Below the Surface: How the best people leaders build high-performing teams

Joelle Emerson
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Below the Surface is a show about what the world's best companies are doing right now to build high-performing teams. Each episode, Joelle Emerson (co-founder and CEO of Paradigm) talks with a leader who's rethinking people, talent, and culture. Conversations consider how AI is reshaping work, what hiring should look like as organizations evolve, and how to create the conditions for performance. Made for CHROs, chief people officers, and HR and talent leaders — and anyone who builds teams.

Episodes

  1. 1 Sept

    Lightspeed CHRO: Everything is about people | Beth Karlsson

    Ask a CEO to name their hardest problem and they will rarely call it a people problem. Beth Karlsson will take that bet every time. From her seat at Lightspeed she watches dozens of the fastest-scaling companies in the world figure out talent in real time, and the ones getting it right have stopped hiring for pedigree and started hiring for how fast someone can learn. Beth Karlsson is Partner and Chief HR Officer at Lightspeed Venture Partners, the global multi-stage venture firm that was an early backer of Anduril, Anthropic, Glean, Snap and Wiz. She started at Apple on the retail floor in the earliest days of its stores, moved into Apple's people organization, and was head of people at Pinterest through its IPO. They get into:1. What a CHRO actually does inside a venture capital firm2. Why she interviews for turning points instead of experience3. The Apple research that found compassion set its best leaders apart, and how it got built into interviews and reviews4. How "pace and purpose" carried Pinterest through its IPO and the year that followed5. Why the runway a company gets to scale has compressed, and the talent that survives it6. The one capability she screens every HR candidate for that almost nobody has Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm. Chapters:00:00 Meet Beth Karlsson01:13 A CHRO inside a venture capital firm03:06 Hiring for potential, not pedigree05:11 The trait Apple's best leaders shared09:27 If you want perks, look elsewhere10:54 The perks arms race at Pinterest12:43 Pace and purpose through the IPO14:57 What the best portfolio companies get right17:15 You can't make everybody happy21:49 There is no AI magic wand26:09 When your team fears being replaced30:37 Everything is about people33:46 People are the only moat36:35 Telling a more optimistic AI story40:45 Lightning round43:31 Closing thoughts Where to find Beth Karlsson:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethkarlsson/ Where to find Joelle Emerson:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelle-emerson-4a24225/X: https://x.com/joelle_emerson Learn more about Lightspeed: https://lsvp.comLearn more about Surface: https://surface.ai Where to find Below the Surface:All episodes: https://surface.ai/podcastApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/below-the-surface/id1896941268Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033AK9SGqJCL9HLx7dE7bn

  2. 24 Aug

    Lattice CEO: Build for the Success of People First | Sarah Franklin

    Companies have spent the last few years measuring the value of AI by the headcount it lets them cut. Sarah Franklin calls that a strategic error — one the market is already correcting. Her bet: the companies that win the next five years will be the ones that build for the success of people first. Sarah Franklin is CEO of Lattice, the people platform, and the first non-founder to lead the company. Before Lattice, she spent 15 years at Salesforce, where she built Trailhead into the company's learning platform and rose to president and chief marketing officer. Joelle and Sarah get into why Lattice promoted its own chief people officer to run the company's AI transformation, what changes in a calibration meeting when the evidence comes out of the systems where work actually happens, why even OpenAI buys this software instead of building it, the AI coach that sits in on one-on-ones and tells managers when they talked over someone, and why every company that kills the performance review ends up bringing it back. Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

  3. 18 Aug

    Superhuman CPO: To Change How People Work, Change What You Reward | Kenny Mendes

    Superhuman's return-to-office mandate wasn't working. The required days came, and the desks stayed empty. So Kenny Mendes scrapped the mandate and changed what the company rewards instead. Kenny is Chief People Officer at Superhuman, the AI productivity company formed by the merger of Grammarly and Coda. Before that, he was the first recruiting hire at Box, where he built the recruiting team that helped take the company to IPO. Joelle and Kenny get into the opt-in office plans that replaced the mandate, the program that let employees voluntarily trade salary for equity, why managers no longer set compensation at Superhuman, and what changed when the people team stopped waiting on the sidelines and started talking to employees directly. Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

  4. 11 Aug

    How Notion Rebuilt HR from First Principles | Katy Shields

    When Katy Shields joined Notion as Chief People Officer, she didn't ask her team to improve what was already there. She asked them to throw it out. Katy joined just over a year ago, when Notion was around 800 people. Before that, she helped scale DoorDash to nearly 20,000 employees, built culture at VSCO, and worked at Google X and Waymo. Her first month was spent mapping guiding principles from a blank page rather than iterating on the playbook she inherited, with Notion's own product as the test bed. Joelle and Katy get into what got retired and what replaced it: the 41-question annual engagement survey, the pilot she rolled out to a fifth of the company too early and then owned publicly, why she calls headcount a vanity metric, how Notion rewrote its company values, and why she thinks AI will make work more human rather than less. Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

