Anna
Ott

Anna spent her childhood on a farm. Right after high school, she interned at Bertelsmann, serendipitously during the summer that their subsidiary, Lycos, went public. She spent a year there learning the ropes of HR in high-volume recruiting, growth and layoffs.

Her quest for seeing the breadth of company cultures has led her to work for SMEs, corporates and start-ups. Anna has worked in Human Resources and Executive Search with roles varying from Consultant to Managing Director and lately independent HR consultant. She is enthusiastic about all things HR Tech, and has worked with various start-ups and investors in that field.

Since moving to Berlin in 2010, she has worked with start-ups in their initiation phase, first at i-potentials, where she was involved in Team Europe's company building, and later at Deutsche Telekom's hub:raum. In her current role at HV, she aims to help founders build talent-centric organizations. Anna sees people management as a clockwork-like system with Talent Acquisition, Performance Management, Leadership and Culture as the cogwheels. Working with early teams is when Anna most feels like an architect of talent.

Anna feels we still know little about what makes workplaces engaging or how we balance motivating and leading people. Being surrounded by so many different companies at HV is a perfect ecosystem to support, but also to understand more about the future of work.