Culture as an Operating System: Hypergrowth and People Strategy with Q Hamirani

In this episode, Bill Banham sits down with Q Hamirani, Chief People Officer at HighLevel, one of the fastest-growing remote-first SaaS platforms serving agencies and consultants worldwide.

With 1,600+ employees spread across the globe and 1,000 new hires added in a single year, HighLevel’s meteoric rise demands a People strategy that can scale without losing its soul. As the company’s cultural architect, Q is at the helm of building a durable, people-first operating system that keeps teams aligned, inspired, and moving fast—no matter the time zone.

A trusted advisor to founders, boards, and accelerator programs like Techstars, Q blends startup grit with global operational experience and deep HR expertise. His leadership journey spans hypergrowth environments at Airbnb, Paper, and now HighLevel—giving him a front-row seat to how People leadership is evolving in the age of AI and distributed teams.

Inside this episode:

• Scaling Culture Like an Operating System: How HighLevel structures communication, decision-making, and goal-setting to keep 1,600+ employees rowing in the same direction.
• Remote Leadership Rituals: From all-hands forums to the monthly Founder’s Corner, Q shares the leadership touchpoints that anchor strategy across borders.
• Evolving the CPO Role: Why today’s Chief People Officer must blend innovation, business acumen, and cultural fluency to thrive in distributed, AI-enabled workplaces.
• Hiring for Mission Alignment: How values-based interviews and compelling onboarding narratives—like HighLevel’s “skateboard-to-Ferrari” story—help transmit founder intent to every new joiner.
• The Human Side of Hypergrowth: How creativity, music, and transcendental meditation help Q lead with empathy and resilience, and how parenthood shaped his leadership lens.

Whether you’re scaling a remote startup or professionalizing a late-stage rocket ship, this conversation is packed with tactical frameworks, cultural insights, and hard-won wisdom to help People leaders build lasting alignment at speed.

Connect with Q Hamirani on LinkedIn.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome, Show Setup, Guest Intro
• 1:26 Q’s Path: Engineering to CPO
• 2:49 Personal Passions Fuel Leadership
• 9:30 Music, Mindfulness, and Balance
• 15:20 Hypergrowth in Remote-First SaaS

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts, and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media, and visit hrgazette.com.

SPEAKER_01: 0:25

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello, listeners. This is your host, today, Bill Bannon. And in this episode, we're going to dive into the evolving world of people leadership with AQ at High Level. Hugh has been on my list of people to interview for a very, very long time. So I'm very excited about this. High Level is one of the fastest growing remote first advanced platforms serving APCs and consultants globally. And he's a trusted advisor, the founders, boards, and accelerated programs like XRs. And Q brings a unique mix of XRW Global Operational Expertise and EHR technology. Hey Q, welcome to the show today. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_00: 1:07

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10

Yes, it's been it's been a few years. So we got there. And uh a big shout out to Jeff Wold, our mutual friend, who helped make this happen. Q, beyond my weird production a moment ago, why don't you take a minute or two and introduce yourself to our listeners?

SPEAKER_00: 1:24

Yeah, yeah, sure. Uh so my name is Q. I'm the chief people officer of high level, as as Bill mentioned. Uh we are a very rapidly growing um SaaS uh tech company uh with a global presence in almost 10 countries. Uh we are we are almost, I would say it changes every day because we're growing so quickly. A little over 1700 employees and 100% remote uh environment. So definitely trying to make sure we um enable the productivity through that journey. Uh prior to that, I was at I was a chief people officer of a net tech company called Paper. And prior to that, I was at Airbnb for five years, where I was thankful and grateful for having the opportunity to work through a lot of unique moments, such as hypergrowth, um, the unfortunate downturn of the pandemic on the travel industry, um, and lead us through the IPO process and then the remote work program as well that came to be known as the Live and Work Anyway program. So kind of, you know, and and outside of that, just to wrap up a little bit of myself in the intro, I studied electrical engineering. I worked in finance and business strategy and all the first seven years of my career, then ran a few of my own companies and then, you know, turned to HR 15 years ago and no turning back. So really love what I do because I think people are the most complex engineering problem, and I'm always trying to figure out mines, which is a never-ending rabbit hole in some ways, but rewarding as well.

SPEAKER_01: 2:43

I like that. People are the most complex engineering problem. I like that. That's good. That's good. With no static variables building on that before we talk a bit more about your current role and your perspective on uh people leadership, let's talk a bit about you and your interests outside of uh so from global travel. So running a record label. Uh these are these are incredibly diverse activities that you've been up to over the years. Uh, how do these personal passions influence your leadership style or approach to culture building?

