Hariharan Kolam had helped build software that made things arrive faster. Finding the right people proved considerably less obliging. At Instart, the company he co-founded and served as chief technology officer, international expansion meant recruiting across borders while competing with other startups. The team was growing quickly. Some of the decisions were wrong. In his own recollection, “we ended up making a couple of bad hires.” There was also the quieter difficulty of telling recruiters precisely what sort of colleague the company needed.
A title could be supplied. A list of skills could be supplied. The qualities that made someone useful in a particular company, at a particular moment, were harder to put into a search box. Speed encouraged compromise. Compromise produced frustration. Kolam’s next business grew out of the suspicion that the search box was asking the wrong questions.
He co-founded Findem with Raghu Venkat in 2019. Today, from Redwood City, California, he leads a company that connects people’s careers with the histories of the organizations where they worked. Its premise is easy to understand: the circumstances of someone’s experience belong in the picture. Putting them there is the engineering job.
The inconvenience of wanting to play
Before hiring became the problem, there was a less solemn grievance: PC games took too long to download. In September 2010, investor Gaurav Garg met Kolam, Venkat and their fellow Instart founder, Manav Mital. The founders were fans of games such as World of Warcraft. Downloads could occupy hours, and broken connections sometimes required a manual restart. Leisure had developed a rather demanding administrative department.
Their idea allowed a player to begin playing shortly after a download started. Garg was interested in the technology, although the original market struck him as narrow. The larger opportunity lay in delivering applications over the web, particularly as mobile use increased. A solution born from impatience at a computer became a business concerned with how information reached millions of other computers.
There is a useful continuity between that beginning and Findem. Both involved looking beneath a familiar inconvenience. Waiting for a game seemed ordinary until someone questioned the delivery method. Struggling to find a colleague seemed ordinary until Kolam questioned the information being searched. His career repeatedly returns to the machinery underneath an experience people have learned to tolerate.
Bellary, then the machinery underneath
Kolam was born and raised in Bellary, in southern India. He has described growing up among people from different walks of life and linked those formative experiences to his empathy and curiosity. He came to the United States for graduate study and found a professional home in startups. That is his account of the journey, and it joins two interests that can sound separate: understanding people and constructing systems.
His public career history includes Sun Microsystems’ Solaris Cluster group and Aster Data, where he worked on large-scale data infrastructure. He completed a master’s degree in computer science at Stony Brook University in 2008. At Instart, he directed the technical work and co-authored more than 50 technology patents. These were years spent dealing with the practical demands of building software that had to function at scale.
The change from CTO to CEO has given him a larger remit without erasing that foundation. In a September 2026 conversation, he described engineering as his core strength and said founders should build teams that complement their expertise. There is some relief in hearing a chief executive acknowledge that a new title does not oblige its owner to become equally accomplished at everything.
“But my core is as an engineer”
Hari Kolam, September 2026
That statement also makes the hiring problem personal. Choosing colleagues is how a founder supplies the abilities he does not have himself. A search that understands only his own vocabulary risks leaving the rest of the company poorly served. The engineer needs people whose contribution he can recognize, even when their work does not resemble his.
A career has three dimensions
Findem emerged publicly in October 2020 with a people intelligence platform and a $7.3 million Series A led by Wing Venture Capital. Garg joined its board. The investor who had encountered the Instart founders a decade earlier was now backing a different application of their technical experience. The company’s initial ambition extended beyond recruiting into the wider set of decisions organizations make about their people.
Kolam’s 2024 explanation describes the data in three dimensions: people, companies and time. Consider two employees who share a title. One arrived when the business was small; the other joined after its operating routines were established. A title alone cannot distinguish those settings. Joining a person’s employment dates to the company’s development gives a hiring team something more useful to investigate.
During a January 2025 interview, Kolam made the idea concrete by looking at host James Mackey’s profile. He described connecting a person’s tenure with a company’s timeline, including financing rounds, to understand what they had experienced. He also explained rediscovery: searching an organization’s existing applicant records and network, then enriching that information. Sometimes the person worth speaking to has already passed through the system.
In a 2022 recruiting conversation, he discussed attributes as characteristics a hiring team wants to find. The proposition requires translating a manager’s partly unwritten preferences into something a system can examine. That is a difficult translation. Experience is richer than a label, while a useful tool must eventually produce a result someone can review. His business sits in that awkward space between the richness and the result.
The old network gets a new job
Kolam’s public hiring advice is broader than the search interface. He has advocated looking at transferable skills inside an organization, maintaining relationships with former employees, and using referrals. The practical theme is that a company may possess useful connections and experience without having a good way to see them. The person is present; the relevant information is scattered.
Findem’s financing in October 2025 gave that ambition more resources. The package consisted of $36 million in Series C equity led by SLW, formerly Silver Lake Waterman, and $15 million in growth financing from J.P. Morgan. The company put its total funding at $105 million. Those figures describe company capital. They also mark the scale of the undertaking Kolam was asking investors to support.
Two forms of capital, one financing package.
In December, Getro joined Findem. Its announcement described a shared belief in combining labeled data with relationship signals. Findem introduced Intelligent Job Posts alongside the deal. A familiar object, the job advertisement, was being asked to do more than sit on a page and wait for someone suitable to notice it.
Kolam’s accompanying essay argued for moving from collecting applicants toward delivering hiring outcomes. Professional networks were part of that direction. The connection matters: an existing relationship may help a candidate engage, while contextual data helps a hiring team decide whether the conversation is relevant. Neither step, by itself, settles whether a person should receive an offer.
A shortlist is only a beginning
The next expansion addressed what happens after discovery. In March 2026, Findem announced an agreement to acquire Glider AI, adding skills assessment, interviews and identity verification to its talent discovery capabilities. The stated aim was to deliver candidates whose skills and identity had been checked before they reached hiring managers. The announcement also introduced pricing tied to hires.
By May, Kolam was discussing the integration as part of a more connected hiring platform. He wanted recruiting teams to spend less time moving between disconnected systems, and more time on relationships and decisions. That is the standard his strategy invites a customer to apply: how much useful work is actually complete when the software hands over a candidate?
The question returns him to Instart’s growing team. A quick search had never been the whole requirement. The requirement was a colleague who could do the work in the circumstances the company faced. Adding validation extends Findem’s responsibility further into that process. It also makes the promise more demanding. A result must survive contact with the people who will rely on it.
When the users escape the roadmap
In September 2026, Findem launched Studio publicly, with agents intended to produce deliverables such as succession plans, market maps and hiring briefs. Kolam’s account of its early use includes a sales leader following contacts as they changed jobs and an investor turning a leadership assessment into a recurring portfolio check. Customers had found uses beyond the recruiting work the team originally anticipated.
Those examples widen the business while preserving its underlying question. What has a person actually done, and what evidence would make that experience useful to someone else? A sales leader and a recruiter need different outputs. They can still need some of the same contextual information. The product’s boundaries become less tidy when customers discover this for themselves.
His colleague Tina Shah Paikeday has described Studio’s responsible AI work in terms of making expert judgment visible. Methods that usually remain in someone’s head become explicit enough to inspect. That offers a sensible editorial standard for a recommendation about a person: show the reasoning, allow another reader to challenge it, and keep the evidence close to the conclusion.
Kolam’s career began with infrastructure and acquired a recurring interest in what conventional descriptions leave out. The gamer waiting for a download, the founder struggling to explain a hire, and the executive asking for a usable recommendation each encounter a different version of that difficulty. He has built companies by taking the inconvenience seriously. The next test is whether more context helps people make a better choice.