Why I Started Labs150

The future of work should feel more human, not less

I have spent much of my career building and scaling companies.

I have seen what happens when a group of people is deeply connected to the mission, clear on what matters, and trusted to do exceptional work. I have also seen what happens when a company grows faster than its ability to understand its own people.

At Instapage, I helped turn the company around and ultimately led it through a massive exit. It was one of the most meaningful chapters of my career. It also forced me to make some of the hardest decisions a leader can make, including restructuring roughly half of the organization.

Those decisions affected real people and their families. And despite all the dashboards, systems, meetings, and management processes around us, too much of the decision-making still came down to incomplete information and instinct.

That stayed with me.

We say people are our greatest asset, yet most companies understand their customers, products, and finances far better than they understand the people doing the work. Leaders are expected to know who is thriving, who is struggling, where trust is breaking down, and whether the organization is truly aligned. But the signals arrive late, filtered through hierarchy, or only after the damage is done.

I started Hatchproof to change that.

And I started Labs150 because I believe the future of work cannot be designed by software companies alone. It has to be shaped with the leaders living through this transformation in real time.

Why 150?

The name comes from Dunbar's Number: the idea that humans can maintain roughly 150 stable social relationships.

The exact number matters less than the principle behind it. Human beings have limits. We are built for trust, familiarity, shared purpose, and reciprocal accountability. We perform best when we can understand the people around us, see how our work contributes to the whole, and feel that our presence matters.

For most of human history, work happened at a human scale. People knew who they depended on. Contribution was visible. Reputation mattered. Responsibility was difficult to hide from.

Modern organizations changed that. As companies grew, they introduced layers of management, policy, process, and software to coordinate people who no longer truly knew one another. Some of that structure was necessary. But over time, the machinery of work began to obscure the humans inside it.

We created more data and somehow ended up with less understanding.

More tools, but less clarity.

More communication, but less connection.

More performance management, but fewer honest conversations about performance.

Labs150 exists to explore a better way.

AI changes the scale of a company, not the nature of a human

AI will allow extraordinarily small teams to build companies that once required hundreds or thousands of people. That is not a distant prediction. It is already beginning.

But technology does not erase our biology.

AI can summarize meetings, identify patterns, automate workflows, and give a small team extraordinary leverage. What it cannot manufacture is trust. It cannot give people a shared identity. It cannot replace the courage required for an honest conversation or the judgment required to make a consequential decision about another human being.

The opportunity is not to remove humanity from work. It is to remove the noise that prevents us from seeing it.

Used well, AI can help organizations recover the qualities that bureaucracy pushed out: context, clarity, accountability, and a genuine understanding of how people are doing. It can surface signals leaders routinely miss. It can help us act earlier, coach better, and make decisions with more evidence and less politics.

That is the future I want us to build: companies with the leverage of machines and the cohesion of a tribe.

What human-scale organizations make possible

When people can understand the group around them, four things become possible.

Clarity

People know why their work matters, how it connects to the mission, and what others are counting on them to deliver. Less energy is wasted navigating ambiguity, protecting turf, or performing visibility.

Accountability

Accountability becomes relational rather than procedural. People follow through because their commitments are visible and because letting the team down means something. Ownership does not need to be imposed through surveillance.

Shared context

Strong teams develop an intuitive understanding of how to work together. They anticipate one another, move faster, and adapt without waiting for instructions to travel through layers of hierarchy.

Candor

People can challenge an idea, admit a mistake, or surface a risk before it becomes a crisis. Psychological safety is not an excuse to avoid difficult conversations. It is what makes those conversations possible.

These are sometimes dismissed as soft ideas. They are not. They are the operating infrastructure of high performance.

When they disappear, companies compensate with more meetings, more process, and more management. People do not necessarily stop caring. They stop seeing how their care changes anything.

Why this is a lab

I did not create Labs150 to be another networking community or a place where leaders trade polished opinions.

I created it as a working group for people who are willing to examine how organizations should actually operate in an AI-native world.

The leaders in this group are making real decisions about performance, culture, organizational design, trust, and the changing relationship between people and technology. Each of us has part of the answer. None of us has all of it.

Labs150 is where we compare what we are seeing, challenge inherited assumptions, and turn lived experience into better ways of working. It is also where we can test ideas early, before they harden into products, policies, or management doctrine.

The goal is not conversation for its own sake. The goal is useful truth: insights that help us build stronger teams and make better decisions about people.

What we believe

We believe human limits are design principles, not defects.

We believe a small, deeply aligned team can outperform a much larger organization.

We believe performance should be understood continuously, not reconstructed during an annual review.

We believe leaders should have better signals before they are forced to make irreversible people decisions.

We believe technology should deepen human understanding, not turn work into surveillance.

We believe candor and care belong together.

We believe the future of work should be built with the people responsible for leading it.

An invitation

Labs150 is intentionally limited to 150 leaders.

Not because exclusivity is the point, but because intimacy is. A community becomes valuable when people know who is in the room, trust the quality of the conversation, and feel responsible for contributing to it.

I want this to be a group where a founder can share the decision keeping them awake, where a people leader can challenge the conventional playbook, and where an operator can talk honestly about what is breaking inside their company before it becomes visible from the outside.

We are not here to predict the future of work from a distance.

We are here to build it together.

The next generation of great companies will not win by accumulating the most people, the most process, or the most software. They will win by understanding their people better, aligning them more clearly, and using technology to amplify what humans uniquely do.

The future of work will be powered by AI.

But it must remain human by design.

That is why I started Labs150.

Imran Syed
Founder & CEO, Hatchproof
Founder, Labs150

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