Ron Storn didn’t plan a career in human resources.
He planned a career in accounting. After five years as a CPA at KPMG, though, something became clear: he was more interested in the people around him than the numbers in front of him.
That pivot led him to talent acquisition, then to his own search firm, and then to Google, where a well-timed connection got him in the door. From Google, he moved to Facebook during the IPO years. From Facebook, he chose Lyft over Quora when Lyft was operating in just six cities and had two people in HR. By the time he left, it was in 500 cities.
Today, he’s CHRO at TruckStop, where he’s applying everything he’s learned about building high-growth people organizations to a company at its own inflection point.
On a recent episode of the Skilled Podcast, Storn joined co-hosts Stefani Okamoto, founder of Luminary Leadership Consulting and Growthspace Ambassador, and Omer Glass, CEO and co-founder of Growthspace, to talk about the myths HR still hasn’t shaken, what he learned from Mark Zuckerberg about building teams, and why learning agility is the only thing that truly predicts future success.
The myth HR still hasn’t shaken
Ask Storn what he’s tired of hearing about HR, and he doesn’t hesitate.
“HR is underestimated at the executive table. They really don’t think they’re equal to the other C-level folks.” The perception, he says, is that HR is the steward of policy, a compliance function, not a strategic one. Something the company needs but doesn’t quite trust to drive results.
The reality is different. “You are a business person, just like everyone else in the organization, and you need to tie all the things you do to business metrics.”
In practice, that means starting every initiative with the same question: How does this help the business make money, serve customers, or develop people who do both? Engagement surveys have their place. But if engagement is the only thing HR can point to, Storn argues, the function will always be seen as peripheral.
“Engagement in itself is not critical. It’s tying it to retention, tying it to what is going to impact the business that makes you a great HR leader.”
The metrics he actually tracks tell a more complete story: revenue per head, time to productivity, regretted attrition, and quality of hire. Each one connects people decisions directly to business outcomes. Engagement, in his framework, is a symptom worth investigating.
The timing lesson: Why career success looks like luck but isn’t
Looking back at his path—Google at 38,000 employees, Facebook at 1,700, Lyft at 80 —Storn is thoughtful about the role of timing.
The Google connection came through relationships built during his search firm years. The Facebook move came through the social capital he’d built at Google, where many early Facebook employees had started. And Lyft? That came down to a choice between two companies: Lyft or Quora.
At the time, Quora was more established. Lyft had a pink mustache on the car and was operating in six cities. But when he looked at Lyft’s growth trajectory (and new capital coming in, 20 new cities about to launch in a single day) he saw something he could build. The experience of getting in early and scaling something from nothing, he believed, would be worth more than the safety of a more developed company.
He was right. And the lesson he takes from it isn’t really about timing. It’s about how to evaluate opportunity.
“Don’t worry about compensation, don’t worry about the title. Go to the company where you’re going to learn the most and you’re going to scale the most.”
What Zuckerberg taught him about hiring
One of the most durable lessons from Storn’s Facebook years came directly from watching Mark Zuckerberg hire.
The principle: hire people better than you. Not people who reflect your existing strengths, but people who fill the gaps you don’t have.
“If you hire people better than you in a skill you don’t have, your team is going to elevate around you and you will elevate as well.”
It sounds obvious. But Storn argues it’s one of the most routinely violated principles in leadership, especially now, when AI anxiety is making managers more protective of their roles, not less.
“A lot of people, especially with AI now, they’re afraid of their job. So they don’t want to bring in this superstar.”
At Truckstop, Storn has built this into the company’s leadership principles directly: raise the bar on your team. Managers who don’t are tracked accordingly. The logic is simple: if you’re hiring people weaker than you to protect your position, you’re also limiting the team’s ceiling and eventually, your own.
HR as a platform, not a policy function
“HR is a product or it’s a platform. You have to figure out what your capabilities are. How do you enhance those capabilities? How do you develop people? How does that tie to your overall growth of the company?”
It’s a framing that changes everything about how HR gets resourced, how it gets measured, and how it earns credibility with business leaders. A platform has features. Features have users. Users have outcomes. When you build HR like a product, you’re accountable to whether it actually works.