SPEAKER_00: 3:15

Yeah, so there's a, you know, I think there's a variety of things in life outside of work that I truly truly believe um help you shape who you are, and who you are in turn shapes how you work in your mindset and leadership style in that context as well. For me, I think a couple things uh throughout my journey have always been kind of needed for purposes of being sane, but also for purposes of being a good leader, which is creativity or some outlet where I am getting that decompression, but also that recharge at the same time, so I can think through what's happening. So for me, travel has always been a key part since growing up. Um, still continue to travel. Um, and then music has always been kind of at the epicenter of everything that I do. Um, in good times, it's been with me, and in tough times, it's a way for me to get through it. So um, you know, I think um doing things outside work, even now, you know, there was, and there are there are moments of ebbs and flows where there'll be years I won't do something deeply and then I'll go back into it. So, for example, I'm trying to get back into music production and mixing, which I've not done for a while, um, and hope to get that outlet done. So for me, I think it's everything that you do outside work, uh, everything you do in life for the most part involves working with people, whether you're trying to build a music track or you're trying to travel and you go and meet a host in a different country or do an experience and meet people and kind of get culturally intoxicated. Um, it's all about meeting people and understanding perspectives. And the more you understand that in your role as a people leader, especially, it only empowers you even more to understand uh different perspectives when you're working in a global environment. So for me, it's it's all related to who I am. Um, you know, you may not see me uh doing you know music stuff at work, but the decompression and the creativity that's come from those 20-minute sessions that I might do, um, including another practice that I've been doing for a while now, is transcendental meditation. And that helps me uh just be more balanced and approach things with a more empathetic perspective at work. So I think it just comes down to your whole self. Whatever you do outside should complement what you do inside. And at the end of the day, a profession like a people leader, you're not just looking at a code base, right? You're looking at people, you're empowering people to work better, to be um better leaders. Um, and to our opening line, you know, they're the most complex engineering problems. So any variable you can inject that would spark um the overall productivity and just uh uh an engagement. Because at the end of the day, we want people engaged. And you don't just, you know, we are way past where you check into work and you leave at 5 p.m. and you check out and you have your personal life. It's pretty much all intertwined, especially in a remote work environment. So, how do you how do you overlap them uh in a way that complements each other? So, yeah, I do a lot of stuff outside work from music to independent film production, um, whatever I can do to just have fun with people and learn and grow. Because a lot of these opportunities outside work are for me to stretch myself in in areas that I would not um in a work setting. And I just learn and grow from everything um from that process. So, yeah, definitely a key part of my life. And I and I believe everyone has it in them to do or wants to do things. It's just a matter of, you know, can can different things take priority? And for me, I have a son who's almost four years old. So the last four years has been a wild ride of uh being humbled, learning patience, uh, learning more uh of dealing with ambiguity, because being a first-time parent, every time I thought I figured something out, I am clearly humbled that I have no idea what I'm doing. Um, so yeah, I mean, you know, it's it's music, it's creativity, being a father, whatever it is. I think all of these need to come together for an individual to just be empowered, um, to be their best self, and then they can do whatever they're doing best. For in my case, empower other individuals, understand their perspective. For an engineer, it might be, you know, coding or whatever, whatever it is. I think it's just critical that we um do that. And I will say, from my perspective, I've I've learned and grown a lot in the last 15, 20 years, because there were moments in my life where I just worked 20 hours a day for years. And I still work a lot. I'm by no means my days are you know um less packed, but I've learned that if I don't do it, I'll eventually burn out. And I need this makes it more sustainable from that. So yeah, I try to do um as much as I can. Again, it's ebbs and flows. For example, the last 10 months I've joined high level in hypergrowth. I've pretty much done nothing. Um, but that's okay. I'm trying to do a little bit of music at home and keep myself entertained and um in due time, you know, you ebbs and flows, as long as you're balanced and you, you know, when you feel the imbalance, you need to augment with stuff. Um, that's what matters.

SPEAKER_01: 8:06

Just going back to the music piece, I'm just interested. Uh what when when you need to get into a happy zone, decompress, whatever it is, what what what is your go-to band or singer?

