What if you didn’t need a People team to build a People function?
Meet Our TeamLaunchWell took shape at a moment when both of us were thinking differently about what came next.
Tony was stepping away from his role as COO of a VC-backed healthtech company after a career spanning management consulting and operations. Julia was building an independent fractional Talent practice, drawing on a career in project management, client delivery, and Talent leadership. From different sides, we were seeing the same challenge: companies were scaling before their People functions were. They needed the expertise, systems, and support, before they were ready to build the full team in-house.
We started comparing what we’d seen from opposite sides of the table.
Tony understood the realities of building and operating a growth-stage business, where resources are finite, priorities move quickly, and bringing in the right expertise at the right moment matters. Julia understood how deeply embedded you have to be to build great teams, and how quickly a hiring need can expose bigger gaps in process, systems, and People strategy.
The more we talked, the more we saw an opportunity. What if growing companies could access Talent and HR as one embedded team, building what they needed as they grew, rather than piecing it together one hire or vendor at a time?
Tony thought there was a business there. Julia initially said no.
But the idea stuck. When Julia eventually said yes, she had one condition: we wouldn’t build LaunchWell around the two of us. We would build a team of people with different expertise who shared our belief in great client service, high-quality work, and becoming genuinely invested in the organizations we support.
That belief still shapes LaunchWell today. We build alongside our partners, evolve with them, and ultimately help create the People function they can carry forward without us.
