In the third episode of Season Two of Powered by People, Three Hills Operating Partner Tim Pointer interviews Logan Naidu, CEO of Kernel. Kernel's teams operate at C-suite and C-suite minus one level, finding the people who genuinely power and transform businesses and, through them, entire industries. The group brings together Dartmouth Partners, built on a classroom-to-boardroom model spanning early careers through to board appointments; Pure Search, covering tax, finance, governance and legal; Catalyst, focused on Chief People Officers, HR Directors and Head of Reward; and two newer brands in consulting and in energy, power and critical infrastructure. What unifies them is that the sectors and roles they serve are mission critical. Logan shares his route to becoming a founder. He wanted to be a banker from an early age, joined investment banking at twenty-one and realised within weeks that it was the wrong choice, spent a year at JP Morgan and two at PwC in corporate finance, then joined a recruitment firm before selling his first business in 2005 at the age of twenty-five. He speaks openly about faith, an immigrant family's expectations and his sense of purpose, and about why he was never quite built for the usual strictures of employment. The conversation explores the two values Logan talks about openly: excellence and kindness. He explains why he does not expect perfection but does expect people to want to do good work, and why perspective matters in a business where nobody's life is on the line. In professional services, as he puts it, the assets walk out of the door every evening and then choose to come back in the next day. Logan describes the classroom-to-boardroom model in practice. The business runs early-careers recruitment for around sixty-five organisations, reviews well over ten thousand applications a year and meets four to five thousand undergraduates and interns, placing roughly one in ten. It is deliberately inefficient by design, because today's candidate is tomorrow's client. Around seventy per cent of Dartmouth's clients have known the firm since they were nineteen or twenty years old. The episode also examines developing people at pace. Logan believes growth requires being comfortably uncomfortable, and is candid that growth has at times outrun the organisation's ability to look after its people, prompting a decision to rebuild learning and development from the ground up across five brands and multiple geographies, from London, Hong Kong, New York, Charlotte and beyond. Logan discusses why the rise of AI increases rather than reduces the value of human judgement, why clarity of thought and storytelling define good leadership, why he hires for character rather than performance, and how reducing the number of decisions he makes each day protects his focus. He also describes the group's Classroom to Boardroom Foundation, which applies the firm's core skill, career advice, to social mobility in inner-city London schools and has already worked with around a thousand young people. On partnering with Three Hills, Logan explains that the decision came down to people and deal structure, and that he was surprised by how much less didactic the approach was than expected: supportive and challenging, but leaving the management team to work out what was right for the business. Listen for a direct and thoughtful conversation about values, scaling a people business, resilience and ambition. As Logan says: "All businesses will talk about the importance of key talent, despite the rise of interest in AI. They need really, really great people to power them — and that creates a massive opportunity for businesses like us."
