recruiting
(30)
Mark Newman and the interview that wouldn't happen
Goldman Sachs wasn't recruiting at his college. Mark Newman helped build HireVue so more people could get an interview - then spent years convincing employers to press play.
Greer Stevenson and the conversation that became a career move
A grand jury term brought Greer Stevenson and a future Figma colleague together. Now Clay’s Founding Sourcer is building a sourcing engine after four years of recruiting at Figma.
Amanda Hahn Spent Her Career Removing the Friction From Hiring
She started recruiting in her teens, learned the machinery from inside, then spent years making hiring technology legible. Amanda Hahn’s career is a study in what happens when the marketer has actually done the work.
Sabrina Kelly
Sabrina Kelly is a people and talent leader who rose from technology recruiting to become President of Techstars, one of the world's largest startup accelerator and investment platforms. Over roughly a decade at Techstars she led People Operations globally, served as Chief People Officer, and built scalable HR functions across markets in the US and Europe. Earlier she recruited technical talent for names like Spotify, IAC, and Etsy in New York, and founded the HR function at CustomMade in Boston. She is known for an empathetic, direct, and pragmatic approach to building culture and managing distributed teams.
Christophe Jeusse
Christophe Jeusse is the Chief Executive Officer of Peoplelink Group, a South Bend, Indiana staffing company that provides administrative, industrial, skilled trade and professional contract workers to businesses across the United States. A French-trained finance executive with more than two decades in employment services, he moved from the international side of France's Groupe Crit into the top job at its U.S. staffing arm. He was recognized by Candidately's World Staffing Awards as one of the top 100 staffing leaders to watch in 2023 and nominated again in 2025.
Fez Zafar
Fez Zafar is Chief of Staff at Mercor, the AI talent marketplace that vets, matches, and pays experts powering frontier AI labs. A 2024 Harvard graduate who was elected First Marshal of his class, he helped scale Mercor through one of the fastest revenue ramps on record and now leads hiring and cross-functional operations across its San Francisco and New York teams. Before Mercor he was an analyst at Village Global, a research assistant to economist Larry Summers, and a campus builder known for comedy, community events, and a student interview podcast.
Michelle Davey
Michelle Davey is the co-founder and CEO of Wheel, an Austin-based virtual care platform she started in 2018 with Griffin Mulcahey. Wheel powers back-end telehealth infrastructure for retailers, payers, pharma companies, and digital health brands, and connects them to a nationwide network of clinicians. Before Wheel, Davey ran talent at a telehealth company and had earlier stints in recruiting and operations at Google, Favor, and Medtronic. She has raised more than $216 million for Wheel across four rounds, including a $150 million Series C in 2022.
Jon Beck
Jon Beck is the Founder and CEO of Ursus, Inc., a San Francisco-based staffing firm he built from scratch in 2015 into one of the fastest-growing in the U.S., recognized by Staffing Industry Analysts for four consecutive years. A UC Berkeley psychology graduate and three-time rugby All-American, Beck brings 25+ years of technology executive experience across startups and global enterprises — including a stint at Cisco-acquired Embrane — to a company built around technical and creative talent for the digital transformation era.
Adrien Fraise
Adrien Fraise is the CEO and founder of ModernGuild, a New York-based edtech company that pairs high school and college students with one-on-one career coaches and a structured online readiness program. A former Deloitte strategy consultant with degrees from Stanford and Columbia Business School, he launched ModernGuild in January 2011 after concluding that traditional early-career recruiting was broken: too many resumes, too little real review, and too much bias. He built the company into a mentoring marketplace that has served tens of thousands of students, partnered with employers like Citibank and Wells Fargo, and went through the Techstars accelerator in 2017.
Omar Khateeb
Omar Khateeb is the co-founder and CEO of JobPixel, a San Francisco video platform that drops TikTok-style, interactive video into the hiring process so candidates and employers can 'virtually shake hands' before a single interview. He started the company in 2020 as a remote-first, deliberately lean operation and grew it past $2.7M in revenue with a team that has hovered around 14 people. A UC Davis grad who once ran events for Instagram and sold for Cisco, Omar is a vocal believer that hiring lost its humanity to the 10-second resume scan, and he is on a mission to put faces and voices back into it.
Robert Kowalski
Robert Kowalski is the co-founder and CEO of Gyfted, a behavioral-science recruiting platform that matches people to jobs and teams on personality, culture fit and ability rather than CVs. A Stanford GSB MBA and LSE economist, he built Gyfted with Stanford computational psychologist Michal Kosinski and engineer Adam Szefer to make remote hiring faster and less biased. He signs his own title 'Village Idiot ie. CEO' and frames the entire recruiting industry as broken and worth flipping over.
