First Plug and Workana gathered People and HR leaders to speak without filters about what really happens when a startup scales beyond its borders.
What HR Without Borders was: The first edition brought together People and HR leaders from LATAM startups at a breakfast organized by First Plug and Workana. No presentations or methodologies. Just real conversations about what happens when an organization starts to scale.
Managing people in a fast-growing startup is one of the most complex challenges in today's world. It is also one of the least documented. There is no manual that covers it well, because every company experiences it differently.
During two hours, very honest conversations took place about culture, leadership, feedback, and distributed teams. This is what we took away.
1. The culture that works with ten people does not scale on its own
Almost every company at the table had experienced the same thing. In the early years, culture exists and works. But it lives in the heads of the founders.
It is not written or documented. And it doesn't need to be: founders are in every interview and know every employee. They have a clear sense of who fits.
“The culture was in the heads of the four founders and nowhere else.”
- Participant of HR Without Borders
That changes when the company grows and founders can no longer be in every selection process.
The problem is not just operational. When culture is not documented, what is perceived from the outside does not always match what is experienced inside. Leaders communicate one culture. Employees perceive another. And no one has a shared reference to resolve that tension.
The solution that worked was concrete: translating values into observable behaviors.
It is not enough to say “we are a team with initiative.” You have to be able to answer: what exactly does someone with initiative do in this company? What does that look like in a meeting, in a mistake, in a difficult decision?
“When you have that defined, calibration conversations change completely. You can talk about concrete behaviors instead of subjective impressions.”
- People Leader, HR Without Borders
2. Remote work has a ceiling that few companies acknowledge
Remote work works very well for execution. It has real challenges for team building.
Spontaneous conversations - the passing comment, the informal question, the off-agenda chat - are what generate cohesion. Those are not easily replicated in a scheduled call.
The answer is not to return to full in-person work. It is to be more intentional with the moments of contact.
Practices that showed concrete results:
Weekly social meetings with only one rule: do not talk about work
Periodic in-person events to "put a face to the avatars"
Non-recordable spaces where people can speak freely
What they have in common: they are not spontaneous, they are designed. The bond in remote teams does not emerge on its own. It has to be built with intention.
3. Continuous feedback wins, but takes time to install
Few areas generate as much resistance as feedback processes. And few are as important for the real development of people.
Most had started with formal evaluations every six months. They encountered resistance from leaders. They tried different formats. And they ended up with a similar model: continuous feedback integrated into one-on-ones, with an annual group calibration instance.
Two key lessons learned:
Feedback as a tool, not an obligation
Feedback works best when leaders understand that it is a tool for them, not an obligation to People. When that is not clear, the process is done just to comply and generates no real value.
Performance and salary must be kept separate
Performance conversations and salary conversations need to be separate.
When they are tied, development requests turn into disguised raise requests. Leaders evaluate with an eye on the financial consequence of what they say.
Untangling them requires an explicit and sustained effort. But it completely changes the quality of the conversations.
4. Cultural fit is easy to claim and hard to evaluate
“Cultural fit is our priority in recruitment” is one of the most repeated phrases in startups. What was discussed at HR Sin Fronteras got straight to the point: how to make it operational.
The main problem: people arrive prepared. They know what answers are expected. And today, with artificial intelligence, they can prepare them better than ever. Evaluating cultural fit based on what someone says in a standard interview has a very low ceiling.
What works best is a combination of concrete situational questions.
Instead of “are you proactive?”, look for situations that reveal how the person acts under pressure or in the face of ambiguity. The goal is not to find the correct answer. It is to detect inconsistencies between what the person says they do and what they would actually do.
Technical challenges are also useful. Not only to evaluate knowledge, but behavior:
What questions does the person ask when faced with an ambiguous prompt?
How do they manage uncertainty?
How long does it take them to respond?
How do they explain their decisions?
5. Performance standards need to be aligned before being used
One of the most common problems in growing organizations: leaders evaluate with different criteria without knowing it.
One considers that someone "exceeds expectations" because they do more than their peer
Another uses as a reference what the role should do according to the description
A third evaluates based on their experience at another company
Without an explicit conversation about what it means to be a good performer in this organization, calibrations turn into negotiations of subjective perceptions.
The consequences are concrete: people who are doing exactly what is expected are evaluated as mediocre. Or vice versa.
The solution lies in setting up calibration panels. Leaders, together with the founding team, concretely define: what is a top performer? What is someone who meets expectations? What is someone who is falling short?
Not as a theoretical exercise. With real examples of behaviors observed in the current team. That prior alignment work is what allows subsequent feedback to be honest, consistent, and useful.
6. In LATAM we are not all the same, and assuming we are is expensive
The closing was one of the least expected and most enriching topics: cultural differences within Latin America.
The starting point was simple: we tend to assume that because we share Spanish and a common history, we function in the same way. It is not like that. Cultural differences between countries are significant and have a real impact on team management.
We Argentines are perceived as direct to the point of being blunt in several regional contexts. Words that are completely natural for us - "obvio" (obvious), "dale" (go ahead), "molestar" (bother) - have negative or directly offensive connotations in other countries.
"Obvio" can sound like "you are telling me I'm an idiot." "Dale" can be perceived as imperative and aggressive.
Brazil is the most extreme case. Not only in communication: also in market logic, product formats, and consumption habits.
Companies operating in the region learn that Brazil requires its own teams and strategies. Not minor adaptations of what works in the rest of LATAM.
The lesson is not that there is one correct way to communicate. It is that managing teams in the region requires an explicit layer of cultural awareness.
“Be more intentional in understanding the cultures of the countries you work with.”
- Participant of HR Sin Fronteras
Our Takeaways
At the end of the breakfast, someone summarized what had happened in a few words:
“It is like a validation tool. To understand if you are still doing things that make sense.”
That was the most valuable part of the meeting. The recognition that people working in People at startups - often alone, or in very small teams - need spaces to compare notes with others who are in the same position.
People teams in LATAM startups face very similar problems. And the solutions that work rarely come from an imported framework. They come from the experience of someone who has already lived it and had the generosity to share it.
First Plug organizes this type of gathering as part of its commitment to the HR and People teams of the companies it works with. This was the first one. The intention is that it won't be the last.
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