Lucas Martinez was walking down Rue Boyer during his first Montreal winter when the cold felt almost comical. He had grown up in Geneva, worked in London and traveled widely, but this was different. He was in a new country to build a company with two friends, and he had no idea where it would end. The discomfort came with a useful counterweight: he had never felt more alive.
Fifteen years later, Martinez returned to that walk in the note announcing his departure as chief executive of Talent.com. The company that began in Montreal as Neuvoo had become an international job-search platform serving millions. Montreal had become the city where he met his wife, where their children were born and where, as he put it, he became an adult. Leaving the CEO role on July 31, 2026 was a business transition, but it was also a separation from the institution through which much of his adult life had been measured.
Quitting was his first form of research
Martinez was born in Geneva to Spanish immigrant parents. He describes a happy, working-class childhood and an extroverted temperament. Competitive table tennis carried him around Europe and beyond for tournaments. What attracted him was not wealth but motion: languages, cultures and experiences. He later became the first person in his family to attend college, studying business and accounting in Geneva.
The respectable path presented itself immediately after graduation. Martinez joined PwC to audit Swiss banks. He lasted one day. He started sweating in the office and understood, with unusual speed, that he could not see himself doing the work for years. Procter & Gamble followed. This time he lasted two days in logistics. His family and friends wondered what he was doing.
The pattern sounds reckless until the third move. He found a job implementing Oracle’s financial software and relocated to London. The work introduced him to technology, consulting and life abroad. He later moved into B2B sales with EF Education First, including work in the Middle East. He was not fleeing work. He was narrowing the search.
I don't care what people think, as long as I believe it's the right thing to do, I'll do it.Lucas Martinez, 2023
His favorite illustration is charmingly low stakes. As a boy, he liked the Backstreet Boys when his friends thought that was uncool. He said so anyway. That comfort with social disapproval became useful when the ideas were larger and the room was full of investors saying no.
Three friends and a name nobody could pronounce
Martinez met Maxime Droux during university in Geneva. Droux already knew Benjamin Philion, a self-taught developer in Montreal. In 2011 the three started Neuvoo, a job-search engine designed to gather listings from company career pages, staffing agencies and job boards. Philion led the product, Droux brought finance, and Martinez took sales and business development. They wanted to help employers understand the return on recruitment spending while making the scattered job market easier for candidates to search.
They were outsiders to recruitment and new to fundraising. Their pitch deck was weak. Investors were wary of aggregation businesses. Raising the first money took roughly 15 months, close enough to failure that the founders decided they would make the company profitable if they survived. Angels put in C$600,000 in 2012 and another C$500,000 about 18 months later.
Martinez responded to rejection with volume. At one startup conference, he followed an investor into the restroom and began pitching. When he returned to the main room, the event's large social screen carried the investor's dispatch: he had just been pitched in the bathroom. Martinez could laugh about it later. At the time, it was another strange moment in a year of looking for any open door.
More useful than the theatrical persistence was the founders' willingness to change the model. They pivoted so frequently that clients could struggle to understand what they were buying. Eventually the key turned. Neuvoo aggregated listings, used search and content tools to attract candidates, and sold pay-per-click traffic to recruiters and employers. Salary and tax calculators gave job seekers another reason to arrive. The company became profitable and, by Martinez's account, doubled for years without returning to the venture market.
There remained a costly problem hiding in plain sight. Neuvoo is Finnish for “advise” or “counsel,” but customers elsewhere found it awkward to say and hard to trust. The founders bought Talent.com and introduced the new brand in 2020. The clearer name reduced the explanation required before a sales conversation could begin.
Every round looked dead before it closed
By 2018, early angel investors wanted liquidity. The founders also saw a chance to professionalize a profitable company and fund faster growth. A C$53 million investment from CDPQ followed in 2019, with much of it buying out early shareholders and roughly C$12 million entering the business. Martinez later admitted that the team went into the process with a long-term vision but no convincing five-year plan. Execution and knowledge carried a weaker fundraising story.
Institutional capital changed the company. Talent.com added finance leadership, a CFO and legal expertise. The preparation mattered when it went back to market in 2021. In March 2022, Talent.com announced US$120 million in equity led by Inovia Capital, alongside US$30 million in debt financing. The public number was clean. Martinez's memory of getting there was not.
Every fundraise, he said, reached a moment when it appeared the money would not come. During the Series B process, one of those lows arrived around Christmas Eve and his daughter's birthday. He was physically with family and mentally inside a financial model that needed to change. When the term sheet finally came, relief was mixed with fatigue. He described feeling like a wounded soldier who had reached one mountain only to see Everest ahead.
Trusting the process, not getting too excited when you don't have to, and not getting too down when things get hard, is something I wish I would have done more of.Lucas Martinez, 2023
The pandemic supplied a different test. Hiring froze, platform traffic fell, and Talent.com's founders cut marketing and reduced their salaries while trying to preserve the team. By June 2020 the business had stabilized; by August it was growing again. The sequence suited Martinez's operating instinct: respond to the facts, preserve the ability to act, then move when the market changes.
The founder becomes the person searching
Martinez's ambitions were never shy. He once described Talent.com's competitive goal with a consumer-brand analogy: Indeed was Coke, and Talent.com wanted to become Pepsi. He also spoke about reducing the skills gap and giving workers and employers better labor-market information. By 2022, the company said it carried more than 30 million jobs across 78 countries and drew more than 35 million job seekers a month.
Four years later, the defining decision was not another market or funding round. It was succession. In June 2026, Martinez announced that July 31 would be his final day as CEO. He wrote that a founder should leave from strength and that the next chapter can call for a different kind of leader. He would continue cheering from the board as Talent.com developed AI and agentic HR products.
Consulting in Europe, sales in the Middle East and a growing appetite for a company of his own.
Neuvoo begins in Montreal with Droux and Philion.
A new name, Talent.com, meets a suddenly frozen hiring market.
A US$120 million Series B funds a wider product and international push.
Martinez leaves the CEO role, stays on the board and heads to San Francisco.
There is symmetry in the move. Martinez spent 15 years building a search engine for other people's careers. His own career had begun through rapid elimination, leaving jobs that looked right on paper but felt wrong in practice. Now the title that fit longest has also been released.
He planned to take the summer to breathe, though he admitted he was already itching for what came next. The geography had changed again: Geneva to London, Montreal to Barcelona, and now San Francisco. The next role was unnamed. For someone who built by testing, learning and moving before certainty arrived, an open question may be the most familiar place to start.