DESCRIPTION

Most people teams wait until someone with an HR background is in the room before they build a culture function. Ella Brennecke didn't have one, and Everlab's culture is stronger for it.

In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Ella Brennecke, People Operations Manager at Everlab, the preventative health company that has grown past 130 people across Sydney and Melbourne. They get into how Ella broke into people and culture from a hospitality and founder-support background, why she deliberately targeted startups with nobody yet in HR, and how she uses AI as a research partner without letting it write the memo a human is meant to read.

It's a hands-on look at building culture at speed: onboarding designed to start before day one, an "everybody unpacks the dishwasher" ownership principle that runs through hiring and customer care alike, and why Everlab puts every new hire through its own health protocol before they touch the product. They also cover the real tension in AI-assisted hiring, why a genuine cover letter still beats a strong resume, and what years in hospitality taught her about designing experiences long before she had a people title.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Cold open

00:43 Intro: why culture is the glue past 100 people

02:57 Designing experiences where people excel

04:03 Magic is designed, not accidental

05:20 Holding culture across Sydney and Melbourne

07:31 Supporting technical people leaders

09:28 Leaning on your VC as a resource

10:56 Breaking into people and culture with no HR background

14:45 Creating your own luck

16:11 Just ask for the title

16:41 Why she stays close to the founder

18:51 What breaks as you scale: onboarding first

21:43 The interview is a two way sell

25:01 Inside the hiring process

26:26 What a culture interview actually looks like

28:27 New York restaurants and fast feedback loops

31:36 Get the ops right, then add the magic

33:12 Automating the busy work

35:38 AI can level you up or level you down

37:52 Teaching the next generation to still think

39:44 AI slop: produce better, not more

41:29 Using AI to synthesise, not to judge

42:37 Why she still reads every cover letter

45:30 The win: annual review cycles

48:07 Design for the people you're actually serving

49:05 Everybody unpacks the dishwasher

51:41 Every employee sits with a customer each quarter

54:34 Final advice: leave threads for people to pull

56:37 Wrap

ABOUT THE GUEST

Ella Brennecke is People Operations Manager at Everlab in Sydney, where she has built the people and culture function largely from scratch since joining roughly nine months ago. She came to Everlab via the Founder Success team at Blackbird Ventures and the guest experience team at cabin retreat company Unyoked, and works closely with Everlab's founder on hiring, onboarding and culture across the company's Sydney and Melbourne offices.

LINKS

Ella Brennecke, Everlab · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ariella-werner-seidler/

James MacDonald, NTP Talent · LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jamesmacdonaldau · Site: ntptalent.com.au

Hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent.

Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the production partner behind Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.

Jack Rudenko hasn't written a line of code himself in nine months. In that time, his team has shipped six or seven products used by millions of people, and he says that gap, between who writes the code and who's actually building, is the whole story of engineering right now.

In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Jack Rudenko, Chief AI Officer at 10x Labs, where he has spent the past two years building an AI-native engineering practice from the ground up. They get into the project everyone called impossible before AI made it a three-month build, why working with AI agents is more exhausting than writing code ever was, and what actually separates an engineer from an artist or a scientist now that the code itself isn't the hard part.

It's a hands-on, practitioner's take on what building with AI agents actually looks like day to day, not the conference-keynote version. They cover Jack's own workflow for briefing an AI agent, why he doesn't trust any project's security the moment an API key exists, the "non-engineering builders" quietly out-building agencies, and why he calls Claude Code some of the worst-engineered software he's ever used, and also the tool he loves most.

CHAPTERS

0:00 - Cold open: the line that explains why most AI engineering doesn't work

0:31 - Who Jack Rudenko is, and what's ahead in this episode

1:27 - Welcome, meet Jack Rudenko, Chief AI and Technical Strategist at 10x Labs

1:48 - The real bottleneck in AI engineering is human, not technical

3:36 - Why "AI native from scratch" beats bolting AI onto old processes

8:53 - Inside Magus, treating AI skills like versioned software packages

11:20 - 500 skills later, building a curated knowledge base for AI agents

14:56 - The rise of the "non-engineering builder"

17:06 - Why enterprise software is the real mess, not startups

19:32 - The unexpected cost of working with AI, burnout, not laziness

21:24 - Jack's actual workflow, plan mode, research, and acceptance criteria

27:26 - Dark factories, evals, and "religion" versus "engineering" in AI

29:49 - The skill nobody measured, loaded less than half the time

32:52 - Why AST trees beat graph databases for AI code memory

36:07 - From 10X to 50X, two projects AI made possible

41:35 - What team size looks like when one person can do it all

42:53 - Why no project is secure once a key exists

46:44 - Artist, scientist, engineer, what actually makes you one

51:04 - What junior engineers need to learn now

54:45 - Cursor, YC founders, and the rise of the non-engineer builder

59:35 - The addictive, exhausting superpower of building 10X more

1:02:57 - Why "impossible" projects are worth the budget now

1:04:55 - The future of software, giant platforms and a million small ones

1:08:04 - Why consultancies are thriving, for now

1:09:12 - "Claude Code is the worst software ever. I love it."

1:11:22 - Open source, Jack's origin story, and why it built him

1:15:23 - James's takeaway: religion vs engineering, and the challenge to measure your own AI rollout

ABOUT THE GUEST

Jack Rudenko is Partner and Chief AI Officer at 10x Labs, where he has spent the past two years building the team’s AI-native engineering practice, Magus, from the ground up. He has deep expertise in cloud-native architecture, Go, Kubernetes and complex systems, and has delivered production platforms that would have been considered technically impossible before AI, including a three-system integration project used as a case study on this episode. Jack is also a longtime open-source contributor, including to the Linux kernel.at 10x Labs, where he has spent the past two years building the team’s AI-native engineering practice, Magus, from the ground up. He has deep expertise in cloud-native architecture, Go, Kubernetes and complex systems, and has delivered production platforms that would have been considered technically impossible before AI, including a three-system integration project used as a case study on this episode. Jack is also a longtime open-source contributor, including to the Linux kernel.

LINKS

Jack Rudenko, 10x Labs · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erudenko/

James MacDonald, NTP Talent · LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jamesmacdonaldau · Site: ntptalent.com.au

Hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent.

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Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the team who helped build Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.