Six months after Evan Walden and Maveric Ohm started the company that would become Getro, the romance of founding had narrowed to a piece of arithmetic. Walden was renting out his New York apartment and sleeping on friends’ couches so the pair could cover basic expenses. Ohm was in Spain, living in an unfurnished house he was trying to sell for his mother. Their promised funding had vanished. The product was unproven. If Techstars did not accept them, they had agreed to get jobs.
The call came a few weeks before selection, two hours before an offer arrived for Ohm’s house. They were in. It is the kind of timing that would embarrass a screenwriter and delight a founder. They flew to Boulder in 2017 and kept building.
This was not yet Getro. The company was called Monday, an amiable little protest against the idea that the working week must begin with dread. It was meant to be a marketplace for meaningful work. Then the marketplace met its chicken-and-egg problem: candidates would not come without companies, and companies would not come without candidates. At roughly the same time, DaPulse bought monday.com and took the name. The founders had a thesis in motion and no suitable sign above the door.
A name that became the instruction
A friend helped combine two words, “get” and “intro.” Getro sounded less like a mood and more like a useful verb. The new name fitted the company they were becoming.
Instead of asking every company to populate another job board, Getro could collect the roles already published across a venture fund’s portfolio. Those listings attracted job seekers. The resulting activity gave companies a reason to participate. The marketplace’s cold start became a software problem that could actually be solved.
The useful person at the end of the problem
Walden had been circling this work long before Getro. After earning a business degree from the University of Vermont in 2009, with a study-abroad term at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, he worked in account management at Dow Chemical. His public biography says he managed a $3.5 million territory and grew sales by more than 30 percent in his first year. It was a conventional corporate beginning to a career that soon became preoccupied with unconventional careers.
In 2012, he co-founded ReWork with Nathaniel Koloc. The recruiting firm helped mission-driven organizations find people who wanted purpose and a paycheck in the same job. ReWork spoke in the earnest dialect of social enterprise, but its proposition was practical: ambitious organizations needed capable people, and capable people wanted to know what their labor was for.
Koya Leadership Partners acquired ReWork at the start of 2018. By then Walden was already running Monday, soon Getro. The two companies used different machinery. At ReWork, clients paid recruiters to locate people. At Getro, clients bought software that helped their own communities publish jobs, understand relationships and make introductions. One sold the work; the other sold a way to do the work.
Getro’s customers were not ordinary employers. They were venture funds, accelerators, economic-development groups and membership organizations whose value partly resided in knowing people. The trouble was that this supposed asset often lived as institutional folklore. Someone knew a candidate, a customer or an investor, but nobody knew who knew them until a hopeful message went into Slack.
Walden’s argument was that relationship memory deserved infrastructure. Third-party data can tell a fund what somebody built and where they worked. First-party context tells it who can make the introduction, whether trust exists, and what prior conversations revealed. A database may contain the person. A network supplies the path.
“It’s all about relationships.”Evan Walden, Tech Scenes Unplugged
By 2023, when Getro acquired the European talent platform Sompani, the two services displayed roles from more than 46,000 venture-backed companies to 3.4 million job seekers a year. Getro said more than 650 platform teams trusted it then. By 2025, that figure had passed 850 networks. Growth did not make the original phrase more complicated: get the introduction.
When the network opened for free
The most revealing Getro product may have been the one created in an emergency and given away. In May 2020, as pandemic layoffs swept through technology companies, Walden and the team launched Getro.org. The service connected job seekers with volunteer recruiters, hiring managers and a community of more than 500 companies that were still hiring. It cost users nothing.
Walden later called it his proudest entrepreneurial moment. The distinction matters. Getro would release broader products, sign more customers and ultimately sell. Yet the project he singled out was an act of deployment: a network, made useful at the moment people needed it.
There is a pleasant consistency here. ReWork began with the belief that people should be able to find meaningful work. Getro.org appeared when work abruptly disappeared. Getro’s commercial products turned communities into connective tissue. Each version objected, in its own way, to the same bureaucratic absurdity: the right person and the right opportunity may exist within one network while remaining invisible to each other.
His life outside the product deck makes the point in a looser key. Walden hosts art-making and music-improvisation events in New York. In an interview, a discussion of company-building wandered happily toward jazz. Improvisation is a useful founder metaphor because it is neither rigid nor random. A player learns the form, listens carefully and changes the next phrase without losing the song. Monday’s pivot, the Getro rebrand and the expansion from job boards to relationship intelligence all followed that rhythm.
After the dashboard
Findem acquired Getro in December 2025. The combination brought Getro’s trusted networks together with Findem’s talent data and agent infrastructure. At the time of the deal, Getro powered more than 800 venture-capital, private-equity and professional networks representing 3.5 million open jobs. Its existing products would continue under the Getro name. Walden moved into the role of Founder in Residence.
The title sounds leisurely; his description is not. He takes AI recruiting products from zero to one. The current work asks what comes after conventional software, when a user can give an agent an objective instead of clicking through a prescribed sequence of screens.
Fifteen years, one stubborn question
Walden describes a gap between the agency and the self-serve tool. A leader hiring a first vice president of engineering may want to meet the candidates, conduct the interviews and make the final choice. The same leader may be delighted to delegate the hours of research required to find people who have built the right kind of team at the right kind of company.
Findem Studio, opened broadly in September 2026, is built around that division. A user can request an executive market map or another piece of recruiting work and receive the result with evidence and method attached. It can run through familiar AI environments rather than insisting that every task begin inside another dashboard.
“I want AI doing the boring work while I walk my dog, so I can spend time on the decisions and conversations that need my expert judgment.”Evan Walden on Findem Studio
The parenthetical joke in his original post was that perhaps he should get a dog now. It is a revealing ambition for automation: not omniscience, merely the return of an afternoon. Walden is not proposing that an agent decide whom to hire. He wants it to assemble the evidence, carry the repetitive work and allow the people involved to spend their attention on consequential conversations.
This is also where his two-company education becomes unusually useful. An agency teaches the texture of the request: clients rarely arrive with perfectly stable requirements, and a promising candidate cannot be reduced to a keyword match. Software teaches the cost of repeating every manual step and the value of a system that can work across thousands of roles. Walden has occupied both chairs. His present job is to decide what should pass from one to the other.
He has been equally direct about the limits of vanity. In public conversations about startups, Walden has discussed dilution, investor preferences and the misleading glamour of a large acquisition headline. He has also spoken about the solitude of the chief executive’s role and the need for peers. This is not the folklore of the founder as solitary genius. It is a picture of company-building as negotiated, relational work, conducted with customers, co-founders, investors and the people willing to answer an inconvenient call.
That boundary also fits the ethical instincts visible in his earlier work. A candidate is not simply a score. A relationship is not merely an edge in a graph. The useful system should explain why somebody fits and how a connection exists. The human being can then inspect the work and decide what to do.
Walden has now spent roughly fifteen years around the same transaction, watching its technology change around him. First came the recruiter making the call. Then the network platform showing who might call whom. Now an agent can do the preparatory research and return a finished map. The final mile remains stubbornly social: somebody chooses to trust the evidence, ask for an introduction and begin a conversation.
A cold database can be enormous. A warm introduction can be small enough to fit inside a sentence. Walden has made a career betting that the sentence is worth more.