Most people teams wait until someone with an HR background is in the room before they build a culture function. Ella Brennecke didn't have one, and Everlab's culture is stronger for it.
In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Ella Brennecke, People Operations Manager at Everlab, the preventative health company that has grown past 130 people across Sydney and Melbourne. They get into how Ella broke into people and culture from a hospitality and founder-support background, why she deliberately targeted startups with nobody yet in HR, and how she uses AI as a research partner without letting it write the memo a human is meant to read.
It's a hands-on look at building culture at speed: onboarding designed to start before day one, an "everybody unpacks the dishwasher" ownership principle that runs through hiring and customer care alike, and why Everlab puts every new hire through its own health protocol before they touch the product. They also cover the real tension in AI-assisted hiring, why a genuine cover letter still beats a strong resume, and what years in hospitality taught her about designing experiences long before she had a people title.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open
00:43 Intro: why culture is the glue past 100 people
02:57 Designing experiences where people excel
04:03 Magic is designed, not accidental
05:20 Holding culture across Sydney and Melbourne
07:31 Supporting technical people leaders
09:28 Leaning on your VC as a resource
10:56 Breaking into people and culture with no HR background
14:45 Creating your own luck
16:11 Just ask for the title
16:41 Why she stays close to the founder
18:51 What breaks as you scale: onboarding first
21:43 The interview is a two way sell
25:01 Inside the hiring process
26:26 What a culture interview actually looks like
28:27 New York restaurants and fast feedback loops
31:36 Get the ops right, then add the magic
33:12 Automating the busy work
35:38 AI can level you up or level you down
37:52 Teaching the next generation to still think
39:44 AI slop: produce better, not more
41:29 Using AI to synthesise, not to judge
42:37 Why she still reads every cover letter
45:30 The win: annual review cycles
48:07 Design for the people you're actually serving
49:05 Everybody unpacks the dishwasher
51:41 Every employee sits with a customer each quarter
54:34 Final advice: leave threads for people to pull
56:37 Wrap
ABOUT THE GUEST
Ella Brennecke is People Operations Manager at Everlab in Sydney, where she has built the people and culture function largely from scratch since joining roughly nine months ago. She came to Everlab via the Founder Success team at Blackbird Ventures and the guest experience team at cabin retreat company Unyoked, and works closely with Everlab's founder on hiring, onboarding and culture across the company's Sydney and Melbourne offices.
LINKS
Ella Brennecke, Everlab · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ariella-werner-seidler/
James MacDonald, NTP Talent · LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jamesmacdonaldau · Site: ntptalent.com.au
Hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent.
Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the team that helped build Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.
