Investor Harry Stebbings: Top CEOs Dislike HR
Venture capitalist Harry Stebbings stated that he has never seen a top-performing CEO who genuinely likes the HR role, believing that HR essentially "slows down and creates meaningless processes." Investor Martin Shkreli countered, emphasizing that HR is one of the most critical functions in a company, especially in recruitment, culture building, and information alignment, noting that startups are fundamentally a "people game."
Discussions in English venture capital and management also indicate that most rapidly growing companies are long-term caught between a "process-driven HR system" and "small teams, culture-driven, rapid decision-making." On one hand, venture capital and compliance requirements drive the standardization of HR systems; on the other hand, early-stage CEOs and frontline teams often view "process and compliance" as growth impediments, a tension that is amplified during hyper-growth cycles.
In more mature stages, large companies generally outsource "talent and culture" to HR and organizational teams, shifting management focus from "managing people" to "systems and strategy." This differentiation means that whether top CEOs like HR reflects more on the management model differences of various stages and organizational forms rather than the intrinsic value of HR itself.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
This debate truly exposes the "role conflict of HR on the organizational growth curve." During the product and market validation phase, CEOs most dislike "designing systems for risks five years out," thus HR's compliance, documentation, and matrix processes are seen as "stopping work today for tomorrow's sake." In the scaling phase, those "slowing processes" become the "safety valves" preventing systemic collapse, but these benefits are hard to attribute to a single function, leading HR to still be viewed as a "cost center."
A deeper divide lies in how HR's value is priced differently in the "front office" and "back office." In the front office, HR is seen as "hiring, organizing events, producing compliance documents," while in the back office, HR is actually responsible for "compensation structures, incentive levers, risk containers, and organizational narrative alignment," taking on many functions that should be shared by the CFO, legal, and CEO. When these back-office values are overlooked, HR is simplified to being a "department that only blocks progress."
In tech companies where "people are core assets," this evaluation method distorts talent structures: entrepreneurs view the state of "running fast without HR" as a capability, while organizations with "HR systems" are seen as "institutionalized," delaying investment in systematic organizational structures until scale crushes the existing management model. This delay often requires higher costs for remediation later. From a long-term perspective, HR itself is not a "good/bad" issue, but rather a question of "when to introduce it, how to design it, and how to align it with CEO power."