SPEAKER_00: 8:17

Yeah, so for me, um most of my uh music, my go-to happy place is house music, um, progressive house music. And um, a lot of my uh followings are folks I follow on SoundCloud. So they're not necessarily like famous DJs. Obviously, there's a there's a lot of them that are good as well. Um, but for me, it's like finding the unknown artist is part of my joy. So I actually go and just, you know, if you know, thankfully for the world we live in today where it recommends stuff for you based on what you like, it's that's I guess I'm a prime candidate for that. So it's really the underground artist um that have not yet made it. Um, you know, one of them um that has made it now pretty big. His name is Fred again. But you know, when when he was just doing YouTube videos, I was watching it too. And then so any it's mostly DJs, is is what I'm saying. And a lot of them are really good. Um, and they may not be famous. And I look for those um and then I try to follow them along their journey as well.

SPEAKER_02: 9:14

Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazette.com. And now back to the show.

SPEAKER_01: 9:30

Let's talk about company growth and people strategy. You've led people functions at some of the fastest scale leading companies. You mentioned some of those earlier, Airbnb, for example. What are the unique people challenges of managing hyper growth in a remote first? Because you know, you you guys all like remote first where you are now, uh, in a remote first global SaaS environment.

SPEAKER_00: 9:48

Yeah, I think the when you're in hypergrowth um and you're remote, um, and trying to trying to do a lot of things to essentially take take a take over a market in a domain that you're you're seeing product market fit on clearly. I think one of the biggest challenges from the people perspective is how do you um balance growth and maturity through coaching and learning and giving that space to individuals that we've all had all have needed in our career, including myself, while balancing you know 20-hour days and the work that's on the plate, right? And you know, I think um it's a continuous challenge um even till today, but I think you work through it in a few ways. One is what is the what I refer to as the operating system of the organization, right? For me, culture is not this nebulous world word that you know just means something you know that we can't quantify. To me, culture is a byproduct of the ways of working and enhanced through your operating system. What is an operating system? It's like, do you have information flowing in the organization? Are you including the right people in decision making so that they feel empowered to do things in a better way? These things are easier said than done than in a remote world, it's actually pretty hard. And it's easy at the same time. So it's hard because you have to make sure it's cascade, it's it's the the whole story is is told in the right setting, but it's easy too because you can slack 50 people in in one channel and you know the message is out there. So you have to balance how you uh empower people through information sharing, and that's always a challenge because you know, at some point in a in an organization's growth, be it Airbnb, you know, whichever um company you are at, at some point the organization turns to you know looking at itself at being a billion dollar plus company um in terms of revenue or whichever financial metric you want to look at. And the challenge ends up becoming how do you infuse the right level of external talent to empower the internal talent that's been there? And you kind of almost have a mix of uh of folks, right, um, with different mindsets, and that can be a transition as well. So, for example, I mostly join late-stage private companies, right? So you're talking about series, you know, D-ish or whatever, thousand people or more and above. And often I'm the first chief people officer they've had, right? So I've been brought in kind of from an external perspective to help scale and take the organization to future hypergrowth and beyond. But that itself is an example of how you're infusing external talent with internal and the mesh and kind of how that works through. So I think in general, it's it's definitely a challenge, but you know, it's something that's workable. Um, and it's something, you know, that ruthless kind of prioritization needs to be done to figure out uh where the organization wants to double down on, and that can be cascaded through whatever you want to call it, goals or KRs. But the idea here is is the operating, is everyone rowing in the same direction, right? Because that gets really hard as you grow. Um, there are multiple teams, and this happens at every organization, that are rowing really, really hard, but they're not all rowing in the same direction because each team is trying to make sure they keep up with what they need to do. So, really that building that fabric becomes challenging. Um, it's all solvable and it takes time. It's not overnight as well. Um, it takes time and overall organizational maturity. But yeah, that's uh I think you know that's been the journey and that's the joy of it, right? Um, you get through some of the pain, but then you see the rewards on the other side. I remember when I joined Airbnb, we were about 3,000 people, and in the first year, we were at like over 7,000 people, right? And you look around and high levels the same same way. So we, I think out of the 1700 people, about maybe almost 1,000 people have joined in the last year. So at some point you look back as you're growing and you're like, oh my God, like you know, majority of the people have been here less than a year. How do you bring them along with the folks that have been here for long, right? And how do you build that cadence of um working together, collaborating? Because there's different views, right? Folks that have seen one way. You always have this with every organization where you can bring in a leader, you can bring in a manager from another organization that has the best skills on paper, but they're trying to implement a playbook that does not work. Because playbooks are starting inspiration points if at best to me, right? You have to figure out what works best well for that organization because it's always unique in some form. So you have these like calibration moments that take time for ways of thinking, for ways of working to all kind of mesh. Um, and yeah, before you know it, then you know you look fast forward three or four years and it's kind of blended into um you know a different stage and of maturity um to do bigger, better things in that front.

