Scaling Talent From the Ground Up: Building a Bootstrapped Unicorn People-First

Tristan Mackrory is VP of People & Talent at Almedia, one of Europe’s fastest-growing ad-tech companies. Joining as the company’s first People hire, he built the function from the ground up and now leads a 13-person team that scaled Almedia from 30 to 120 employees in just 18 months. His team has delivered global expansion, new equity and compensation frameworks, leadership development programmes, and AI-driven People Ops tools; all while keeping the company profitable and bootstrapped.