“How clear are you about what you want next in in life?” - Julia Psitos can guide you.
Julia calls herself a “builder,” someone who looks for chances to build, fix, or leave a legacy inside any organization she joins. But she is so much more than that.
Today I talked to Julia Psitos, and it reminded me why conversations about careers, community, and the future of work feel so urgent right now. Listening to her trace her path from West Virginia to Santiago to WeWork and now to Alfred and Go link up, I kept thinking: this is exactly the kind of non-linear, intentional career story more people need to hear.
From titles to time and impact
One of my favorite parts of our conversation was how Julia approaches career transitions. Instead of starting with “What job do you want?”, she starts with two deceptively simple questions: how clear are you about what you want next (on a scale of 1–10), and where do you actually want to spend your time and have impact.
That framing really stayed with me because as a CEO, most of the bad hiring decisions seen over the years come from over-indexing on titles and under-indexing on time and impact. When candidates or team members anchor on “Head of X” instead of “I want to spend 60% of my week doing deep product work” or “I want to design and run communities,” misalignment is almost guaranteed.
Julia’s insistence on defining non‑negotiables—what must be true in your life and work for it to function—also resonated strongly. For her, that includes things like twice‑weekly Pilates in the middle of a workday and structured time at home where she is fully present, not half‑working on a laptop. For leaders, hearing another operator unapologetically hold those boundaries is an important reminder: if you do not defend your energy, your calendar will eat your strategy.
The discipline of being “best when busy”
I loved this conversation because it forced me to reflect on my own relationship with “busyness”. Julia describes herself as “best when I’m busy,” but not in the chaotic, reactive way that often gets mistakenly glorified. She pairs that busyness with a mindfulness coach and a commitment to stop multitasking—doing one thing at a time, fully.
That combination—high load plus high intentionality—is, in many ways, the modern executive challenge. Many founders and marketers operate at high RPMs, but without the rituals Julia has in place (intentions set daily/weekly/monthly, non‑negotiable health practices, structured focus), the quality of thinking degrades fast. Her approach reminded me of phases in my own journey where the business was scaling faster than my operating system, and the only thing that helped was building my own “rules of engagement” with time.
What I also appreciated is how honest she was about needing help to make that shift. Working with a mindfulness coach to unlearn multitasking is not something leaders talk about enough, yet it is often the missing piece between “always on” and genuinely effective.
Builders, communication, and the real work of culture
Julia calls herself a “builder,” someone who looks for chances to build, fix, or leave a legacy inside any organization she joins. That orientation is obvious when she talks about WeWork: joining at 1,500 employees and seeing it grow to 15,000, while staying focused on culture, internal communications, and alumni engagement.
What struck me most is how quickly she goes to communication as the universal failure mode. Across sizes and industries, the pattern she sees is the same: communication is the thing that breaks first and the thing you can “never do enough of.” As someone who has led teams through rapid growth, this is painfully true. Leaders underestimate how much repetition, clarity, and context people need to feel safe enough to perform.
Her definition of community and culture is also deeply practical, not fluffy. She talks about:
Creating spaces where people can show up authentically by being intentional about everything from meeting cadences to job descriptions.
Building around value alignment so performance flexibility becomes possible—if we share values, it matters less how you get the job done.
Recognizing that going through hard things together is one of the strongest community builders.
In my own experience, that last point is underrated. The teams that remember a product crisis or a market shock as a “bonding” moment almost always had leaders who were transparent, communicative, and values‑driven in the middle of the storm. Julia’s WeWork alums work is a living example of transforming a difficult chapter into a long‑term asset.
Keeping communities alive: value, rituals, and ownership
As someone obsessed with ecosystems and long‑term relationships, I found Julia’s playbook for sustaining communities particularly powerful. Early on with WeWork alums, she felt defeated because engagement was low. The turning point came when she focused the community around something tangibly valuable: sourcing and sharing real job opportunities that were connected to alumni.
There is a simple but crucial lesson here: communities do not come alive because you create a Slack group; they come alive when you solve real problems for members. Julia layers on two more components that every founder or marketer building a community should steal:
Consistency of cadences and rituals so people know what to expect, which builds trust over time.
