About
Charlyne Fothergill ran HR inside and alongside tech companies before she ran Sova. She doesn't need the runway slide explained, and chances are, she's already had the hard conversation you're avoiding.
Founded
2021
Based in
Vancouver, BC
Supporting
US + Canada
The story of Sova
Named for the owl. Built for wartime.
Sova is the owl, Athena's owl. The Greek goddess of wisdom and wartime strategy was never without it. Knowledge, foresight, seeing what others miss in the dark. That's the work: strategic clarity, turned into action you can actually take.
We pair it with the “wartime CEO” mindset, the idea Ben Horowitz wrote about in The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Wartime is a depleting runway, a hard pivot, the performance call you've been drafting in your head for three weeks. We get in the trenches with you and handle the gritty part of building a company.
Founder + Principal
Charlyne Fothergill
The Path to Sova
Charlyne's career has sat at the intersection of people, operations and company building. Borrowing from Ben Horowitz's split between the wartime and peacetime CEO, she calls herself a wartime HR operator, the person you want when the stakes are high, the context keeps shifting and no option feels easy.
She learned it in real time: rapid growth, restructures, systems built from scratch, hard people decisions. She brings clarity when the path isn't obvious, and knows how to bring the team along through the change.
Her first tech role came in 2011, a maternity-leave contract at a growing startup. She helped drive the growth that led to its acquisition, and got hooked on the pace, the people and the chance to make a visible dent.
From there she became Program Director at GrowLab, one of Canada's early VC-backed accelerators, working with cohorts in Vancouver and San Francisco. Then Lighthouse Labs, where she joined in year one as employee number five. As Founding Director of Career Services, and the de facto HR Director, she built the programs, processes and team behind the graduate employment outcomes that became a defining part of the company's reputation. She also helped establish campuses across the country as Lighthouse Labs grew into one of Canada's most recognized tech-education brands.
More than 15 years in, she's still inspired by the people who choose to build, and still loves being inside the work.
Why 'Operations' is in the name: Sova wasn't built to hand over a strategy deck and disappear. As Sova has grown, Charlyne has stayed close to the work, and that standard runs across the team. We don't just tell you what should happen. We help make it happen.
The work
We move at the speed of the founder.
Engagements start with a 20-minute call. We get clear on what matters, identify the next move and start working.
We get founders and their teams.
Every operator at Sova has worked inside startups. We understand the pace, the ambiguity and the constant change because we've lived it. Nobody at Sova is getting their startup education on your time.
We bring the right people to the table.
More than 15 years in North America's startup ecosystem means we know who to call. No directories. No random referrals. Trusted operators, advisors and specialists who have done the work.
We handle the hard stuff.
Terminations. Runway reductions. The performance issue no one wants to address. We'll help make the call, script the conversation, sit beside you through it and steady the team after.
We provide strategy and execution.
We don't send 40 pages of recommendations or hand you a Notion doc full of frameworks of what should happen. We take it end to end.
Why this exists
A passion for building companies and the communities around them.
Sova exists because Charlyne kept watching founders try to hire, retain and scale teams with no one in the room who'd actually done it. The fractional HR options were either built for enterprise or built to upsell. Neither shape fit the job.
She cares about the wider startup ecosystem too, including the founders building outside the big hubs, in smaller Canadian communities, often doing the work alone. The thesis is simple: good operators help good operators, and the community works better when it actually behaves like one.
That's why every Sova engagement comes with the network attached. Talk to us for an hour and you walk away knowing three other people who can help with whatever's next.