Hiring is hard, scaling is harder.
We’ve built teams from the ground up and worn 10 hats at once. Our team brings deep recruiting expertise and firsthand startup experience, so when you say, “We need a 10x hire,” we know exactly what that means and how to find them.
The Problem
Early-stage hiring is brutal. You’re moving fast, and every decision counts. In a noisy market where top talent has options, you can’t afford to sift through endless resumes or make the wrong hire that slows growth or derails momentum.
The truth
We’ve seen it firsthand: people are the biggest differentiator between a startup that scales and one that doesn’t.
The best companies don’t just hire great people. They build systems that attract, select, and grow them.
We’re not another recruiting firm. We’re your embedded talent partner, helping you turn hiring from a one-off task into a company-wide capability. We help founders and early teams hire faster without sacrificing quality by building scalable, repeatable hiring processes that turn hiring from a major risk into a lasting competitive advantage. We apply the same focus, urgency, and intentionality that startups bring to Product and Growth to your People.
The Solution
Because when you get people right, everything else gets easier.
Our Team
Katy Fox
Founder & Ceo, higherpeople
Katy Stover Fox is the Founder & CEO of HigherPeople, a recruiting and people-strategy firm built to support early-stage startups from pre-seed through Series B. She partners closely with founders during the most formative stages of company building, when every hire matters, roles are still evolving, and people decisions can feel both urgent and deeply personal.
Katy began her career as a Teach For America corps member teaching high school Geometry in Southeast Washington, D.C., where she first saw how access, opportunity, and systems shape long-term outcomes. She later led large-scale education and workforce programs at Pearson and General Assembly, partnering with companies like Bloomberg, Capital One, Booz Allen, and the U.S. Department of Defense to massively upskill and reskill their teams.
After realizing that education alone doesn’t solve the talent equation, Katy moved into executive recruiting to learn the craft end-to-end and founded HigherPeople to bring a more holistic approach to hiring. Today, she works as a recruiting partner, coach, consultant, and, at times, what feels like a therapist to founders navigating scale for the first time. Her work spans hiring strategy, role definition, compensation, and building recruiting processes that are both rigorous and deeply human.
Katy remains hands-on with clients while leading a high-performing internal team at HigherPeople. In her free time, she enjoys live music, getting outside, horseback riding, spending time with her husband, friends, and dogs Johnny Cash and Bleu, and continuously practicing the art of adulting with humor and curiosity.