  5. 4 Aug

    Greenhouse's Daniel Chait: Hiring Is Broken and Nobody's Winning

    Hiring is in a doom loop. Candidates are using AI to apply to more jobs than ever, companies are using AI to screen them out faster than ever, and both sides are getting worse outcomes for the effort. Daniel Chait is co-founder and CEO of Greenhouse, the hiring platform behind more than 7,500 companies. He's been arguing for structured hiring for over a decade, and he thinks it matters more now than ever, because AI applied on top of a chaotic process just scales the chaos. Joelle and Daniel get into why neither employers nor job seekers are winning right now, what the best companies do differently before AI enters the picture at all, how AI interviews can either destroy or expand fair access to a first conversation, and what happened when Paradigm's own hiring process ran into candidates who weren't who they said they were. Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

  6. 21 Jul

    WRITER's Chief People Officer: Companies Aren't Failing at AI, They're Failing at Change | Jevan Soo Lenox

    Most companies aren't failing at AI. They're failing at change. That's the argument from Jevan Soo Lenox, Chief People Officer at WRITER, who says the technology is rarely the problem. The culture around it is. Jevan is a five-time chief people officer who has scaled teams at Square, Stitch Fix, Blue Bottle Coffee, and AI drug discovery company insitro, and he's been working at the intersection of technology and people for over two decades. In this episode, Jevan and Joelle Emerson dig into why AI amplifies whatever your organization already is, for better or worse. Jevan shares findings from WRITER's recent adoption survey, including the surprising number of employees actively sabotaging AI initiatives at their companies, and explains why bottoms-up experimentation alone almost never produces business results. They also get into why he predicted years ago that the chief people officer would need to become the chief change officer, what he learned about humans and algorithms working together at Stitch Fix a decade before it was fashionable, the return of the generalist, and the difference between an efficiency culture and a resilience culture. Below the Surface is a podcast from Paradigm about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

  7. 7 Jul

    How Linear Built a Winning Culture: Focus on Impact, not Hours | Cristina Cordova

    How does Linear build a $1B+ business with under 200 people, without a culture of burnout?  Cristina Cordova is COO of Linear, the product development system for teams and agents. Before Linear, Cristina was an early employee at Stripe, helping scale the company from under 30 employees to over 3,000, and later helped build partnerships at Notion. In this episode, Cristina joins host Joelle Emerson to discuss why Linear has explicitly rejected the 996 culture common in tech startups. She explains why Linear treats headcount as a deliberate choice rather than a byproduct of growth, why the company's hiring bar is about learning ability and risk-taking rather than resume checkboxes, and why focus, not raw output, is Linear's real competitive advantage. They also discuss Linear's paid work trials, how the company organizes engineering into project-based "collapsible teams," and why investing in brand early pays off for years. If you're thinking about how to build a high-performing team without overhiring, or how to design a hiring process that actually predicts success, this conversation is for you.

  8. 23 Jun

    Cursor’s Hiring Secret: Treat Every Role Like an Executive Search | Adam Ward

    What does hiring look like at the frontier of AI? Adam Ward is Head of Talent at Cursor, one of the fastest-growing software companies in history. Before joining Cursor, Adam helped scale Facebook through its IPO, led global recruiting at Pinterest as the company grew from 200 to more than 2,000 employees, and built Growth by Design Talent into the talent advisory firm behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Notion, and Figma. In this episode, Adam joins host Joelle Emerson to talk about why most companies are still building recruiting teams the way they did decades ago, and what needs to change now. He explains Cursor’s approach to hiring, why the best recruiting processes look more like executive search than a traditional funnel, and why companies should focus less on hiring efficiency and more on hiring efficacy. They also discuss talent density, referral mining, work trials, founder involvement, compensation philosophy, AI in recruiting, hiring junior engineers in an AI-native world, and what it takes to close exceptional candidates in a market where speed, judgment, and conviction matter more than ever. If you’re thinking about how AI is changing recruiting, team design, and the future of high-performance organizations, this conversation is for you.

  9. 18 Jun

    Below the Surface: A podcast for HR and people leaders (Trailer)

    The job of the people team is being rewritten in real-time. We created Below the Surface to learn how category-defining companies are navigating people, talent, and culture right now.

Trailer

About

Below the Surface is a show about what the world's best companies are doing right now to build high-performing teams. Each episode, Joelle Emerson (co-founder and CEO of Paradigm) talks with a leader who's rethinking people, talent, and culture. Conversations consider how AI is reshaping work, what hiring should look like as organizations evolve, and how to create the conditions for performance. Made for CHROs, chief people officers, and HR and talent leaders — and anyone who builds teams.

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