executive-search
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The Most Valuable Answer in Fundraising Is Sometimes No
Ruotolo Associates has spent more than 45 years teaching nonprofits a counterintuitive discipline: before asking donors for money, ask whether the institution is ready to deserve a yes.
CreatorForce and the people behind the famous face
A celebrity can bring an audience. CreatorForce set out to find the partners and operators who could turn that attention into a consumer business - a story that now leads to Cr8tify.
PR Talent knows who belongs on the shortlist
A former publicist built a recruiting firm around people who know the work. Its most useful lesson comes when the first résumés arrive and the hiring manager has to explain what is missing.
Andrew Hantzis Found His Niche in the People Behind the Passwords
For 15 years, Andrew Hantzis has recruited in technology. The useful twist is that he spent the last decade going narrow - deep into identity security, where every new machine account and AI agent creates another human problem to solve.
Charlie Saffro Built a Recruiting Firm by Charging for What She Had Been Giving Away
A $1,200 placement, a contract she was not yet staffed to deliver, and a belief that business is personal turned Charlie Saffro's instinct for introductions into a 16-year company - and then into a difficult lesson about what comes after an exit.
The Recruiter Who Went Rogue for Women in the C-Suite
Tracy Saunders spent two decades placing executives for Google, Amazon and Cisco. Then she flipped the model - and built a discreet network that gets senior women hired, paid and promoted without the noise.
Crelate Wants to Turn the Recruiting Database Into a Living Network
The Idaho software company spent years making the applicant-tracking system more flexible. Now it is betting that recruiters need a database that searches, refreshes and suggests - without taking the relationship out of their hands.
The Company Private Equity Calls When the Clock Is Ticking
BluWave built an invite-only network of vetted specialists and matches buyout firms with the exact consultant, interim CFO, or diligence team they need - usually inside a day, usually for free.
Consello Is Building a Boardroom Without Walls
The young firm pairs former operators, athletes and dealmakers with an investment arm - a model designed to turn introductions and advice into measurable corporate action.
The Agency That Staffs the Agencies
Celeste Gudas started 24 Seven in 2000 to staff fashion and beauty brands. Twenty-five years and eight acquisitions later, it is the No. 2 marketing and creative staffing firm in America - and it is quietly betting that the future of hiring is a matching algorithm plus a human who has read 3,000 salary surveys.
AcuityX Wants to Fix the Expensive Gap Between the Plan and the Work
The Abu Dhabi consultancy has bundled company formation, executive search, advisory and people performance into one operator-led firm. Its bet is that strategy works better when the people advising have also carried the operational consequences.
Korn Ferry
Korn Ferry began with one phone, one assistant and a Rolodex. Now the $2.9 billion firm wants its data, consultants and software inside every consequential decision a company makes about people.
AMN Healthcare
AMN began by placing traveling nurses. Forty years later, it sells health systems something broader: the people, software and operating discipline to keep care moving when labor gets scarce, expensive or suddenly unavailable.
Infotech Spectrum Inc
Infotech Spectrum Inc is a Santa Clara, California IT consulting and professional staffing firm founded in 2003. It pairs contract, contract-to-hire, and direct placement staffing with delivery services spanning strategic IT consulting, enterprise software, cloud, and computer systems validation (CSV) for regulated life sciences work. Working with clients such as Gilead, Genentech, Cisco, and Juul, the roughly 86-person company blends onsite Silicon Valley talent with a global delivery model to help enterprises staff hard-to-fill roles and ship technology projects on schedule and on budget.
Censia
Censia is a San Francisco-based talent intelligence company that uses AI to turn billions of workforce data points into skills-based profiles of employees and candidates. Its platform enriches HR systems - most notably Workday - so enterprises can see hidden internal talent, plan their workforce around skills rather than job titles, and make faster, fairer hiring and mobility decisions. Founded in 2017 and led by CEO Joanna Riley, Censia sells to large enterprises and pitches itself on ethical, bias-aware AI applied to talent data.
