The war for talent has never been hotter in Silicon Valley. Sometimes a key hire can make the difference in when a company launches a product—or lands its next financing round.
Think we're kidding? We know one late-stage company that waited to round out its management team before gunning for an eight-figure fundraising.
Even venture capitalists are taking a more hands-on role in recruiting, building up internal operations that keep their portfolio companies fueled with engineers, designers, and salespeople. Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, and others now have in-house "talent partners."
So if you want to work for Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter or the next rising star in tech, who can get you in the door?
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Oliver Ryan, Lab 8 Ventures
At Twitter, Ryan took the company from 50 employees to 500. He hunted down statistical geneticists for 23andMe. Now he's got his own firm, Lab 8 Ventures. It's quietly hunted engineers for Amazon as far afield as Australia.
"Most of the companies I'm working with are keeping a pretty low profile and tend to be small, but have generally been NEA-funded," Ryan tells us. (NEA, or New Enterprise Associates, is a venture-capital firm that's backed Juniper Networks, TiVo, and Diapers.com, among other companies; it raised a $2.6 billion fund last summer.)
Carrie Farrell, Google Ventures
Like many members of the Google Ventures team, Farrell is a veteran of the search giant. While the venture-capital arm is technically independent, its networks are thoroughly interwoven with Googlers—which means a huge depth of talent at Farrell's fingertips.
"We can give a founder 50 Java resumes in a day," Farrell told VentureBeat last year. Maybe yours could be one of them.
Ali Behnam, Riviera Partners
Behnam cofounded Riviera Partners. He's best known in the industry for placing Mike Abbott as Twitter's VP of engineering, a hire that helped slay the site's dreaded Fail Whale, the mascot synonymous with outages. (Abbott is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins.) Cloudera cofounder Jeff Hammerbacher also gives Riviera high marks.
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