Michelle partners with early-stage founders on technical hiring, recruiting strategy, and expanding Lightspeed’s broader network of technical talent and operators.

“As a founder, team building needs to be one of your top priorities, but you’re constantly pulled in a hundred different directions with so much to build,” she says. “Whether it’s bringing on a team’s founding engineers or thinking through their first talent hire, I’m energized by helping founders build from their first hire.”

Before Lightspeed, Michelle spent over a decade as an early recruiter and operator at high-growth startups, working hand-in-hand with founders to build their core teams. Most recently, she was scaling the research engineering team for the Superintelligence Team at Microsoft AI. Before that, she was an early member of the talent team at Inflection AI and at Clubhouse, she joined as the company’s first recruiter and led hiring as it grew from 9 to nearly 100.

“Working closely with founders to build their early teams has always been one of the most meaningful parts of the startup journey,” she says. Lightspeed’s philosophy of true partnership with founders made it a natural fit.

Her instinct for what it takes to build comes from home. Michelle grew up in a family of restaurant entrepreneurs and saw early on the resilience required to build a business from scratch. It gave her a deep appreciation for founders and the teams they assemble.

When she’s not thinking about building teams, Michelle can be found cooking, discovering new restaurants, or in the garden.