The future of HR is being built in AI startups

The most complex products in history are being built within the simplest org charts.

This week's newsletter comes from Federica De Cillis. Fede has shaped People strategy at Meta, Stripe, and Airwallex during hyper-growth and international expansion. Now as founder of Arc Studio, she helps startups design strategies and cultures that move fast without breaking. In this edition, she unpacked what HR can learn from lean AI teams like ElevenLabs and OpenAI, what makes high-performing startups tick and how real teams scale.

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AI products are insanely complex. But the companies building them? Their org charts are ridiculously simple.

No sprawling departments. No alphabet soup of titles. Just tiny teams, flat structures, and a fierce hiring bar.

Take ElevenLabs. Valued at $6.6B. 330 employees. But split into just 20 micro-teams.

Five to ten people own an entire product area end to end. The CEO still interviews every single hire. The philosophy is simple: more people doesn’t mean more progress.

And it’s working. They’ve already passed $200M in revenue while beating competitors with engineering armies ten times the size.

OpenAI is running the same play. About 500 engineers, split into 6-person pods. Each pod runs like a startup inside the company. A technical lead, a handful of engineers, a QA specialist. Every four weeks, they vote on priorities. Ownership rotates. Features ship in 48-hour cycles.

The result? Blistering speed. Unusual depth.

⚡️What HR should steal

This is where HR should pay attention.

If the most complex products in history are being built by some of the simplest org structures we’ve seen, why are we still adding layers, policies, and friction?

This isn’t just an AI story. It’s the next organisational revolution.

Three lessons worth stealing:

1. Size slows you down. Smaller teams move faster. Always.
2. Structure sets the pace. Get it wrong and you kill innovation before it ships.
3. Raise the bar, drop the titles. ElevenLabs and OpenAI care about density, not hierarchy.

And yes, HR is more than org design. It’s talent, culture, comp, performance.

But structure sets the speed limit for all of it. Get the structure wrong and everything else grinds.

👀 What to watch out for

None of this is a free pass. Micro-teams and pods sound great, until you hit scaling headaches.

• Coordination gets messy. More micro-teams = harder knowledge flow. Silos creep in fast.

• Decision fog. Flat works at 100 people. At 400, it risks chaos.

• Pods drifting apart. Conway’s Law means 20 pods can quietly turn into 20 products.

• Culture stretch. Global growth needs rituals, or the culture never travels beyond the founders.

The point isn’t to copy AI startups wholesale. The point is to learn how they protect speed, then adapt it to your reality.

ElevenLabs is the best case in Europe right now. I unpacked it all in my article here.

The test

AI companies are showing us something bigger than technology.

They’re showing us what happens when you strip an organisation back to its essentials.

And the uncomfortable truth? That’s where the future of HR is headed, whether we like it or not.