Diverse corporate experience leads Crosby to form PeopleCap

Memphis Standout profile for The Memphis Daily News

Oct. 18, 2013

Meg Crosby’s career might be summed up as an exercise in adaptation.

A principal with the boutique human resources firm PeopleCap, Crosby left her hometown of Memphis for college at the University of Richmond for a double major in English and interpersonal communications. Her pragmatic father insisted on throwing some business courses into the mix.

“My dad felt it was quite important for me to take some accounting and finance and econ, so by the time I took his required classes I had a minor,” she said.

After graduation, she returned home to work as the membership and development coordinator for the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

A longing to live in New York, though, found her working for an investment bank there three years later. Working her way from planning special events into the human resources department, she eventually ran the undergraduate analyst program, a two-year program for those on the way to graduate school. She managed the program for three years, taking it from a national to a global scope, and from hiring 40 undergraduates a year to about 200.

In 1999, Crosby was approached by a friend in Los Angeles about heading up the human resources department for a 40-employee startup.

“It was a time in my life where I just thought, ‘Why not?’” she said. “I had this overwhelming sense that technology was going to be the hallmark of our generation, and I really was excited to be a part of it and to figure out what was going on out there.”

In 2003, that startup was bought by Google, which then had a staff of about a thousand employees. Crosby was the first human resources generalist hired in a department of 14.

“Six years later when I left, the employee population was 25,000, and the HR department had a thousand people in it.”

“It was awesome,” she says of her time with Google. “It was like being a part of history, and it was incredible working with such talented, smart people. I think, if anything, that experience taught me to think big. … It was a culture of ‘yes.’”

During that period, she married Scott Crosby, an attorney with Burch, Porter & Johnson PLLC, and moved back to Memphis while continuing to telecommute, including a lot of travel, for Google. In 2008, son Tom was born, and she left Google with the intent of taking a hiatus from her career for a couple of years.

It may have been two of the busiest years of her life. She and Scott were recruited as co-chair for the final stages of the campaign push to build The Salvation Army’s Kroc Center. The couple also opened The Brass Door, the Irish pub Downtown at 152 Madison Ave . . . (read more)