The three jobs that eat a founder's calendar - hiring senior people, writing the plan, and raising the money. HiWire does them so the founder can build the company.
Above: the name on the door of a one-person practice that does the work big search firms hand to the new kids. No logo necessary when your reputation is the brand.
Menlo Park, California · a company of one
It is Tuesday morning in Menlo Park and somewhere a first-time founder is staring at three tabs: a half-written job description for a VP they don't know how to evaluate, a pitch deck with a blank financials slide, and an inbox with no investor replies. This is the moment HiWire was built for. Not the celebration. The bottleneck.
HiWire is a boutique advisory firm that takes the most time-consuming founder tasks off the founder's plate. It does three things, and it does them for people who usually can't get the attention of anyone who does them well: recruiting and sourcing senior talent, building business and product plans that investors will actually read, and the slow contact sport of fundraising itself. One operator. No bench of juniors. The person who sells the engagement is the person who runs it.
“HiWire helps startup executives best utilize their valuable time by acting as a trusted resource to offload critical, yet extremely time consuming tasks.”
— HiWire, in its own wordsExecutive search is a good business right up until the client is small. The largest firms - and most of the boutique ones - are organized around fees that only a funded, scaling company can absorb. An early-stage startup with three engineers and a runway measured in months is, to that machinery, not worth the senior partner's time. So the startup gets a junior, or gets ignored, or gets a bill it can't pay.
That gap is the whole premise. Founders need senior hires earlier than anyone wants to serve them, they need a plan before they can raise, and they need to raise before they can grow - and the people best equipped to help tend to show up only after the company no longer urgently needs the help. It is, in the gentlest possible terms, a market that politely points its best service at the customers who need it least.
“Providing high-quality executive search to early-stage companies at entrepreneur-friendly fees and terms.”
— HiWire's founding niche, 2006Web Augustine started where a lot of Silicon Valley starts: with a Mechanical Engineering degree from Stanford and a job at a startup division of Hewlett-Packard, in Vancouver, Washington. The pivot from machines to people took the next two decades - marketing, sales, consulting, and finally the craft that stuck, executive search and sourcing.
His resume reads like a tour of the places that define how tech hires: contract product-leadership sourcing at Facebook, talent engagement at eBay, talent acquisition at Exabeam, and a stint as a contract partner at Equity Search Partners recruiting VP and C-level roles across North America and Europe. The bet behind HiWire is simple and a little contrarian - that a seasoned recruiter, working solo and pricing for founders, can deliver what the big firms reserve for big clients. He founded HiWire in 2006, then relaunched it in 2015 with a wider lineup.
“Twenty-plus years in marketing, sales, consulting, and executive search - put to work for the companies most search firms won't pick up the phone for.”
— on Web Augustine, Founder & CEONo unicorn arc here - just a practice built, paused, and rebuilt around a clearer idea.
Web Augustine graduates Stanford in Mechanical Engineering and joins a startup division of Hewlett-Packard - the first step away from machines and toward people.
Launched to fill a niche the big search firms ignore: high-quality retained search for early-stage companies at founder-friendly fees.
HiWire reboots with a broader lineup - recruiting and sourcing for startups and larger firms, plus business/product planning and fundraising support.
Retained search, SearchXeleration, planning, and fundraising guidance - run hands-on from Menlo Park.
HiWire's services map cleanly onto the founder's three headaches. The recruiting work runs from full retained search to flexible contract sourcing. The planning work turns a founder's napkin math into deliverables an investor will respect. And the fundraising work treats raising money as a process with steps, not a mystery with vibes.
High-quality retained search for senior roles at early-stage companies - the same rigor large firms reserve for large clients, priced for founders.
A rapid-start program delivering names, profiles and contact info for ~25 candidates in three days to jump-start any search - in-house or external.
Flexible contract recruiting and sourcing relationships for startups and somewhat larger companies that just need more hiring capacity.
Business plans, product plans, financial forecasts, market analysis and pitch decks built to survive a VC's skepticism.
Mentoring before, during and after a raise; intros to VCs, angels and acquirers; due-diligence help; and term-sheet review.
Help building boards of directors and advisors - the quiet hires that shape a young company's judgment.
“Twenty-five qualified candidate profiles, in three days. The pitch is almost a dare.”
— on SearchXelerationHiWire's whole argument rests on one number: a founder's hours. Recruiting a single senior executive, writing a credible plan, and running a raise are each multi-week, full-attention efforts. Stack them and they swallow a quarter. The chart below is illustrative of why founders offload - rough ranges drawn from how these tasks typically play out, not a HiWire scorecard.
Illustrative ranges, not audited figures. The point isn't the exact bar - it's that the bottom bar is measured in days while the rest are measured in weeks.
“The best startup hire is the one you didn't spend three months finding.”
— the HiWire thesis, compressedThe proof for a firm like this isn't a logo wall - it's repeat trust. HiWire maintains relationships with accelerators and incubators that funnel early-stage founders its way, and its founder's sourcing history is tied to names like Facebook, eBay and Exabeam. For a company of one, the credential is the career.
Strip away the service menu and HiWire is a single correction to a lopsided market: give early-stage founders access to senior-grade search, planning, and fundraising help at terms they can afford. Not a discount version. The real thing, sized down.
That is a quieter mission than most company profiles promise, and it is more honest for it. There is no claim to reinvent recruiting or disrupt venture capital. There is a claim that a founder's time is the scarcest asset in the building, and that someone experienced should be guarding it. The whole firm is an argument that being useful beats being big.
“A trusted resource - so the founder can spend their scarce hours building the company, not chasing the people who'll fund it.”
— the throughlineMore companies start every year, capital gets choosier, and the gap between a good idea and a fundable one keeps widening. Fractional and on-demand expertise - exactly HiWire's model - is becoming the default way small teams buy senior help. A firm built to serve the underserved tends to have a long runway when the underserved keep multiplying.
So return to Tuesday morning. The same founder, the same three tabs. Except the VP job description now has a shortlist attached, the financials slide is filled in, and two of those cold investor emails have turned into meetings. Nothing about the founder's ambition changed. What changed is that the time-consuming part stopped belonging to them. That is the entire job, and HiWire treats it like one.
Note: the hiwire.com domain has since been picked up by an unrelated entertainment company - a reminder that on the internet, your URL can outlive your business.