Taylor Roa, Head of People & Talent at January, shares how a nine-year-old Series B company achieved something virtually unheard of in startup culture: zero layoffs through every market cycle while maintaining sustainable growth. As January approaches their hockey stick growth moment after years of disciplined scaling, Taylor reveals how they’re reinventing their hiring approach to double their team size while preserving the cultural elements that drove their success. His framework for building lean, efficient teams through AI-powered recruiting and intentional culture evolution offers a blueprint for sustainable scaling without the typical startup growing pains.

Topics Discussed

• Building sustainable growth cultures that survive market downturns without layoffs
• Creating writing-first cultures that enable async collaboration and thoughtful decision-making
• Developing outbound recruiting strategies for companies without strong brand awareness
• Implementing AI tools across people operations to increase team efficiency by 50-200%
• Managing cultural evolution during controlled growth phases rather than hypergrowth
• Building people functions that amplify founder strengths instead of fixing cultural problems
• Designing lean team structures that can scale to IPO with plateau headcount models
• Creating hiring processes that prioritize exceptional talent over rapid volume scaling