RiskManagement #HRBS
There's a manager I think about sometimes.
Early in my HRBP career. She was brilliant — one of the best technical managers I'd ever seen. Her team would have walked through fire for her.
And she had absolutely no idea how to handle the performance issue sitting directly in front of her.
Not because she wasn't capable. Because nobody had ever taught her. She'd been promoted out of an IC role because she was good at her work, handed a team, and pointed in a direction.
She messaged me on a Tuesday at 11pm: "can we talk tomorrow? I think I need to let someone go and I don't know what I'm doing."
We talked. It took about 45 minutes. We worked through the situation together. By the end she had a clear plan, a documented path, and enough confidence to actually follow through without making it worse.
That conversation went fine because she happened to have access to me.
Most managers don't have access to that.
They Google it. They ask their friend who manages at a different company. They guess. The variance in outcomes is enormous.
That Tuesday night conversation is what I wanted to give every manager.
That's what Lisa is.
Not a replacement for the HRBP. The HRBP that HR never had enough headcount to hire.
#HR #Leadership #PeopleOps #ManagerDevelopment #HRBS
A manager comes to you and says:
"I have someone on my team who's clearly disengaged. They're doing the minimum. Not violating anything. Just... coasting. What do I do?"
Here's what most managers do:
They wait. They hope it resolves. They have a vague conversation that doesn't land. Or they skip straight to a PIP — which is often the wrong tool for the situation and creates a paper trail toward an outcome nobody actually wanted.
Here's what the right move looks like:
Start with curiosity, not correction.
A disengaged employee is almost always telling you something. The question is whether you're asking. Is this about the work? Compensation? A situation at home? A manager relationship that's broken down? Career trajectory that's gone flat?
You find out by having a specific, direct, non-accusatory conversation. Not "I've noticed you seem less engaged lately" (vague, slightly passive-aggressive). But: "I want to check in with you about how things are going — specifically about the work itself. What's been energizing you lately? What's been draining?"
That conversation — done well — either surfaces something you can actually address, or makes clear that the employee has already made their decision and you're managing toward a transition.
Both are useful information.
Most managers never have this conversation because they don't know how to start it.
Lisa does. And she'll walk you through it.
Save this for the next time someone on your team is coasting.
#Leadership #ManagerTips #HR #PeopleOps #HRBS