Natalie Ledbetter

Experience

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  Virtual Sapiens

  Board of Advisors

  Jan 2025 - Jan 2026

  AI Roleplay Coaching That Makes Training Stick Virtual Sapiens is an AI Roleplay Communication Coach for mastering pitches, difficult conversations, and meetings, built by expert communication coaches & trusted by global teams. 90% of training is forgotten within days. Our AI Roleplays and patented, science-backed feedback reinforce real-world skills across body language, tone, and verbal content. Our Practice Portal provides immersive learning journeys that turn ‘soft’ skills into strategic superpowers.

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  Bubble.io

  Fractional CPO

  Jan 2025 - May 2025

  - Partnered with founders and executive leadership to assess organizational design, leadership capability, and team alignment, implementing talent and structural changes that restored execution velocity and supported scale. - Ran talent audits across Engineering and Product to identify (and fix) leadership and workflow bottlenecks impacting execution speed, delivery, and team effectiveness. - Implemented operational and policy changes to internal mobility practices, and team design to improve time to productivity. - Unraveled complex employee relations matters, led two investigations and partnered with Founders to rebuild employee trust amidst cultural toxicity, exiting performance and behavior risks that were slowing delivery and increasing attrition. - Managed and developed a six-person People Operations & Talent Acquisition function while strengthening management capability through training, coaching, and performance practices that increased accountability and team effectiveness.

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  Wallaroo.AI

  Fractional People Operations Leader

  May 2023 - Jun 2024

  Wallaroo.AI empowers enterprise AI teams to operationalize machine learning (ML) to drive positive outcomes with a unified software platform that enables deployment, observability, optimization and scalability of ML in the cloud, in decentralized networks, and at the edge.

  • Partnered with the Founder/CEO to drive large-scale talent changes, creating a leaner, more focused organization with the right people in the right roles.
  • Trained the entire company on, built and ran an engagement survey to identify organizational issues, shift culture and build new company-wide programs for retention.
  • Built end-to-end interview processes for every open role, closing candidates in Sales and Solutions Engineering.
  • Worked as a thought partner to Founder/CEO
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  Boldstart Ventures

  Operating Partner, Head of People and Platform

  Nov 2019 - Dec 2022

  Day one partner + true believer for enterprise infrastructure/SaaS founders

  • Harnessed pattern recognition from scaling three early-stage startups to hyper-growth, building "People Ops as Service."
  • Architected bespoke People Ops programs covering the entire employee lifecycle, from attraction to separation.
  • Worked with founders to develop their "employer brand," codify values, and design employee value propositions to hire top talent globally.
  • Created scalable, structured, and equitable recruitment processes; trained portfolio co. teams on interviewing, negotiating offers, and using data to measure recruitment effectiveness.
  • Introduced executive talent, saving companies over $2.7M.
  • Built total rewards systems, including compensation bands, leveling, equity grants, and strategic benefits (relocation, mental health, education stipends, compassionate leaves).
  • Ensured the development of DEIB programs to engage and retain employees.
  • Developed toolkits for internal and external communications on COVID, RIFs, terminations, employee deaths, sexual harassment, and other ER scenarios.
  • Counseled founders on codifying cultures and threading values through feedback, hiring, performance reviews.
  • Drove strategic organizational design exercises to enhance team velocity and effectiveness.
  • Acted as a sounding board for 30+ founders, providing People Ops support and actionable feedback.
  • Drove strategic organizational design exercises to enhance team velocity and effectiveness.
  • Acted as a sounding board for 30+ founders, providing People Ops support and actionable feedback.
  • Built and ran thought leadership events, offering founders access to C-suite executives and stage-specific content (e.g., freemium models, pricing strategy, scaling mindset, DevRel). Presented to LPs on enhancing portfolio companies
  • Presented yearly at the Annual General Meeting, which included 90+ LP's, founders and potential investors
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  Text Iq (acquired by Relativity)

  Advisor to the Head of People and People Operations Team

  Aug 2019 - Jul 2021

  AI for Sensitive Information

  • Mentored the People Operations team to uplevel the existing talent, provide thought partnership with the Head of People and drive strategic programs
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  Stash Invest

  Vice President of People Operations

  Jan 2017 - Jul 2019

  Banking. Investing. Education. One seamless experience.