Fahad Jalal
Fahad Jalal is the founder and CEO of QLU.ai, a San Francisco AI platform that lets executive recruiters describe an ideal hire in plain English and surface qualified candidates in seconds rather than months. A Stanford computer scientist with a Wharton MBA, he scaled a business unit at Mentor Graphics from zero to $100M ARR in two years and has exited multiple startups to Fortune 100 companies. At QLU.ai he is building tools that automate prospect research and outreach while insisting human judgment stays at the center of hiring.
HiWire
HiWire is a Silicon Valley advisory firm that helps early-stage startups offload three of the most time-consuming jobs a founder faces: recruiting senior talent, building investor-ready business and product plans, and raising money. Founded by Stanford-trained engineer and longtime recruiter Web Augustine, HiWire offers retained executive search for Director, VP and CEO roles at entrepreneur-friendly fees, contract sourcing, a rapid-turnaround program called SearchXeleration, and hands-on fundraising guidance including introductions to VCs and angel investors.
Web Augustine
Web Augustine is the founder and CEO of HiWire, a Menlo Park outfit that runs high-end executive search and fundraising help for early-stage startups at entrepreneur-friendly terms. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer turned marketer, he was the first product manager on HP's DeskJet inkjet line, Sun Microsystems' employee 152, and the founding VP of marketing who helped spin VeriSign out as a standalone company in 1995. Four decades in, he splits his time between recruiting CEOs and VPs for founders, advising on pitch decks and financial forecasts, and writing books - including a 2020 political satire and a 1,400-entry quotations collection.
Avisha Naganath
Avisha Naganath is VP of Talent and Talent Partner at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms. Raised in Mumbai and educated at Stanford, she bridges the worlds of global executive search and frontier technology investing, helping founders build world-class leadership teams across a portfolio of 350+ companies spanning AI, biotech, fintech, and climate tech. A former Korn Ferry senior associate, she now sits at the intersection of human capital and breakthrough innovation, with 39 countries visited, three dance styles mastered, and a reputation as the person top founders call when they need to find their next great leader.
Jeff Markowitz
Jeff Markowitz is an Advisory Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where he serves as a go-to resource for the firm and its portfolio companies on executive hiring. Before returning to Greylock in an advisory capacity, he spent over six years at Alphabet as Vice President and Talent Advisor directly to CEO Sundar Pichai, helping shape leadership and succession at the board and management team levels of one of the world's largest companies. His career bridges two worlds - the high-stakes art of executive recruiting (with stints at Heidrick & Struggles and a national search firm) and the operational intensity of venture-backed company building.
Kelly Kinnard
Kelly Kinnard is Operating Partner and Head of Talent at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms. She leads the talent function across 500+ portfolio companies, advising founders and CEOs on how to recruit and retain exceptional leaders. With a career that spans elite retained search firms, Oracle's cloud transformation, and Battery Ventures before landing at Khosla, Kelly has helped shape the executive teams driving some of tech's most ambitious bets. She is known for treating recruiting like relationship-building - equal parts strategy, empathy, and persistence.
Matt Oberhardt
Matt Oberhardt is a Partner on the Talent Network team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he has led executive hiring and talent strategy since 2012. Armed with a BS in Chemical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from Wharton, he spent six years at Korn/Ferry International before joining a16z to help portfolio founders recruit and retain world-class C-suite talent. Beyond executive search, he is a board member of The COMMIT Foundation and champions the transition of military veterans into technology careers, partnering with organizations like BreakLine, Honor Foundation, and shift.org. He lives in Truckee, California (near Lake Tahoe), shares his home with a pair of golden retrievers, and is a devoted - if historically pained - Philadelphia sports fan.
Stephanie Doppelt
Stephanie Doppelt is Partner of Executive Talent at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. She brings two decades of recruiting expertise spanning elite executive search firms - Korn Ferry, Spencer Stuart, and Heidrick & Struggles - and six years as Pinterest's first business recruiter, where she built hiring infrastructure from the ground up. At a16z, she helps portfolio companies find and place senior leadership talent, authoring practical guides on hiring CROs, CMOs, and Chief Customer Officers. She holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and is known for her mentorship of transitioning military veterans.