Airbnb's First People Ops Leader on What Actually Breaks at Scale, a TPPG AMA with Q Hamirani
Most People leaders get one or two career-defining moments. Q Hamirani got most of them in about five years.
As Airbnb's first global People Operations leader, Q built the function from scratch and then ran it through hypergrowth, a pandemic that froze global travel almost overnight, a major restructuring, and an IPO. Somewhere in the middle of all that, he pitched the idea that became Airbnb's Live and Work Anywhere program, which is a pretty good trick: using the company's own product as its people strategy.
Since then he's led People and Comms at Paper, a Series D edtech company, and is now global Chief People Officer at HighLevel, 1,200+ people working remotely across the world. He also founded PeopleGPT, a global community of People leaders working out AI together, writes for Forbes, teaches at London Business School, coaches founders and CEOs, and runs a record label and executive produces indie films on the side. We don't know when he sleeps. You can ask him that too.
Good places to start:
What you actually do in the first 48 hours when the business falls off a cliff
Running a layoff you'll still be able to defend in five years
What changes for the People team on the road to IPO, and what everyone underestimates
Keeping a fully remote company of 1,000+ people from feeling like a giant Slack channel
What HR leaders are getting wrong about AI, and the story we should be telling instead
How Q decides which bets to take on, at work and outside it
Bring the questions you'd ask him if you could.
Hosted by Martin Hauck from The People People Group