What's the Company Culture Like at Circle (circle.so)?

Name a recent decision that clearly reflected your values. What changed as a result?

I joined a few months ago as Circle's new head of people and the first thing I noticed: Every other department had scaled, but people was still firefighting, almost literally. People partners didn't exist. It was generalist HR support: Show up once something's already on fire and hope the fire doesn’t spread while we work on putting it out. We built people partners as strategic advisors instead, from scratch, embedded in their own teams, to spot the smoke before it turns into a blaze. That's long-term thinking, one of Circle's core values: We're building a function meant to last for years. It's also trust and autonomy, another core value, in action; managers let a partner into the real conversations and partners run with their own human-first judgment. And it only works because of growth together, the third value here. Partners give managers the honest, no-frills feedback that actually moves a team forward. We're only a few weeks into rollout, so no fancy metric yet, just vibes (great vibes, but I don't have a dashboard for that). What I do notice already is that managers pulling partners into conversations early, on their own, unprompted.

What habit keeps cross-team work moving — and how do you track its effect?

We have three founders and they're in the weeds with every team (like, actually in the weeds, not a founder-cameo once a quarter). What keeps us rowing in the same direction across 30-plus countries and every time zone is a genuine love for the product and for the mission behind it — helping the world connect and transform. That's the glue. The habit that makes it functional is documentation and over-communication. Write it down. Share it broadly. Give the whole project visibility. No gatekeeping, no secret club. We don't track this with a dashboard (I wish I had a cool dashboard). What I notice is that way fewer "wait, did anyone already answer this" messages and a lot less scrambling to catch up on a decision made while your time zone was asleep.

How do you make recognition fair and visible — and what metric proves it works?

We make recognition peer-to-peer and 360 sideways between teammates, up from a report to a manager, down from a manager to a report, whatever direction the good work happens in (it's a little feral, goes wherever it wants). Circle also has some of the kindest, most thoughtful people I've worked with. It's not unusual for someone to message another person directly just to say a presentation blew them away. We genuinely like each other and that's most of the magic right there. That's what makes it fair, everyone gets to do the noticing, not just whoever has the org chart's blessing. I don't have a metric for this one (I promise, better systems are coming). What tells me it's working is shoutouts landing from people two levels removed from entirely different departments for work that would never make a formal review. When someone in design thanks someone in finance for catching a mistake, that's the real signal.