At Truckstop, that means 170+ active HR projects get evaluated by the same standard: is this connected to what the business needs? If not, it's not a priority.
Navigating the AI moment: what leaders actually need to do
Storn is candid about where AI is headed.
The board is focused on it. Engineering is prioritized around it. And HR, he argues, has to be at the center of it, not because HR manages the technology, but because humans still have to navigate the change.
His framework starts with a simple question for every employee: in your workflow, in your day-to-day tasks, what can you automate so you can do more strategic things? The answers go into a company-wide panel so ideas don’t live in silos. Coordination, not just permission, is the goal.
For managers, the shift is more fundamental.
“If you’re managing an agent plus a person, there are two different skill sets and you have to learn that it’s a very different focus.” AI increases intelligence; wisdom is still the human’s job.
He’s also skeptical of the idea that formal training classes will drive AI adoption. “I think where you sit down for a training class is gone. You have to embed it in the workflow day-to-day.” That means micro-learning moments, peer-to-peer exchange, and access to expert support exactly when someone hits a wall.
Truckstop’s approach reflects this: an employee recently built an internal AI knowledge infrastructure on his own initiative. Rather than treating it as an anomaly, Storn highlighted it company-wide.
His honest assessment of what can’t be forced: “AI is not going to replace jobs. It’s going to replace people who don’t know how to leverage AI. If you’re not open and interested in it, there’s nothing I can do. The only thing I can do is provide the opportunity, provide the environment, provide the tools.”
Culture that actually means something
Truckstop’s stated culture includes a commitment to being a “fun, safe, and collaborative environment that empowers each other to do big things.” Storn is clear-eyed about what makes that stick and what makes it fade.
“I’ve been in companies where you have values, but they’re just values. They don’t mean anything, you don’t live them, you don’t reinforce them.”
Culture works, in his framework, when it does three things: tells you how to reward people, reveals where you have gaps, and guides decision-making when the answer isn’t obvious. It’s a decision filter, not a wall decoration.
That means values have to be operationalized.
At Truckstop, every manager has a leadership goal tied to company values. Living those values is part of performance accountability, not a separate HR initiative. And when someone goes above and beyond, the recognition connects the specific behavior back to what the company stands for, not just to an output metric.
He also pushes back on the idea that culture has to be static to be meaningful. “The values are going to guide you how to make the decisions, but the way that those decisions are made might change a little bit.” Culture is a foundation, not a cage.
The one quality that predicts everything else
Across 20 years of building organizations at Google, Facebook, Lyft, and now Truckstop, Storn has identified one quality that consistently separates people who grow from people who plateau.
It’s not technical skill. It’s not tenure. It’s not even performance in the current role.
“Learning agility. If you’re curious and you want to learn, you’ll be successful. When you stop wanting to learn or stop wanting to grow, that’s when things fall apart.”
It’s the same quality that led him to leave accounting for recruiting, to leave a stable firm for Google during a financial crisis, to choose a pink-mustache rideshare startup over a better-known tech platform. Curiosity as a career strategy.
And it’s the quality he’s now trying to build into Truckstop’s culture: not by mandating curiosity, but by creating the conditions where trying new things feels safe, where experimenting with AI is expected, and where the people who ask questions are more valued than the people who have all the answers.
What legacy looks like
When asked what leadership story he hopes people tell when his career is done, Storn’s answer is immediate and specific.
“I help build organizations that people and the company can thrive, and performance matters. I always wanted to be someone who leads with clarity, integrity, and compassion, and who develops other leaders that can carry on that legacy.”
The proof point he’s most proud of: 14 people who have been on his team went on to become people leaders elsewhere. That multiplier effect (not just the organizations he’s built, but the leaders those organizations produced) is how he measures whether he got it right.
It’s a different kind of metric than revenue per head or time to productivity. But for someone who has spent 20 years arguing that HR should be held to business standards, it might be the most business-relevant outcome of all: the people you develop become the leaders who develop others.
Resources
- Connect with Ron Storn on LinkedIn
- Learn more about Truckstop
- Explore Growthspace for precision skill development at scale
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