People leadership · Advising · Executive search
Building the human capability behind consequential companies.
I build the People strategy, leadership, organizational systems, and workforce required to turn ambitious plans into something real. I work inside companies as a People leader and alongside them as an advisor.
How I work
Inside the company. Alongside the company. Ahead of the question.
I am most useful when a technically ambitious company needs someone to translate what it is trying to build into the organization and human capability required to deliver it.
Inside · People leadershipI am open to the right Head of People or VP of People role with a company building something consequential.
Alongside · Advising and searchPeople strategy, organizational design, workforce planning, and executive and technical search for companies in moments of scale or transition.
Ahead · Susan researchResearching how expertise forms, how organizations can see it, and what AI should reason with when résumés and credentials are not enough.
Why Darla
A recruiter’s eye. An operator’s perspective.
I built the People function at JetZero while the company prepared to scale its workforce, production capability, and manufacturing footprint. That work reminded me how much I love being inside the problem: working across the business to build the organization and human capability required to make an ambitious plan real.
Across more than 20 years in recruiting and People leadership, I have helped startups, public companies, and mission-driven organizations build leadership teams and the operating infrastructure required to grow. Today I advise companies facing those transitions, and I am open to joining the right organization as its Head of People or VP of People.
More about DarlaIndustrial operating experience
Earlier technology and mission-driven work
About Susan
A context engine for human capability.
The instruments we use today are titles, résumés, credentials, historical hiring patterns, and, in most cases, a modern interview process that rewards presentation over demonstrated capability. They flatten people into proxies and tell us almost nothing about capability in context.
Susan is an active research project indexing human capability from evidence of real work. The ontology and working model remain in a private brief while the research develops.
About Susan and the private briefExpertise is not a data point to extract. It is a human capability formed in relationship with an environment.
Why the physical workforce
I have always been drawn to things being built and to the people who know how to build them.
I live inside this world. I have spent more than 20 years building teams alongside founders and operators, most recently inside aerospace, where ambition eventually has to become an aircraft, a factory, a supply chain, and a workforce capable of delivering it.
Aerospace, defense, and manufacturing make the future of work tangible. AI may change design, planning, inspection, and production, but physical work still depends on judgment, tacit knowledge, skilled hands, and people learning through doing.
This is where technology meets consequence. It is where the question of human capability becomes impossible to ignore.The working belief
What should AI reason with?
If AI reasons only from job titles, résumés, credentials, and historical hiring patterns, it inherits a narrow and incomplete view of people. It should also be able to reason with evidence of what people have built, solved, learned, and become capable of doing.
That requires a richer index of human capability: lived experience, tacit knowledge, context, training, and the environments where expertise developed. It also creates a better foundation for deciding what capability people need to build next.
Follow AI and work signalsWhat I am working on
A richer account of how people become capable.
I am investigating how human expertise is formed, how AI changes what work requires, and whether we can build a more complete record of capability than titles, credentials, and résumés provide.
I am starting in aerospace, defense, and manufacturing because physical work makes the consequences visible. The work must be learned, verified, transferred, and ultimately used to build something real.
Voices shaping the question
What are leaders saying about AI and work?
A deliberately varied set of perspectives on how AI may reshape work, which human capabilities become more valuable, and what the shift means for reindustrialization and for all of us.
Daron Acemoglu + David Autor · MIT
Can AI be designed to create new human capability?
Darla's readAcemoglu and Autor push beyond job-loss forecasts toward a different design question: whether AI will primarily automate existing work or help people, including those without four-year degrees, perform valuable new tasks.
Alex Karp · Palantir
AI may increase the value of vocational capability
Darla's readKarp argues that AI will put pressure on some credentialed white-collar work while increasing the relative value of vocational, technical, and highly specific forms of capability. It is a provocative claim that deserves evidence and debate.
Chris Power · Hadrian
A new workforce is part of rebuilding defense manufacturing
Darla's readIn a conversation about the submarine industrial base, Power connects software-driven factories with the need to build far more manufacturing capacity and a workforce able to operate and improve it.
Jensen Huang · NVIDIA
AI infrastructure could create more work before it replaces it
Darla's readHuang presents a more expansionary view: AI becomes infrastructure, raising productivity while creating demand across energy, construction, chips, data centers, skilled trades, and new digital work.
Katherine Boyle · a16z
Rebuilding America requires more than software
Darla's readBoyle’s American Dynamism thesis connects technology investment to the physical institutions, industrial systems, talent, and operating capacity required to build in the real world.
Evidence behind the inquiry
One question. Four kinds of evidence.
These are living field notes, not finished national directories. Together they ask where capability is needed, where it grows, and what prevents it from forming.
What is changing
The evidence, voices, investments, and production changes worth following.
Read Signals 02What must be built
Where capital, contracts, facilities, and hiring point to the capabilities companies will need.
Explore demand 03Where preparation happens
Where critical capability is being built and where training capacity is constrained.
Explore the map 04Who can respond
Which boards and regional partnerships are responding to industrial demand, and what the rest of the system can learn.
Explore the watchlistContribute to the inquiry
Where did you become the expert?
Tell me about the project, mistake, mentor, machine, team, or environment that changed how you work. These stories help make visible what résumés and job titles leave out.
Share your storyWriting beyond the signal