SPEAKER_01: 14:49

So quick follow-up to what you mentioned there. How does someone in your role try and uh keep all of these new folks who are coming, coming into the organization, keep keep them aligned with the initial vision of the founders of a company? That must be the one of the biggest challenges.

SPEAKER_00: 15:05

Yeah, so yeah, it's definitely a challenge, especially as you scale and grow to thousands of people, right? Because when you're when you're a hundred people or less, like the founder knows everyone, everyone has access. And as you scale broadly, um that needs to be kind of cascaded or replicated. There's a couple ways. I would say there's probably two moments um in the employee journey that I think are most critical for this. One is in the hiring process, right? So are you looking for folks that understand our mission? Are coming. I keep telling folks like, don't join for the money. The money is great if that's a byproduct, but join it because you want to uh drive impact and it excites you in that industry, right? Like I may, you know, I may get a job at in an industry that just does not excite me. You know, it's it's hard to you know continue to be tied to the mission if you don't get excited to what the organization is doing. So in the hiring process, you got to make sure that matches there. The the second one, which is very critical as well, is in the onboarding process, right? So day one, when they join the organization, how do you make sure that they understand what the vision is through the founder's lens? And this does not mean the founders have to attend orientation like they used to do when you were 50 people. There's ways you can have videos, you can have messages from the founders, you can you can still relay the mission, like at Airbnb when we had our onboarding, the and and so so at high level, same at high level, you know, we talk about the journey of how we got here and how the founders started, right? And what what what it's evolved into because that helps people understand. So at high level, for example, um, we have our skateboard model, which is you know, you don't overnight go to you know from a from a from riding a skateboard to driving a Ferrari, you go from a skateboard to a scooter to a bike to a car. So let's let's build and iterate and evolve into you know bigger things because then we can set the expectations right. So we talk about that in onboarding, right? So onboarding is a critical point where you and hiring, hiring is like propagating what the founders really obsess over and like so that you can get that culture right off the start. Um, at Airbnb, it's a good example. So the founders used to interview everyone till I think we were almost thousand people. And the only way they let go of letting the recruiting team do it was they implemented this amazing program called Core Value Interviewers. And these are volunteers from the organization uh that essentially every single candidate that goes through the recruiting process has to go through two core value interviews. And these are interviews done by people that are not in your function. So you really can't talk about work. Like I had in I had a payments engineer doing mine, and I forget the other one because it's been so long. So you're not talking about HR, you're talking about they're talking to you about their core values, and their whole job is to assess do you align with the core values of Airbnb? And if you do not pass both of those at Airbnb, you're not getting in the dough. That's that's what they made as the goal. So there are ways where you can instill these moments in hiring, in onboarding. We at a high level, um, you know, now that we've gotten pretty big and we're in 10 countries, so it's hard to do, you know, regular, we do all hands, but it's hard to do it weekly, for example, because you're in 10 time zones. Who, you know, which one are you gonna pick that someone's not in the middle of the day? So we do do our all hands, but we launch something called the monthly newsletter we, you know, uh uh internally to the organization. And that has a founder's corner. It opens up with founders' thoughts, right? So again, this goes back to my initial point of what is your operating system of connecting with people, both for them to be tied to the mission, but then also to understand the ways of working, what our priorities are, what's top of mind for the founders, so we can try our best to row in the same direction. So that's what I would say. It's it's hard, but there are ways to do it. And hiring and onboarding are two examples, including regular communications, that you can kind of build that connection to the mission and the founders' um latest thoughts or what's top of mind, um, so that they can hear from them as well in some form or the other.

SPEAKER_01: 19:10

Very good. I had so many more questions for you, but we are almost out of time. So uh chase you for a few more years until you come back on again. Okay. But before we finish for today, uh, how can our listeners connect with you? Is that LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever you want to share there? Yeah. Uh and of course, how could how could they learn more about the quick?

SPEAKER_00: 19:29

Yeah, so uh you the easiest way to connect with me is on LinkedIn. My website, uh hamirani.com, which is my last name.com, is also uh connected to LinkedIn. Um and you can you know connect with me there and learn more about us at gohilevel.com. And we are hiring, so please uh do reach out, all remote jobs and uh continuing to grow rapidly. So please do connect out.

SPEAKER_01: 19:50

Very good. Q Hamirani, thank you very much for your time today. I appreciate it. And I will be bothering you for another conversation very soon. But for today's thank you, thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 19:59

All right, take care and congrats on being a dad as well.

SPEAKER_01: 20:01

All right, take care. You don't take care. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_03: 20:07

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette? And remember, for what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media, and visit hrgazette.com.