After seven years at Peoplesoft, Heidi left the HR tech giant at its height to co-found her own HR consultancy, Knowledge Infusion, with no consulting experience whatsoever and sold it to Appirio in 2012. In this Q&A, she describes how representation in the workplace is essential to cultivating innovation and why every leader should embrace their unique strengths early in their career.

After a brief hiatus to focus on a few other endeavors, we're back with the latest installment of our Lieutenants Series. Hiral spent more than 14 years at one of the largest IT services firms on the planet where he led a $3B portfolio but wasn’t afraid to write himself into an active role on a customer contract or take career inspiration from a gym poster.

Paula-Jo (PJ) Oleksak, the chief business officer at Slice, talks about her transition from finance to operations, how she builds successful teams by keeping things simple, and the need to empower people while allowing them to be full humans, especially in today’s world.

I get to meet with a lot of growth-stage entrepreneurs in my current role at GGV, and some of the most common questions I get from these leaders revolve around scaling teams