  • Built the HR, Talent Acquisition, Employee Experience, L&D and Facilities functions from the ground up, represented the people function on the Executive team and in board meetings
  • Owned and forecasted (with CFO) people ops budget annually, ensuring transparency into people and spending
  • Lead a team of seven HR, Recruiting and Facilities professionals, owning strategy and execution for all People Ops initiatives at Stash
  • Scaled the company from 27 people by over 750% to nearly 300 in 2.5 years while staying highly focused on diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging (ask about this!)
  • Benchmarked and built benefits offerings and policies for all Stash employees--medical, dental, equity in the company, 401k, FSA, Commuter, flexible time off, parental leave, education stipends, catered lunches etc.
  • Leveled the org and developed comp banding and career ladders for every role in the org
  • Built performance management including bi-annual performance reviews and a separate bi-annual compensation review process, running company-wide trainings prior to each launch
  • Developed end-to-end interviewing processes for every role, across every team at the company and all interview training (responsibility of all recruiters on my team) including a required kick off meeting and candidate profile intake with hiring managers
  • Built and scaled a 2 day onboarding process for all new employees with all department heads presenting and familiarizing new teammates with the history, vision, strategy and all key members of the executive team
  • Built all processes/policies and executed trainings (when needed) for OKR's, All Hands, promotions, comp adjustments, employee referrals and bonuses, sexual harassment, visa sponsorship, team building events, 30 and 60 day check-ins with new hires etc
  • Owned L&D, including introducing required manager bootcamp (LifeLabs) for all people managers
  • Moved two offices and project managed a move and 8-month build out of a custom space for Stash
  • Presented people strategy to BoD
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  Curalate (Acquired by Bazaarvoice)

  Director of Talent Acquisition

  Dec 2014 - Nov 2016

  Curalate is a marketing and analytics suite for visual social media platforms.

  • Built Curalate’s recruiting organization and all programs and processes around hiring from the ground up, as the company entered hyper growth
  • Scaled the company by over 240% in 1.8 years across New York, Philadelphia and Seattle offices
  • Lead all strategy around employer branding, marketing and positioning in the marketplace, including thought leadership pieces, speaking engagements and events
  • Maintained an 83% positive candidate experience rating based on survey results sent to all candidates interviewing at the company (Greenhouse benchmark is 73% positive rating); integrated a “white glove” policy for bringing candidates through the intervie
  • Developed all interviewing processes for every role, across every team (45+ unique positions); provided all goals, competencies and lines of questioning for every interviewer
  • Drove process around running effective kick off meetings with hiring managers to hone in on desired qualities and competencies and developing candidate personas
  • Implemented highly data-driven method of hiring, utilizing Greenhouse reporting, slicing and analyzing pipelines, identifying and rectifying process bottlenecks
  • Established KPI’s for the People Ops Team of 5 holding weekly 1:1’s and bi-weekly team meetings, providing continuous coaching, running role-plays, negotiation scenarios
  • Unveiled surveying of new hires (by their managers) at 90 days ensuring employees are set up for success, identifying management/training issues and continuously improving our hiring processes; current metric: What is the probability that you would hire t
  • Made all key senior hires and managed a company-wide push to up-level our existing team; senior hires included CFO, VP of Client Success, VP of Product Management, Director of Demand Generation, Director of Sales Development, Director of Enterprise Sales,
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  Shapeways

  Director Talent Acquisition

  May 2013 - Nov 2014

  Enabling product creation at scale is the core of Shapeways’ innovative technology platform.

  • (Company IPO 2021) • Led all recruitment strategy and execution efforts for all roles at Shapeways NYC--as only member of HR/Recruiting team--from end to end. Growing the team from approximately 80 to 200, with two disparate populations: knowledge/corporate workers, and manufactering employees. • Owned all employer branding strategy including managing budgets, execution of plans and outside vendor relationships • Acted as main HR point of contact (until I brought on an HR Manager) on ER issues, terminations, foreign visas, discrimination claims, on-boarding of new employees and HR policies and procedures • Helped devise all company retention strategies and employee engagement initiatives including the roll out of the company's first engagement survey via Culture Amp • Cultivated relationships with our VC funds, fund portfolio organizations, city and county organizations, universities, professors, consultancies etc. to help build our talent funnel • Orchestrated deal to scale manufacturing services and packing for Google: Made With Code partnership