Two founders. 40+ years.
They've spent their careers helping companies do HR properly and watching founders struggle through it alone. They know exactly what to do.
Not a person. A bench.
A team that runs compliance and operations before you even have to ask, so the function is covered, not just advised.
BYOA. 8 agents, live.
Bring Your Own Agents, built by HR professionals, not engineers, and tested on real startup data.
At the cost of one average HR Head, DONE BETTER.
"Product-market fit, cashflow, the next round, a customer escalation. All of it is genuinely urgent. All of it genuinely deserves me."
People work is never the loudest fire, so it keeps getting moved to tomorrow. Until tomorrow is too late.
"The advice I get from my network is only as good as what my network has been through. Which is a very small sample."
The same three people, asked for advice. Bounded knowledge presented as certainty.
"I've made three significant people decisions this month. I haven't spoken to anyone about any of them."
The highest-stakes calls in the business, made with the least support of any function.
A world where no founder navigates their talent agenda alone. Where the quality of thinking available to a 20-person company is as good as what a 20,000-person company takes for granted.
The positions that shape everything FTN builds and every conversation it hosts.
A strategic thought partner who has built people functions before changes the quality of every people decision you make. Not after the crisis. Before it.
Who you hire, how you lead them, when you let them go. These are the highest-leverage decisions a founder makes, not operational tasks.
A deck doesn't run payroll, compliance or onboarding. The function is only real when someone is actually holding it day to day.
At 200 people, one hire can reshape a team, a culture, a quarter. At enterprise scale it barely registers. The stakes are categorically different.
10–50 people | Getting the basics right before they become expensive problems
50–150 people | When founder intuition needs to become a system
150–500 people | From a startup team to a real organisation
Senior thinking for decisions that change trajectory.
Specialists who actually get things done.
Purpose-built agents for repeatable HR work.
This list is indicative. — We agree the exact scope after due diligence.
Two senior HR professionals who kept meeting founders who needed more support than they were getting.
Co-founder, FTN
Deepika spent two decades as Partner and Managing Director at Accenture HR Consulting, advising some of the world's largest companies on their people strategy. She was thorough, rigorous, and by any measurable standard, successful, occasionally helping enterprises build HR functions that looked impressive in boardrooms and meant very little to the people actually doing the work. After twenty years of watching the same expensive mistakes repeat at scale, she left to go where the stakes are actually felt.
"I spent twenty years helping large companies do HR properly. Some of the time, we actually did. The rest of the time, we built decks. Founders don't have time for decks. That's why I'm here."
Co-founder, FTN
Around 20 years inside some of the world's most complex organisations, including Accenture Strategy and PwC, building and leading People and Org Strategies, watching great companies make avoidable people mistakes because no one in the room understood both the strategy and the stage. She brings the strategic rigor of an enterprise HR leader, applied with the speed and zero-bloat thinking startups actually need.
"I keep meeting brilliant founders fighting their most consequential decisions alone, and knew exactly what was missing."