About Persona.bio

A working cheatsheet for the people you collaborate with.

What it is

A persona is the manual for working with you that you wish someone had handed you on day one. It tells the truth about how you operate, not how you want to be hired. It is allowed to be imperfect, because real humans are imperfect, and pretending otherwise is the reason most onboarding documents are useless.

The questions are configurable, but in practice people end up sharing things like:

  • "I do my best deep work between 6am and 10am. Please do not book design reviews in that window."
  • "I think out loud. If I push back hard in a meeting, I am probably 60 percent of the way to agreeing with you, not 100 percent against."
  • "Async first. A Loom or a written doc almost always beats a 30-minute call for me."
  • "I learn by reading code, not by watching demos. Send me the repo."
  • "Direct feedback is a gift. Vague positivity makes me anxious because I cannot tell if anything is actually working."
  • "I run hot when I am stressed. If I sound short on Slack, give me an hour and I will come back human."
  • Time zone, working hours, pronouns, and the channels you actually read versus the ones that just collect notifications.

None of these belong on a resume. All of them shorten the time it takes to work well together.

Not a resume. Not a LinkedIn profile

A resume is a sales document. A LinkedIn profile is a sales document. Both are designed to put your best foot forward and win the next opportunity. They are full of polished accomplishments, carefully chosen verbs, and almost nothing that would be useful to a teammate at 9am on a Tuesday.

A persona is the opposite. It is for the people you already work with — not the people you're trying to be hired by.

Who it is for

Persona.bio is built for the people who join new teams more than once a year. Consultants and agencies. Distributed and remote-first companies. Fast-growing startups where the team you joined three months ago is not the team you are on today. Open-source maintainers who collaborate with strangers every week.

Today you can publish your persona to the open web at a friendly URL. More granular sharing controls — like email-specific and domain-specific access — are planned as the product grows.

A small bet on honesty

Rapport does not have to take six months. If everyone shows up with an honest card on day one, the first week of working together can feel like the third month. The awkward early period gets shorter. The good work starts sooner.

That is what we are building. We hope you will write a card too.

The story behind it

Persona.bio started with a frustration that anyone who has done consulting work, contract work, or joined a fast-growing company will recognize.

For years, our founder Chris Malek worked as a consultant. New client every few months. New team almost every quarter. Mostly remote, almost always distributed across time zones. By the time he had figured out that one engineer preferred a Slack DM over a meeting, that the project manager actually wanted pushback rather than nodding agreement, and that the designer did her best work after 3pm and resented morning standups, the engagement would wind down and the cycle would start over with a new room full of strangers.

Building real rapport with people is what makes work feel good and ship faster. But rapport is expensive. It is paid for in awkward first weeks, missed cues, and the slow accumulation of small observations: how someone receives feedback, when they get defensive, what energizes them, what drains them. On a stable team, you eventually pay that cost once. On shifting, distributed, or consulting teams, you pay it again and again, and the meter never stops running.

The spark for persona.bio came from reading Ray Dalio's Principles. Dalio describes how Bridgewater builds something close to a "baseball card" for every team member, capturing how they think, where they are strong, where they are weak, and how they work best with others. The point is not to label people. The point is to make the invisible parts of working together visible, so a team can stop guessing.

That clicked. What if every person got to write their own card? Not assembled by HR, not inferred from a personality test, but written honestly by the human who has to live inside it every day.