Jobs' quote shaped how I approached recruiting and people ops at high-growth companies and startups for the past decade.
At GroupM, building the technical, programmatic and executive functions across global advertising agencies. I learned how different the game is at an early-stage startup during my time at Beeswax, supporting Charlie, Ram, and Shamim as they built the SRE, Platform, and Data Engineering functions. I carried that learning to Dotdash, helping Colleen, Nabil, and Adam build brand teams before working on the acquisition that became what is now People Inc.
Then I owned it 0 > 1 at Aptos. I came in early, helped build the org from the ground up w/ Mo, Avery, David, and Tom, and spent years watching the network scale. The people who made it possible were not always the most credentialed in the room. They were the ones who understood why the problem mattered and stayed when it got hard.
A decade of building these teams taught me to look past credentials and pay attention to what they build. The systems that hold under pressure are staffed by people who deliberately choose the difficult version of the job.
That is why I joined Movement as Head of People. This team, after everything they've been through, chose to keep building when the world counted them out. I am joining a team of A players like Sean, Zekun, and Akeel, with more joining over the next several weeks.
Movement has live, licensed payment rails running today. The job now is finding the builders who understand why settlement speed and systemic reliability matter, and hiring them before the network demands it. Most organizations scale people reactively, waiting for cracks to appear. Movement cannot afford that. The settlement layer for global emerging markets gets one chance to be right.
The stakes are high, but there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
