Pavi Iyer started her career in medicinal chemistry, which taught her early that the most interesting problems sit where science, people and experimental thinking all meet. She found her way into People and Talent, took a detour to co-found a specialty coffee roastery and café in Melbourne where she learnt what running a business actually demands, and came back to People and Culture. Fifteen years later she is still obsessed with the same fundamentals, just with better tools and fewer coffee burns.
She has built people functions from scratch inside high-growth startups and scaleups, delivered thousands of hires across her career, and holds an organisational coaching accreditation that shapes how she coaches founders and leaders. Today she leads the People and Talent function at Fortiro, alongside coaching and facilitating workshops for early-stage founders outside of work.
Pavi is currently experimenting with AI and vibe coding tools, working out what AI can genuinely do for People teams and how to speed up the administrative side of the work without losing the human judgement that makes it worth doing. She is still forming a view on parts of it, and enjoying the journey of exploring and learning.