Rohan Pavuluri
Rohan Pavuluri is the Chief Business Officer at Speechify, the consumer voice-AI app, and the co-founder of Upsolve, the nonprofit whose free online tool has helped low-income Americans erase hundreds of millions of dollars in debt through bankruptcy. A Harvard statistics graduate and Phillips Exeter alum, he built Upsolve out of a Harvard Law access-to-justice lab as an undergraduate, led it as CEO until 2022, and now serves as its volunteer board chair. He is a TED Fellow, a TIME100 Next honoree, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 recognized for arguing that civil rights should be free.
Benjamin Encz
Benjamin Encz is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ashby, a San Francisco-based AI-native recruiting platform used by companies like OpenAI, Shopify, and Snowflake. A German-born software engineer turned recruiting-infrastructure builder, he spent 80% of his time on recruiting operations as Director of Engineering at PlanGrid before co-founding Ashby in 2018. Under his leadership, Ashby has grown to 2,700+ customers, 380 employees, and $142.5M in total funding including a $50M Series D in 2025.
Adarsh Hiremath
Adarsh Hiremath is the Co-Founder and CTO of Mercor, the AI-powered talent marketplace connecting domain experts with AI labs for model training, evaluation, and data creation. At 22, he dropped out of Harvard, received a Thiel Fellowship, and co-built Mercor from a São Paulo hackathon idea into a $10 billion company generating over $500 million in annual revenue - making him one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires alongside co-founders Brendan Foody and Surya Midha.
Hariharan Kolam
Hariharan Kolam (Hari Kolam) is the co-founder and CEO of Findem, an AI-powered talent data platform headquartered in Redwood City, California. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years building technology companies, he previously co-founded Instart Logic as CTO, accumulating over 50 technology patents. At Findem, Kolam is reimagining recruitment by replacing resume-based hiring with 3D candidate profiles that synthesize data from over 100,000 sources and 1.6 trillion data points - turning talent acquisition from a guessing game into a data science problem. Under his leadership, Findem raised a $51M Series C in October 2025, bringing total funding to $124M.
Colleen Gallagher
Colleen Gallagher is the CEO of Textio, an AI-powered HR tech company helping organizations attract and develop top talent through bias-aware communication tools. A US Navy veteran turned finance executive, she rose through the ranks at Textio - from CFO to COO to CEO - bringing operational rigor and a conviction that most hiring fails because it mistakes likability for competence. Under her leadership, Textio launched Lavalier, an interview intelligence platform designed to replace gut-feel hiring with structured, evidence-based evaluation.
Anne Foor
Anne Foor is VP of Talent at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most ambitious deep-tech venture funds. She partners with founders across the portfolio to recruit exceptional talent for transformative companies - from AI labs to biotech startups. With stops at Uber, Afterpay/Square, Facebook, Apple, and Google, she has spent over a decade building the teams that build the future. She holds a B.A. in Intensive Psychology and Legal Studies from UC Santa Cruz and is known for operating at nearly twice the candidate volume of her peers.
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.
Glen Evans
Glen Evans is Partner of Core Talent at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's premier venture capital firms. A veteran recruiter who built Facebook's engineering recruiting team from scratch and served as Slack's first Head of Global Recruiting, Evans now helps Greylock's portfolio companies build world-class teams. He advises founders on hiring strategy, recruiting operations, compensation benchmarks, and talent pipelines - translating the hard-won lessons of hyper-growth into practical playbooks for startups.
Mario Linares
Mario Linares is a Partner on the Executive Talent team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he works directly with seed-stage founders across Enterprise, Fintech, Consumer, and American Dynamism portfolio companies to recruit and place senior leadership. A former professional chef turned Silicon Valley recruiter, Linares spent years inside the talent organizations of Cisco, Nicira, VMware, and Google/YouTube before joining a16z - where he now brings the same precision he once applied to perfecting a dish to the art of matching world-class executives with breakout companies.
Ryan Batra
Ryan Batra is the VP, Talent Partner at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most influential deep-tech venture firms. A career talent architect with over a decade in hypergrowth tech, he spent six years building DoorDash's technical and executive recruiting machine through multiple phases of explosive expansion, then led recruiting at Lime and OpenStore before landing at Khosla. Now he helps founders across KV's portfolio - spanning AI, biotech, space, and climate - hire the engineers, researchers, and leaders who make bold ideas real. He's placed 500+ engineers and leaders. His philosophy: talent is one of the most powerful forms of leverage a founder has.
