PULSE
The human side of hiring, retention & workplace culture — told through data, voices, and dispatches from inside the companies quietly rewriting the employee playbook.
The Archive
Each issue anchored by a people leader willing to say the thing everyone else is thinking.
The Attrition Paradox
"We stopped asking why people leave. We started asking why they stay — and rebuilt everything from there."
Mia Okafor
Chief People Officer, Lattice
Headcount Is a Hypothesis
Daniel Chukwu
VP People Operations, Rippling
The 90-Day Myth
Priya Ramachandran
Head of People, Notion
Greenhouse Is Not a Strategy
Marcus Webb
People Partner, Figma
The Culture Tax
Aisha Nwosu
Director of HR, Carta
What's Inside
Kezia Obi · HR Director, Stripe
"The CFO doesn't care about engagement scores. She cares about whether we can ship the roadmap. So I learned to translate."
You've said headcount planning at Series B is more art than science. What does that actually mean?
It means the spreadsheet is lying to you — and you know it. You're projecting growth curves for a product that doesn't exist yet, onto markets that aren't there yet, for a team that hasn't been hired yet. The number you land on is a commitment, not a calculation.
How do you justify people programs to a skeptical CFO?
I stopped saying "culture." I started saying "velocity." Every people program I propose now has a direct line to eng output, sales ramp time, or churn rate. Once I made that translation, the conversation changed completely.
Naomi Castillo
Founding Editor
Former Head of People at two Series C companies. Now writes about the work she used to do.
I built this because the newsletters I needed didn't exist.
When I was running people ops at a 180-person Series C, I spent every Sunday morning hunting for something — anything — that would help me walk into Monday's leadership meeting with an idea worth fighting for. I found plenty of HR content. I found almost nothing worth reading.
The blogs were listicles. The podcasts were vendor pitches wearing thought leadership costumes. The LinkedIn posts were the same five people saying the same five things with slightly different emojis. Nowhere could I find the actual conversations happening in the room — the real numbers, the hard calls, the CPOs admitting what wasn't working.
Pulse is that conversation. Every week, one issue. One person ops story told with enough specificity to be actually useful. Original data you won't find in a Gartner report. And the occasional uncomfortable truth about how the sausage gets made.
"This isn't a newsletter for people who want to feel good about HR. It's for the ones trying to get better at it."
If you're reading this from a Greenhouse dashboard with seventeen open reqs and a CFO asking why your time-to-hire is still 47 days — this was built for you. Pull up a chair. The coffee's still warm.
— Naomi
Pulse
The State of People Ops at Series B
"Everything you were afraid to ask your CFO — answered with data."
In This Issue
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"I read Issue Zero on a Tuesday afternoon and forwarded it to my CEO before I finished my coffee."
Tomás Guerrero · Head of People, Brex