Constantly reminding members that the community belongs to them, not to the company or to her personally, which shifts people from passive consumers to active owners.
This resonates with how brand communities and customer programs succeed or fail. When businesses hold on too tightly, communities stay transactional. When they design for member‑led behavior, communities become resilient and self‑propelling.
Her concept of a “personal board of directors” also blends beautifully with the community theme. Julia intentionally surrounds herself with a small group of trusted people she can call to pressure‑test ideas and decisions. From a leadership standpoint, that might be one of the most practical takeaways from this episode: nobody should be trying to navigate a portfolio career, a startup, or a senior role without that kind of intentional support structure.
AI, discernment, and the future of work
Julia’s views on AI are refreshingly grounded. She is not as “bullish” as some, but she is very clear about where the upside is: giving people back time for high‑impact work and innovation, and acting as a thought partner for brainstorming and research. She even shared how she advised an executive to use ChatGPT as a first‑pass idea generator before coming to her for a coaching conversation.
At the same time, she is skeptical about AI in recruitment. The mass automation of applications, screening, and responses is burning out human recruiters and creating impersonal candidate experiences. From the vantage point of an employer brand and people leader, this is a real risk: the more AI pushes humans out of the loop in talent processes, the more differentiation will come from the companies willing to put humans back in.
Her point about “AI talking to AI”—AI‑generated emails being summarized by AI on the other side—was both funny and deeply true. For standardized tasks, that closed loop may be fine. But for nuanced, human‑heavy work, Julia insists the final solution must still come from people, with AI playing the role of assistant or research partner, not decision‑maker.
What stood out for me as a CEO is her insistence on transparency. She wants people to be explicit when they use AI, not to hide it, both to build trust and to give junior employees permission to experiment with these tools without shame. That is exactly the culture shift organizations need: AI as a visible, normalized amplifier of human work, not a shadow tool people quietly rely on.
Human connection, physical spaces, and the rise of portfolio careers
Julia believes that as AI and digital tools advance, live and in‑person human connection will become even more sought after, not less. In the WeWork alums context, she uses AI for logistics like invites but keeps content and experience design fundamentally human—either co‑creating with AI or having AI refine her work, never delivering a “purely AI‑driven product.”
Her view of physical space is very intentional: use time “in and around humans” for collaboration, meetings, and brainstorming, and reserve remote, non‑physical space for heads‑down focused work. Anyone designing hybrid work policies should start here. The office is not a default; it is a tool for specific kinds of interactions. That aligns strongly with how many high‑performing teams now think about offsites, team days, and asynchronous work.
We ended up in one of the most important parts of the conversation: the future of careers. Julia predicts that in ten years, most careers will not be linear but “portfolio careers,” mixing roles, freelance work, side ventures, and learning cycles. There is no longer a predictable ladder where “top jobs” stay stable for decades. The meta‑skill will be learning agility—balancing technical skills with people skills and staying open to possibilities.
For students and early‑career professionals, her advice is to develop discernment: the ability to leverage technology well, to learn fast, to question assumptions, and to pause and ask, “Does this make sense?” She also suggests a beautiful, simple diagnostic: pay attention to the moments when you are in “flow” and lose track of time. That is often where your future work should live.
Her new venture, go link up, sits right at the intersection of these ideas: helping people map and activate their networks to find hidden opportunities, especially alumni who lack strong career support from their universities. Starting B2C and then piloting with colleges is a smart way to validate the product while learning directly from individuals navigating complex transitions.
One of the most provocative ideas Julia shared is that future CEOs might come more often from people leadership roles—leaders who deeply understand both the business and employee needs, and who design internal and external experiences with equal intentionality. As someone leading a company today, that thesis feels not only plausible, but desirable.
This conversation reminded me that the future of work is not just about technology or strategy; it is about how intentionally we use our time, how clearly we communicate, the communities we build, and the discernment we bring to every tool at our disposal. Talking to Julia was a powerful confirmation that if we get those human pieces right, the rest—AI, hybrid, portfolio careers—becomes not a threat, but an incredible canvas.
How to connect with Julia?
LinkedIn is where you can find her: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-psitos/