Natalie Ledbetter

Fractional People Operations Leader - Chief People Officer - Head of People

Driving impact on day one, I help executives and founders build programs that support, develop, supercharge and retain their biggest asset: PEOPLE.

With 20 years of experience and the last 10 years in startups and early-stage Venture Capital, I am a People Operations Executive and former Operating Partner at Boldstart Ventures.


As a People Operations Leader, I have built and scaled three growth stage tech startups (both B2C and B2B), owning People Operations end-to-end (Human Resources, Talent Acquisition, Employee Experience/Culture, L&D, Facilities). I architect people programs (for example: codifying core values, structured recruiting processes and hiring, onboarding, benefits and comp, leveling, performance management, DEIB, professional development and leadership coaching) from scratch and ensure that they not only tie back to the business, but are bespoke to a company’s culture. Additionally, I triage issues in existing People Operations departments and drive change through being hands-on with strategy, training and executing on creative, data-driven solutions. 

I am currently working on two fractional opportunities, but I have room to take on a couple of additional clients for Fractional People Leadership roles, coaching and advisory work.


Another thing that I'm working on, is building a program for seed founders with my partner (who is an experienced founder coach and successful ex-founder) which will teach early-stage entrepreneurs everything they need to know when building a company from the ground up. We've seen Founders make the same mistakes (from hiring to communicating with investors, to nailing focus and finding PMF) time and again--what if we could supercharge them by helping them bypass those mistakes--saving them time, runway, stress and so much more? We are calling it the founder MBA. Stay tuned!

Natalie Ledbetter
Connect
My name is Natalie Ledbetter, and some of the things that I bring to a role like this are I would just say background-wise. I have 20 years of experience and the last ten have actually been in three different growth startups. As a department leader, typically I lead all of the people operations, so each is talent acquisition, learning, and development. Anything that touches employee experience and culture all the way to facilities if there is a physical location. So I have the pattern recognition of things that break down. when you do this three times in a row, you end up with significant pattern recognition because you realize there are inflection points that every single organization hits at very similar times. So the beauty of it is I can get ahead of things which it's really hard to get proactive in startups. So that pattern recognition facilitates this knowledge of being able to say this is going to break down at 20 people, this is going to break down at 50 people, this is going to break down to 200 people, all of those things so we can get ahead of that. Additionally, I worked with Bold START Ventures, which is an early CVC, and I was there for three years. I built people ops as a service and I'm pretty knowledgeable in terms of working with both small but also more developed teams, working directly with founders through all types of advisory services, answering questions, and just being a lifeline when they want to pick up the phone or working through building programs, bespoke programs alongside the founders. The other thing I would say is just that I have a very large network based on those three opportunities and then going into BC as well. I have a pretty significant network of people. We pull from talent to customers to advisors to potential angels, and this curiosity and sort of desire that I have that sort of permeates through everything is just a really strong desire, to solve new interesting problems. The last thing is that I'm highly execution focused. I'm very comfortable in a autonomous environment. I seem to work seamlessly with most personalities. And do you have the ability to build trust in order to introduce new ideas and help people kind of think about things in a different way?

Experience

  • Chief

    Chief

    Member

    Jun 2020 - Present

    Women have always been powerful. We’re not waiting for a seat at the table — we're building our own.

  • Boldstart Ventures

    Boldstart Ventures

    Operating Partner, Head of People and Platform

    Nov 2019 - Present

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

  • Stash Invest

    Stash Invest

    Vice President of People Operations

    May 2023 - Jun 2019

    Banking. Investing. Education. One seamless experience.

  • Text Iq

    Text Iq

    Advisor to the Head of People and People Operations Team

    Aug 2019 - Jul 2021

    AI for Sensitive Information

  • Shapeways

    Shapeways

    Director Talent Acquisition

    May 2013 - Nov 2014

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

Send me Talent

Chat with the founders of Fractional to learn what problems you could be solving tomorrow.