Anne Murray

Who she is now

Karat interviews engineers for a living. Companies that need to hire software talent - and do not have the bandwidth to run hundreds of first-round technical screens - hand the job to Karat's network of expert interviewers. It is a strange and specific business, and it works. The company has raised more than $150 million and carries a valuation north of a billion dollars.

Inside that machine, Anne Murray works where the decisions get made. The Office of the CEO is the small, high-pressure center of a growth-stage company: the place where the schedule, the communications, the board prep, the travel, the introductions, and the thousand tiny logistics of a chief executive's week all converge. Somebody has to keep that room from catching fire. That somebody is her.

She joined Karat in June 2022. An Executive Business Partner is not a note-taker. It is closer to an air-traffic controller with a diplomatic passport - the person who decides what reaches the CEO, in what order, and what gets handled before it ever does. The best ones are invisible, which is exactly the point.

A career with range, not a ladder

Murray's resume does not climb a single ladder. It fans out across the last two decades of technology, and that is what makes it interesting. Before Karat she spent roughly a year at Outreach - the Seattle sales-engagement platform - as Senior Executive Assistant to the Chief Revenue Officer. Before that, and for the better part of seven years, she was Senior Executive Assistant to the Chief Corporate Relations Officer at Zillow Group, through the years when Zillow became a household verb.

Rewind further and the story gets more unusual. She worked at Linden Lab, the studio behind Second Life - meaning she helped keep the trains running at one of the internet's most famous virtual worlds. She spent time at Waggener Edstrom, later WE Communications, the PR agency long braided into Microsoft's rise. She was Executive Assistant to the CEO at Nofsinger Group and at River Forest Financial. Financial services, public relations, real estate, a virtual world, and now hiring technology: it reads less like a career and more like a guided tour of how work actually happens.

And in 2011, she did the thing that reframes the whole story: she co-founded her own shop, Urban Consulting Group. The operator is also an entrepreneur. She has sat on both sides of the table - the one who runs the founder's day, and the one who was the founder.

The through-line

Look closely and a pattern emerges. Murray keeps choosing the seat next to power at companies in motion - a CRO here, a CEO there, a chief corporate relations officer at a company reinventing an entire industry. It is a deliberate specialty. Supporting leaders at growth-stage companies is its own discipline, and she has been practicing it for a long time.

Her education matches the range: the University of California, Berkeley; Seattle Pacific University; and, before all of it, Shorewood High School north of Seattle. Three very different rooms, one consistent outcome - a person who is comfortable being the most organized presence in whatever building she walks into.

Where the job meets the point

Karat is not only a business; it runs a program called Brilliant Black Minds, a mission to double the number of Black software engineers by opening access to the practice, coaching, and connections that too often decide who gets hired. Murray is connected to that work - named among the members of the Brilliant Black Minds Interview Accelerator cohort in 2024, alongside the company's partner network.

It is a useful reminder that operations work is not neutral. The people who keep a mission-driven company running are, in their quiet way, keeping the mission running too. When the leadership team can focus because the logistics are handled, the diversity initiative ships, the partnerships close, and the interviews happen. The back office is where the front-page mission gets its footing.

The discipline of being indispensable

There is a reason executive partners rarely make the press release. The work is defined by what does not happen: the meeting that never collides, the flight that never gets missed, the ask that never reaches the CEO because it was solved three layers down. Judgment, discretion, and relentless follow-through are the whole job. It is a craft that compounds - the longer you do it, the more context you hold, and the harder you are to replace.

Murray has been compounding that context for years, across industries that share almost nothing except velocity. A virtual-world studio and a Series C hiring company do not look alike from the outside. From her seat, they rhyme: fast-moving leaders, too many priorities, and a limited number of hours - problems that never change no matter what the company sells.

So she is easy to under-describe and hard to replace. The title on the door says Executive Business Partner. The role in practice is closer to a chief of staff in everything but name - the operating system for an executive suite, running quietly in the background while everyone else takes the meetings.