About
Founded on one principle: people deserve the best.
I'm Lisa Young. I spent my career hiring for technology companies. Now I help them build the people operations that make those hires work — and take their leaders somewhere quiet enough to think.
How the path began
I started in recruiting because I liked the conversations.
Thousands of them, as it turned out. With engineers and founders and operators, usually at the exact moment they were deciding what to do with the next part of their lives. It is a strange privilege, being in the room for that decision over and over.
I helped scale startups from the ground up, and took one all the way through an IPO. I learned what a great hire does to a team, and what a rushed one costs for years afterward. I learned that the organization you sketch in year one quietly decides what you're capable of in year three.
And somewhere in all of it I noticed something the pipeline reports never captured. The companies that grew well weren't the ones with the cleverest sourcing strategy. They were the ones where people could still think clearly.
The part that changed things
So I trained as a yoga and breathwork instructor.
Not to change careers — to understand something I kept running into and couldn't solve with a better job description.
I'd watched capable leaders make poor decisions in rooms where nobody could take a full breath. I'd sat across from founders who could recite their strategy flawlessly and hadn't slept properly in a month. The work I was doing on hiring was real and it mattered, but it stopped at the edge of something I didn't have language for.
Yoga and breathwork gave me the other half. Practical tools for the nervous system, not just the org chart — how attention actually works, what happens to judgment under sustained stress, and the difference between a group that's regulated and a group running on adrenaline and calendar invites.
That's why I stopped recruiting and started doing this instead. Fractional people operations and leadership retreats aren't two separate businesses that happen to share a logo — they're the same question asked at different altitudes: what do people actually need in order to do their best work?
I've learned that making a ‘living’ is not the same as ‘making a life.’
Maya AngelouWhat I believe
Four things I've stopped arguing about.
- People deserve the best. Recruiting is often someone's first real experience of your company. It should be a good one whether or not they get the job. That isn't sentimentality — it's the reputation you're building either way.
- Systems beat heroics. A strong people operation means nobody has to be a hero on a Tuesday. If your onboarding only works when one particular person is paying attention, you don't have onboarding.
- Slow is smooth. The fastest hire is rarely the fastest route to a functioning team. Most hiring pain I've seen traces back to a decision someone made in a hurry six months earlier.
- Rest is infrastructure. Not a perk, not a reward, not something you get to after the quarter closes. A team that cannot recover cannot think, and a team that cannot think is expensive in ways that never show up on the right line.
Background
- Experience
- Startups scaled from the ground up
- Milestone
- Recruiting leadership through an IPO
- Conversations
- Thousands, and still counting
- Also certified
- Yoga & breathwork instructor
Let's connect
Tell me what you're building.
Thirty minutes, no pitch deck. I mostly ask questions.
“I’ve learned that making a ‘living’ is not the same as ‘making a life.’” - Maya Angelou
Chat with me
Interested to learn more about how we can help, click below!