Samson Wu
Samson Wu is a Recruiting Operations Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. With roots in economics from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and formative stints at AIESEC, Uber, and CloudKitchens, he has become a key architect of how a16z and its portfolio companies find and hire world-class talent. He supports the firm's New Media team as an HR Business Partner and brings operational rigor to recruiting functions that span early-stage startups to growth-stage companies across the a16z portfolio.
Sarah Altabet
Sarah Altabet is the Early Career Talent Partner at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most influential VC firms. She builds the firm's university recruiting program and connects students and early-career candidates with opportunities across the KV portfolio. With a career spanning Western Digital, Rivian, and Sierra, she has become a go-to voice on how top-tier startups and venture-backed companies hire - and how students can break into the industry.
Tom Hammer
Tom Hammer is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he leads People Practices for a16z speedrun, the firm's early-stage accelerator investing up to $1M in pre-seed startups. A veteran people operator who has scaled teams at Riot Games and Bird Rides, Tom coaches founders on talent strategy, organizational design, and building high-performance cultures from day one. He is known for his direct, founder-first approach and his belief that strong hiring is the single greatest lever a startup has.
Zabie Elmgren
Zabie Elmgren is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) on the American Dynamism investing team, where she backs founders building companies at the intersection of AI and the physical world - from industrial infrastructure to defense technology. Before a16z, she was a Partner at Index Ventures leading early-stage B2B and B2C software investments. Her career started unconventionally: as part of the founding team at Human Capital, she helped grow a recruiting firm into a $600M+ venture fund while studying computer science at Harvard, personally placing early engineers at Brex, Robinhood, Snowflake, and Nuro.
Leonard Adler
Leonard Adler is the founder and CEO of Green Jobs Network, a San Francisco-based social enterprise he launched in 2008 to connect job seekers with careers in sustainability, conservation, and clean energy. A Stanford-educated political scientist who went on to earn a J.D. from Georgetown Law and an MPP from Harvard's Kennedy School, Adler parlayed his early work in public-interest law and poverty research into building one of the internet's most active communities dedicated to green and climate careers. Under his leadership, Green Jobs Network has grown to run the largest LinkedIn group focused exclusively on green jobs—135,000+ members worldwide—while publishing a newsletter with more than 100,000 subscribers, hosting the Green Jobs Pod, and launching ClimateJobs.AI, an AI-powered career coaching platform. An Echoing Green Global Fellow and serial social entrepreneur, Adler has spoken at Stanford, the Commonwealth Club's Climate One, the National Career Development Association, and the Green Festivals, making him one of the most visible connectors in the climate workforce ecosystem.
Ksenia Onosov
Ksenia Onosov is a veteran talent acquisition leader and the Recruitment Lead at Forum Ventures, one of North America's leading B2B SaaS venture studios. With over 12 years of recruiting experience spanning global tech giants and early-stage startups, she specializes in building teams from the ground up across Engineering, GTM, and Operations. Simultaneously running her own consultancy, Clever Fox, she brings a rare dual perspective as both an embedded operator and independent advisor to the startup hiring ecosystem.
Maren Kate
Maren Kate Donovan is a serial entrepreneur and operator best known for founding Zirtual, a US-based virtual assistant marketplace that grew to 400+ employees and $11M ARR before its dramatic overnight collapse in 2015. She turned that spectacular failure into a career studying how people work, building Avra Talent (later Carrara), co-founding Inde.co for remote workers, serving as interim COO at Calm, and writing candidly about the realities of building companies. Currently exploring SMB acquisition and building Zozy, an AI-powered home inventory app, she writes at marenkate.com under the banner 'Build Real Things.'
Nakul Mandan
Nakul Mandan is the founder and managing partner of Audacious Ventures, a $250M pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. A graduate of IIT Kanpur and IIM Lucknow, he arrived in the US in 2009 on an H-1B visa and spent a decade investing at Battery Ventures and Lightspeed before launching Audacious in April 2020 — during COVID lockdowns. His firm's unconventional edge: embedding a full recruiting operation inside a VC fund, with technical recruiters actively running executive and engineering searches for portfolio companies. He has backed companies including WorkOS, Tome, FalconX, and Multiverse, and is known for his framework of five founder traits: high IQ, outsized ambition, the ability to make people believe, grit, and velocity.
NishA Acharya
NishA Acharya is a tech talent executive and career strategist with 14+ years of experience placing engineers and consultants at Ernst & Young. As US Talent Acquisition Recruiting Lead for EY Technology Consulting, she has built pipelines for some of the most sought-after tech roles in consulting, with a growing focus on AI, Physical AI, and Robotics. She runs 'The Leverage' newsletter, helping tech professionals navigate career growth, and speaks at Women in Tech events globally on recruiting, STEM, and how to build a career that compounds.