Insights

Field notes from the searches.

Hiring before the playbook exists, telling real capability from resume inflation, and where AI is changing the work itself. Written for founders, boards and investors making high-conviction leadership decisions early.

The AI talent you need will not relocate. What to do about it.

Most hiring strategies for senior AI talent begin with a quiet, unexamined assumption: that the right person, offered enough money and a big enough problem, will move to where the company is. For the leaders who matter most, that assumption is wrong, and building around it wastes quarters you do not have.

Hiring before the playbook exists

Most executive search is built for clarity. The client knows the role, the profile, the comparable companies, and the success metrics. The search firm runs a defined process against a defined brief, produces a shortlist of people who have done the job before, and the client picks one. For most of the economy, that model works perfectly well.

AI's biggest impact is in R&D, not apps

The popular story about AI is about software getting smarter. Better assistants, better copilots, better consumer products. That story is real, but it is also the smaller half of what is happening. The larger, slower, and more valuable shift is AI moving into the hard, research-heavy parts of the economy, drug discovery, materials science, defense, energy, and industrial R&D. That is where the deepest value will be created over the next decade, and it changes what kind of leadership these companies need.

How to tell real AI capability from resume inflation

There has never been an easier time to sound like an AI expert, or a harder time to be sure someone is one. The vocabulary is everywhere. Titles have inflated. Every team now has a story about how it uses machine learning. For anyone hiring senior AI talent, the central risk is no longer finding candidates. It is distinguishing genuine capability from a well-rehearsed surface. The pressure makes this harder. Around 87 percent of organisations report struggling to hire AI developers, with time-to-fill averaging close to 142 days, so the temptation to say yes to a fluent, confident candidate is intense, and that is exactly when expensive mistakes are made.

Building a leadership team from zero: lessons from cross-border market entry

There is a particular kind of search that tests everything: building an entire leadership team from scratch, in a market where the company has no presence, no brand, and no existing team to recruit against. It is the hardest version of the work, and the lessons it teaches apply far beyond market entry.

The first ten hires decide whether your company works

Founders spend enormous energy on product, fundraising and growth, and rightly so. But in the earliest phase of a category-defining company, no decision compounds like the first leadership hires. The first ten leaders set the bar for everyone who follows, shape the culture before it is written down, and make the calls that are hardest to reverse later. Get them right and the company gets a flywheel. Get them wrong and you spend the next two years undoing it.

Culture-market fit matters as much as product-market fit

Every founder knows the phrase product-market fit. Far fewer treat culture with the same rigour, and it costs them. In fast-growing companies, the leaders who succeed are not simply the most capable on paper. They are the ones whose way of working fits the company they are joining. We call this culture-market fit, and it is as real and as decisive as its more famous cousin.

Recruiting research-grade talent into a product company

Some of the most valuable hires a modern company can make are research-grade people, scientists and researchers who can work at the frontier of a field, placed inside an organisation whose job is to ship product. It is also one of the easiest hires to get wrong, because research talent and product organisations have different instincts, and bridging them takes deliberate effort.

The case for going where the talent lives: offshore centres of excellence

When a company cannot hire enough senior talent in one location, it faces a choice it often does not name explicitly: lower the bar locally, hire thinly across many remote locations, or establish a presence where the talent is already concentrated. For frontier capability, the third option, an offshore centre of excellence in a talent-dense city, is frequently the strongest, and it is worth understanding why.

Leadership for deep tech: why standard search playbooks fail

Hiring leaders for deep tech, companies whose progress depends on engineering and physical science as much as software, is not the same as hiring for a consumer or SaaS business, and the standard search playbook quietly fails at it. The failure is rarely dramatic. It is a slow drift toward plausible candidates who do not actually fit, because the methods that work for software hiring do not reach the people deep tech needs.

What founders get wrong about hiring their first CXO

The first executive hire is one of the highest-stakes decisions a founder makes, and it is also one of the most commonly mishandled. The mistakes are predictable, which is good news, because predictable mistakes can be avoided. Most of them come from the same root: treating the first CXO hire like a later-stage one, when it is a fundamentally different decision. And the price of getting it wrong is steep. At the executive level, the cost of a bad hire is commonly estimated at 200 percent or more of annual salary once direct and indirect losses are counted, and some analyses put a failed senior hire as high as several times salary.

Climate leadership: hiring for mission and margin

Climate companies sit at an unusual intersection. They have to work as businesses, with the commercial discipline any venture needs, and they carry a mission that is part of why they exist and why their best people join. Hiring leadership for them means holding both at once, and the companies that get it right understand that mission and margin are not in tension. They are the same job, done well.

Life sciences meets AI: the next leadership frontier

The convergence of life sciences and AI is one of the most consequential shifts in technology, and it is creating a leadership challenge that few organisations are equipped for. As AI moves into drug discovery, computational biology, diagnostics and health, the companies at the frontier need leaders who can operate across two demanding worlds at once. That talent is scarce, and the conventional ways of hiring it do not work.

The real cost of a wrong executive hire, and how to de-risk it

A wrong executive hire is one of the most expensive mistakes a company can make, and the headline salary is the smallest part of the cost. Founders and boards who price the decision by the package alone routinely under-invest in getting it right, and pay far more later. Understanding the true cost is the first step to de-risking it.

Backing impact with skin in the game: inside The Impact Class

It is easy for a company to say it cares about impact. It is harder, and far more meaningful, to put its own resources behind that claim. The Impact Class is how we do it: each year, a cohort of leadership mandates for mission organisations working on climate and other clear-impact causes, run pro bono. It is our way of making sure impact is a commitment we bear a cost for, not a line we add for the brand.