Hiring Talent as a Seed or Series A Funded Startup
It's not unusual for a Founder CEO of a Series A funded tech startup to ask us whether we've ever worked with companies at their stage before. Many times these Founders assume that retained search firms only partner with large enterprises.
However, over Martyn Bassett Associates' last 20+ years, 80% of our clients have been venture funded tech startups and the majority of them were in a Seed or Series A stage. We’ve even worked with companies as small as just three Founding members.
In our three-part Startup Stories series, we will share the journey of Series A companies who’ve retained us to help them build their business with a strategic hire.
Story I:
- We were retained by a 40-person Series A funded B2B SaaS company who had previously raised $4M.
- They had attempted to hire a Product Management leader in the previous 3 months before engaging our firm.
- Much earlier they had made a hire but admitted it had been the wrong person - choosing someone from a large telecom. This hire struggled to translate their model of product management to a startup model.
- Our client required someone who could apply a strategic approach to the business by putting the customer at the center of the product, but who could also 'roll up their sleeves' to deliver with a small and scrappy team.
- We completed this search in 27 business days.
- The candidate we placed had
- 18 years of employment experience, 8 of which were in Product Management for enterprise B2B SaaS orgs
- An active member of the Canadian product management community.
- They were selected for their empathetic approach to delivering value to customers.
- Their ability to shift a business from being purely “sales driven” to one which seeks to apply product value and growth across all customers also instilled confidence that this was the right hire.
- 7 months later our client raised a B round.