I help venture-backed founders navigate layoffs and sensitive separations while protecting their people, their company, and everything they’ve built.
Your employment counsel knows the law but can’t run the process. Your Head of People has led transitions but hesitates at the legal exposure. A reduction asks for both at the same time — under pressure, on a deadline, with people’s livelihoods and the company’s reputation on the line. I’ve sat in both chairs.
Selection criteria, adverse-impact exposure, notice obligations, enforceable releases. Get these wrong and a cost-cutting measure becomes an expensive lawsuit.
How the news is delivered, how people leave, how the team that remains is steadied. This is what your organization is remembered by.
A former corporate lawyer who has led the People function inside venture-backed companies, holding the legal and the human in one set of hands.
Most founders face this once, with no playbook. I bring the playbook — and the steadiness — to the moment you can’t afford to fumble.
Designing defensible selection criteria and pressure-testing the list so the reduction doesn’t fall disproportionately on protected groups — the single most common path to litigation.
Mapping federal and state notice obligations that catch growing companies off guard, and building a timeline that keeps you on the right side of them.
A severance approach that is fair, consistent, and produces releases that actually hold, including the specific requirements that protect you with longer-tenured and older employees.
The all-hands script, the individual notification approach, and the manager prep that help ensure people leave with their dignity intact.
A deliberate plan to re-stabilize the people who remain (and are usually more shaken than leadership expects) and to re-earn the trust of the ones who will carry the company forward.
I’m Kelli Mason, a Stanford Law School graduate who practiced law before spending more than a decade leading People operations inside venture-backed and mission-driven technology companies.
My rare background allows me to balance the legal risk and human reality of a reduction without losing sight of either. As a result, founders have a single source of experienced judgment during one of the most consequential decisions they will make.
The best outcomes start well before the announcement. Whether you’re weighing a reduction in force now or simply want to be ready, an early conversation costs nothing.
Most work is scoped as a single reduction, with a flat fee tied to the size and stakes, not the clock.
Some founders keep me on a light retainer as a confidential sounding board for sensitive People decisions.