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How Zero's Chief of Staff built people ops ahead of a $10M seed round using Taito.ai
How Zero's Chief of Staff built people operations from the ground up with Taito.ai, ahead of a funding round and fast headcount growth, so his time goes to growing the business and leading people, not managing HR paperwork.
How Zero’s Chief of Staff built people ops ahead of a $10M seed round using Taito.ai
Zero is a go-to-market operating system: startups run their entire go-to-market, from lead sourcing, qualification, and outreach across email, LinkedIn, and cold calling, to deal management and post-sale churn monitoring, inside one platform, instead of stitching together five to fifteen separate tools. The company is based in Helsinki with a team of 12, and has just announced a $10.3M seed round backed by Primary VC and 20VC, along with angels from Lovable, Supercell, Silo AI, and Langdock. Markus Vapaavuori, Zero’s Chief of Staff, owns people ops alongside a long list of other responsibilities. Rather than wait until the admin became unmanageable, he set up Taito.ai early, with the explicit goal of never having to touch it again as the team scales.
TL;DR
- Zero: Helsinki-based startup with 12 employees (8 product, 4 GTM), growing fast; recently announced a $10.3M seed round
- Problem: a Chief of Staff wearing many hats, who wants the time he spends on people to go to people, not admin, and a clear memory of how painful ungoverned people processes get once a team scales
- Result: up and running in hours, not weeks; time-off handled entirely in Slack, employee data and documents in one place instead of scattered, onboarding tracked step by step, and a foundation built now that’s meant to hold up to hundreds of employees
One generalist, a lot of hats, and fresh funding in hand
The person who steps in wherever execution is needed. Markus Vapaavuori joined Zero as Chief of Staff. In practice that means sales, product spec work, or the things that simply have to get done: option agreements, bookkeeping coordination, and people ops. Day to day, most of his time goes to driving Zero’s own GTM. People ops is one responsibility among several, not a dedicated function, which is exactly why he didn’t want it eating disproportionate time.
Zero is a zero-click CRM that runs a startup’s entire GTM motion in one place.
- People ops
- Owned by the Chief of Staff, alongside GTM, legal, and operations
- Headcount
- 12 employees · 8 product, 4 GTM
- Location
- Helsinki
- Stage
- Seed · just announced a $10.3M round, growing fast
Drawing a hard line on where his time goes
Markus is direct about what he does and doesn’t want the people side of his job to mean. For him, the admin side should simply run itself, ideally without him being the bottleneck.
I want to be talking with people, not managing unnecessary admin.
Markus Vapaavuori, Chief of Staff at Zero
His co-founder frames it from the leadership side.
Everyone on our team is probably worried about the additional burden of HR processes that comes with scaling the team. Luckily, Taito.ai is a breath of fresh air in this space, building the future of HR tooling that people actually love using.
Tuomo Riekki, Founder & CEO at Zero
Before Taito.ai, the pattern was familiar: employee data scattered across different places; contracts, option agreements, and other employee documents with no single source of truth. Pulling together everything on one employee, especially someone who’d been there a while, meant hunting through multiple locations, and often pinging colleagues to track down whatever they happened to be holding.
Building the roof before it rains
A deliberate bet on getting ahead of growth. Zero is still a 12-person team, small enough that most of this could, in Markus’s words, be handled manually for now without much pain. He set it up anyway, because he’s watched what happens at companies that don’t: the things that never get automated turn out to cost a surprising amount of extra work once the team starts growing. His plan is to build the foundation once, while the stakes are still low, so that as headcount climbs it doesn’t gradually consume more and more of the team’s working hours. The goal, as he puts it, is a setup that holds, ideally all the way to a few hundred employees, without needing to be rebuilt under pressure.
I want people ops to just run itself. And better still, I don’t want to be the bottleneck in it.
Markus Vapaavuori, Chief of Staff at Zero
Time-off, onboarding, and a single source of truth: all in Slack
Time-off, fully off his plate. Employees take leave at different times, and keeping track of the balances used to need real attention. Now employees self-serve their own time-off requests in Slack, where the team already lives, with no manual tracking on his end.
Employee data, finally in one place. Contracts, option agreements, tenure, onboarding history, all in one place in Taito.ai instead of scattered across tools and people. What used to take twenty to thirty minutes of digging, often with a colleague’s help, is now something an employee can just ask the Slack bot.
Onboarding, next on the list. As the team grows, Markus wants onboarding handled in a standardized way: a consistent checklist through Taito.ai and Slack, nothing missed, no added mess with each new hire.
Feedback stays human: Taito.ai handles the admin around it
Performance conversations are kept face to face. Zero’s culture is open, the team is small and mostly in-office, and that’s worked well. As they grow, Markus wants more structure: a place to set expectations and goals, store feedback, and track development over time. He sees Taito.ai’s role on the input side too, automatically sending light self-assessment prompts ahead of 1:1s and monthly check-ins, so people walk in having already thought about the questions. The conversation stays human; only the prep is automated.
Legal compliance and reporting, without having to think about it
Nordic labor law is built into Taito.ai rather than bolted on, a priority for Markus, who sees real risk in a freestyle spreadsheet approach going quietly wrong. All legally required processes are handled correctly by default. Investor reporting is still light at the seed stage, but the reporting layer already exists and is ready for when more is needed.
His advice to founders and early-stage leaders: don’t wait for the busy season
Set it up before you’re too busy to. Asked what he’d tell an early-stage founder wondering if it’s the right time to get people ops in order, Markus doesn’t hesitate: waiting only makes it worse, because the moment a startup is growing fast is exactly the moment you have the least time to fix an old spreadsheet-based setup. He’d rather spend his time closing big customers than doing admin work that pulls him away from the people who are ready to buy, and he thinks getting the foundation in early, while things are still somewhat calm, is how you avoid ever being forced into that trade-off.
It’s a lot more annoying to deal with in the middle of real growth. Get it running early, and you never have to think about it again.
Markus Vapaavuori, Chief of Staff at Zero
See how Taito.ai lets a lean team build people ops that scale before they have to. Get access to Taito.ai by joining our waitlist.
