ABOUT LAILA

Laila Tarraf is a leadership advisor and talent strategist with over 25 years of experience building strong cultures and high-performing teams across industries and stages of growth. She was a founding member of Walmart.com at the height of the first internet boom, and later served as Chief People Officer at Peet’s Coffee as the company scaled nationally.

She went on to spend seven years in private equity—first at GI Partners, then as a Human Capital Advisor at Altamont Capital—before joining Allbirds as Chief People Officer, where she led the organization through a founder transition and into its public company phase.

But Laila’s approach to leadership wasn’t shaped by professional success alone. It was forged through a series of profound personal losses and transformations that deepened her understanding of what it really means to lead and live well.

Through those experiences, she came to embrace the inherent duality of life—balancing courage with compassion, integrating head with heart, infusing power with tenderness.

These ideas are at the heart of her debut book, Strong Like Water™, and the foundation of her work with leaders today.

Laila holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and guest lectures at Berkeley Law. She is Lebanese and American, an avid traveler and explorer, and a proud mom to her daughter Nadia and their 8-pound Yorkie, Max.