Groundwork Lingo Live

In the last twenty years, Melissa Daimler has become known as one of the leading thinkers on culture. She built Learning, Organizational, and Talent Development functions for Adobe, Twitter, and WeWork. She now serves as the Chief Learning Officer for Udemy, the online learning platform that delivers over 196,000 courses to over 52 million learners worldwide. She also happens to be one of the first coaches ever certified by ICF, the International Coach Federation.
In this episode, Melissa talks about her new book, "ReCulturing: Design Your Company Culture to Connect with Strategy and Purpose for Lasting Success." She explores why most culture efforts fail as quickly as they start and gets into the playbook she’s developed to solve this problem. You’ll walk away from our conversation with actionable steps to better design culture and attract and retain top talent.

Barb Bidan started out in sales and spent almost a decade in the fitness space prior to making her mark at some of the best-known technology companies in the world: Blackberry, Yahoo, Indeed, InVision, and most recently, Peloton, where she led the company's transition to remote work through unprecedented growth during the pandemic. Barb now finds herself as the Chief People Officer at Boom Supersonic, the unicorn that’s breaking barriers for its ambition to build the world’s fastest airliner.
In this episode, Barb talks about the infrastructure she and her team are building to prepare for scale. We’ll hear which priorities are top of mind, how to keep the organization engaged in a virtual environment, and the story of a decisive meeting with her executive team that ended with a sigh of relief.

Natasha Kehimkar has spent over 25 years leading HR, Talent Acquisition, and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) in multiple industries. She started out at Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, and made the move into hyper-growth at OpenTable, App Annie, and Fandom. She brings that experience to her work now as CEO & Founder of Malida Advisors.
In this episode, Natasha talks about growing up in Toronto and the values her parents instilled in her early on. We’ll hear her thoughts on building (and rebuilding) people functions from the ground up, how to take advantage of the desire to build a more equitable workplace, and the story of the time she got laid off and how it influences how she thinks about HR.

For the past 30 years, Pattie Money has devoted her career to creating strong, healthy cultures that drive individual and organizational success. She’s served as a Chief People Officer at some of the most successful tech companies of our time, like TubeMogul, SendGrid, and Twilio. Her experience is deep when it comes to scaling startups and has included multiple M&A and IPOs. Suffice it to say Pattie is somebody you’d want on speed dial whenever you’re navigating change.
In this episode, Pattie talks about what it means to be a rules-light HR practitioner and why it’s been her philosophy from the start. We’ll hear her thoughts on how to build a team that thrives in a high-growth environment, how to ground people in times of turmoil, and the motto she keeps on her desk to encourage her to keep trying new things.

Brandon Sammut started out in recruiting at Teach for America. After earning a Stanford MBA, he dove right into hyper-growth startups. He served as the Chief People & Culture Officer at LiveRamp, a SaaS platform that he helped grow to over 1,300 employees across 13 offices around the world. Recently he’s moved on to become the Chief People Officer at Zapier, the $5 billion automation startup that pioneered distributed work at scale.
In this episode, Brandon talks about how he approaches career development and it’s radically different from what you might think. We’ll hear about one of the best decisions he ever made, his grandfather’s influence as an auto worker at the original Ford Motors factory in Detroit, and the phone call from his CEO that propelled him overnight to the leadership table.

Mariabrisa Olivares began her career at Danone and The Walt Disney Company before transitioning to hypergrowth startups. She joined Twitter as their Head of HR in Latin America at a time when they were the underdogs, just 15 employees proving naysayers wrong that the platform had a chance to succeed in the region.
After that, she moved on to become a Chief People Officer at some of the most rapidly-growing companies in Europe, including, most recently Owkin, a biotech startup that’s pioneering artificial intelligence to accelerate medical research.
In this episode, Mariabrisa talks about the first two priorities she sets whenever she joins a new organization that’s looking to grow fast. We’ll hear about her experience with dyslexia, what she means by a guiding principle she coined “scarecited,” and the story of JFK’s visit to NASA and what he learned from one of the janitors on staff.