Hello, I’m Alisa. I partner with organizations to help them establish the HR, people operations and recruiting practices to meet their business goals.

Throughout my career, I have had the privilege of working with organizations of various sizes, stages, and industries, including SaaS, neurotech, hardware, advertising, and more. It’s been a blast!

After completing my Master's in Organizational Design, I joined Zenefits, the fastest-growing startup of 2014 and a16z's most significant single investment at the time. I was the first recruiter and helped scale the recruiting team before becoming the founding HR hire. During my tenure, I implemented foundational recruiting processes and systems, hired nearly 100 employees across multiple operational functions, and built Zenefits’s first onboarding program.

Since then, I have also served as Head of HR in several organizations, including Fetch (now iProspect), Poggio Labs, and Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain-machine interface, and the antidote to the singularity. In each of these roles, I worked directly with founders and leaders to implement foundational HR systems and programs.

After Neuralink, I joined Pinterest, where I worked with Engineering's Technical Foundations as their HR Business Partner. Working directly with C-Suite and VP-level business partners, I built out organization design, rolled out engineering expectations, and developed performance cycle programming.

Throughout my career, the common thread has been driving clarity and increasing understanding for employees of all levels, and my true passion lies in advising leadership to build strong HR and Organizational Design strategy.

This varied experience, at both large, international, publicly-traded organizations and small upstarts (often being the first and sometimes only HR person), makes me uniquely qualified to advise on a variety of HR issues. I have built from zero and have also seen how high-functioning orgs work at scale.

And, because ‘About Me’ pages can be notoriously dry, here are some random facts, I hope, humanize me and prove this website was not written by ChatGPT:

• I cannot resist using a pun—ask me about the time Mr. Musk let me know a pun I used “hurt his eyes”

• San Francisco is my hometown—yes, really, the city of San Francisco

• I have been told I am the queen of analogies and comparisons—unfortunately, there are no gameshows or contests where I can capitalize on this skill