Building a people function from zero at Moove AV

The first employee the CEO hired. Job description on day one: build every people function this company will ever need — and run it as one person while it scales.

Standup, in facts

Employee #1. Three markets: Phoenix, Miami, pre-launch Las Vegas. Waymo-partnered autonomous-vehicle operator. Zero HR, zero payroll, zero recruiting, zero compliance infrastructure on day one.

The function I stood up:

• HR — policies, handbook, employee relations, terminations, leaves. From nothing.
• Payroll — 26 consecutive cycles, $15M annual, 100% on time. Sole operator.
• Recruiting — 175 active headcount, 220+ total hired, across three markets.
• Compliance — multi-state standup across 8 states. Registrations, tax setup, labor-law postings, wage-and-hour, workers’ comp, unemployment, benefits.

None of this was rebuilt from a template. There was no template; there was no predecessor. Every artifact — offer letter, handbook, escalation path, payroll calendar, onboarding checklist — was written once, by me, and then run for years.

Anchor moments

Six things worth naming, because averages hide the work.

The 82-worker vendor transition — zero downtime, A+ client rating

71 frontline workers plus 11 managers moved from one operating vendor to another without a shift missed. Rated A+ by the client on completion. The mechanics that made that possible — parallel onboarding, staggered credentialing, a payroll cutover choreographed to the pay period rather than the calendar — are the case study inside the case study.

The $832K vendor savings

One-time savings from consolidating fragmented vendor contracts into a single unified services agreement. The negotiation was mine. The line item is unambiguous on the financial statement; it is not an estimate.

26 payroll cycles, $15M annual, 100% on time — sole operator

Twenty-six consecutive on-time payroll cycles. One person. Multi-state, hourly and salaried, exempt and non-exempt, W-2 and 1099. No missed pay dates, no mis-calculations that reached an employee, no compliance escalations. This is the load-bearing claim of the entire résumé.

Multi-state compliance from scratch — 8 states

Eight state registrations built from zero: employer accounts, tax setup, labor posters, workers’ comp, unemployment, benefits filings. When the company entered a new market, the compliance runbook already existed; I wrote it in the first three markets so the fourth wouldn’t be improvised.

The 21-day Miami launch

The Miami market went from decision to full 24-hour coverage in 21 days. Eleven managers hired, relocated where needed, trained, and stood up on rotating shifts inside three weeks. The recruiting funnel, offer sequence, and onboarding checklist ran in parallel; the pace is what happens when the pipeline exists before the requisition does.

The automation thread

The reason this all held together at 175 headcount with one operator on the people side is that the manual work was replaced with software before it became a bottleneck. Three interventions carry most of the leverage:

• Google Apps Script + Python payroll matching, bridging Deel and ConnectTeam — 6–8 hours saved per cycle. Twenty-six cycles is 150–200 hours of manual reconciliation avoided, but the more important number is zero: no matching errors reached an employee.
• Automated ATS interview scheduling in TeamTailor, self-serve for candidates — time-to-hire down 1.5 days. The recruiter no longer owns the calendar; the candidate owns it.
• Onboarding workflow rebuilt — 5 days → 3 days. Not by cutting content, by cutting handoffs.

This is the thread that continues in the Waypoint case study: the same instinct — build the tool the function should have had — applied to job-search software rather than payroll matching.

Two problems, same instinct

Case study #1 (this one) is what the people function looks like when it’s built from zero by someone who ships software. Case study #2 (Waypoint) is what the software looks like when it’s built by someone who has run a people function from zero. Neither reads correctly without the other.