startup-hiring
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Amanda Christoff Built a Recruiting Firm on the One Thing Hiring Platforms Keep Flattening: Fit
For ten years, the San Francisco recruiter has built Bloom Talent around a stubbornly human idea: the best hire is not a keyword match, but a working relationship that can survive Monday morning.
The VC Firm That Wants the 11 P.M. Call
Oceans built its pitch around a scarce commodity in venture capital: useful attention after the wire lands. Its partners sell founders on operator time, candid advice and help with the hires and customers that decide whether an early-stage company gets a second act.
Bloom Talent
Bloom Talent is a woman-owned boutique recruiting agency in San Francisco that places Chief of Staff, Executive Assistant, and operations talent for tech startups, venture firms, and executives. Founded in 2015 by Amanda Christoff, the firm is known for a relationship-driven, white-glove approach that weighs personality fit alongside skills, and has placed candidates at companies including Y Combinator, Stripe, Airbnb, and Pinterest.
Contrario
Contrario is a San Francisco AI recruiting company that pairs specialized human recruiters with AI agents to source, screen, and deliver vetted candidates to startups within days. Founded in 2025 by Stanford dropouts Arya Marwaha and Aditya Sood, it operates as a hybrid between a traditional agency and recruiting software, using AI talent scorecards and graph-based matching while automating scheduling and follow-ups. The company reached roughly $6M in annualized revenue and paid over $1M to recruiters within six months of operating, and raised a $2.3M seed led by Nexus Venture Partners.
Perfectly
Perfectly is an AI-native recruiting operating system that automates sourcing, outreach, screening, and qualification for fast-growing startups. Built by three ex-TikTok and Meta machine learning scientists, it treats hiring as a recommendation-systems problem: it learns a company's hiring preferences, reaches out to thousands of candidates, runs AI screens, and delivers interview-ready candidates directly into Slack. Backed by Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch, Perfectly counts startups like Giga, Corgi, LlamaIndex, Porter, and Mintlify among its early customers and charges only when a role is filled.
Shor
Shor is a San Francisco fintech (YC S25) that runs international payroll and Employer-of-Record services for startup founders. It pays contractors and full-time employees across 150+ countries by settling on stablecoin rails in the backend while customers transact in ordinary currencies - cutting the intermediary fees that make legacy providers like Deel and Rippling expensive. Setup happens on a single call, payroll runs within a week, and pricing starts at $19/month per contractor and $299/month per EOR employee.
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.
Holly Rose Faith
Holly Rose Faith is the Executive Talent Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms. Specializing in C-suite, VP-level, and board placements for Greylock's portfolio companies, she has placed top executives at Roblox, Nextdoor, Databricks, Abnormal AI, Gem, PayJoy, Snorkel, Casper, and Transfix. With roughly eight years in VC talent roles spanning Khosla Ventures, NEA, and now Greylock, Faith brings a founder-first philosophy that goes beyond transactional recruiting — coaching founders on hiring strategy, building interview frameworks, and staying involved through references, compensation, and the close.
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.
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.
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.