Product recruiting and executive search (with Andrew Abramson from Riviera Partners)
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All right, LPs, good to be with you again. Here I sit in Seattle, David in San Francisco in a way of capital HQ, and we have a guest with us today to shine a little bit of a light on something that you sort of hear a lot about behind the scenes, but I personally just

just don't know a lot about the mechanics of how it actually works. And that is executive recruiting, particularly as it applies to sort of product and engineering roles. David, you know a lot more about our guests than I do. So why don't you take it from here on the intro? We are super happy to be joined today by Andrew Abramson, who's a director at Riviera Partners here in San Francisco, which is a fantastic agency.

executive search firm that specializes in several disciplines, tech companies across engineering, product, and others, but Andrew specializes in product. So we're here to talk about a couple of things. I mean, A, Riviera and what it's like to work with an executive search firm and how companies should think about that and how they should think about recruiting in general, but then also specifically product and

how companies should think about recruiting for product, how product folks should think about looking at companies. And I think this is going to be super helpful to many of our listeners, no matter where you sit in the ecosystem. So thank you so much for being here. Yeah. Thank you guys for having me on. It's a dream come true right now, being on the show. So thanks, guys. Likewise. We're super happy to have you. Let's dive in and start. Tell us a little bit about

Yeah. People ask me that. And it's interesting. Most people don't grow up wanting to be an executive recruiter. Because when you're growing up, you don't really know what executive search is. And so I went to USC for business school. I was going at night. And I was like,

Through business school, I got this big interest in tech. And that was when Snapchat in LA was starting to get popular and Dollar Shave Club and some of these other tech companies. And so I found this other executive search firm, a boutique executive search firm in LA called Sapphire Partners, where I became a partner for about two and a half years. My last search there, I worked with Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg on their chief product officer. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. WonderCo, then New TV, now Quibi.

And that was my final search there. My wife, who was a dentist, got a fantastic job in San Francisco. And so given I had really gravitated towards recruiting product and tech, we decided to bite the bullet and move up to the Bay Area. And so we've been here for about a year now. And I focus exclusively on product searches. And it's been great.

Andrew, how do you define executive? What levels when you're talking about... You're not hiring a product manager one. So I would say for the most part, it's a VP plus, but for the bigger companies, we'll go down to director level. Executive search, it's more like management consulting in a sense, where it's really truly a partnership between us and the hiring manager, usually the founder or CEO of the company. The other models at Contingent is a

you're recruiting for a defined role. You get compensated when that, when that role is hired, but not before then. Correct. And then in-house is obviously lots of big and medium sized companies have recruiters in-house that are working on roles. Yes. Those tend to be, I think for, you know, mostly lower level roles in the organization, but for retained executive search, like when is the right time to engage with you guys? Is it like when this, when the founder or CEO or the board has decided like we need this executive. Yeah.

Or before then. Yeah. Yeah. I would say over 50% of the time, executive search is usually the company's last attempt

at solving this hire. The CEO will probably have a network. The venture community that's invested will probably have a network. The peers at that company will probably have a network. They will always try and solve that. Maybe not always, but they will typically try and solve that on their own before going to retained executive search. For founders where they have strong product sensibilities, you know, bringing in that, well, that first product manager is hard, but I would imagine bringing in that first

VP of product and handing over the reins is like handing over your child. How does that go? Is that difficult? Do you prefer working with product-driven CEOs versus non? The clear answer in those types of situations is you need to appropriately set expectations with the candidate and with the founder, quite frankly, on what this role is going to be like. If the founder thinks that

that they're going to be comfortable giving up the vision, but in reality, they aren't. That's where you get significant friction when they're hiring a VP product who comes in. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think that a good example of that is, is Evan Spiegel when he hired Tom Conrad from Pandora. I was the founder of Pandora to come in and run product. And, uh,

Within six months, I think Tom felt like, you know what, I'm just really executing Evan's vision. Evan's in all the roadmapping meetings. What am I even doing here? My skill set of setting vision, setting strategy, evangelizing that to the entire company, being creative, it's kind of going to waste here because I'm just executing. And so it's just really important when you have a product launch

led founder or CEO, that they are realistic with us in terms of kind of what they're looking for here and that we're realistic with the candidates on what the role is going to entail. Let's pop up to...

the process of how this works. I mean, imagine that's like, first, what is a successful recruiting process look like? And I would imagine that's the first step of just aligning like, what do you need in the candidate? And like, you can hire a product person who's a visionary, you know, CEO type, or you can hire a product person who's like an execution minded person, or you can hire somebody who's good at leading engineering teams. Yeah.

Yeah. How does it start? In terms of how it starts, let's say, you know, I get a phone call or an email from a CEO or a founder saying, you know, Andrew, we're ready to kick off a VP product search. After we go in and kind of get a high level understanding of the business, of their offerings, around their stage and whatnot, the main goal is to really kind of understand the problem that they're trying to solve with that hire, right? So like,

Is the CEO's time getting bogged down in the weeds of roadmapping and developing PMs skills that they probably don't have? Are they losing sight of the overarching business because they're too involved in the actual product itself? That tends to be an earlier stage problem, probably around series A, series B. Is the business scaling rapidly and becoming more complex and you need...

a senior level PM to really scale things up, launching ancillary product lines. That's one we see pretty frequently and is a pretty clean story around series B, series C. It's also kind of the stage where you look for experience around defining processes, the interaction and cadence between product engineering and design, just businesses getting bigger, and you really need to kind of define a true product management function. That's typically the stage that we see the most, which is, again, in that series B, series C-ish type

type range. And, you know, one thing that we say is like great founders think about the product, but exceptional founders think about who should lead the company versus who should lead the product. And, you know, even though they may sound similar, especially early on, it's actually not similar. It's very different. It's very, very different.

Oftentimes, probably more times than not, what the client thinks they want at the beginning of a search changes so frequently by the end of the search that it's incredible. I mean, it's every, almost every search I work on, you know, product especially because so much of the skill set is around the soft skills and is around how the rest of the team resonates with this person. It's just a little bit harder to measure quantitatively than maybe engineering leadership. And so be

of that, so much of it comes down to personality fit and culture fit. And that's just kind of harder to measure at the onset of a search. Yeah, the way I think about hiring product people...

compared to other disciplines is that it's still a normal curve, but the standard deviation is higher for what product means in that organization and what you necessarily need. Like sometimes based on, let's say you've got like, and I'm thinking earlier stage than sort of you would retain an executive search firm here, but let's say, because I deal with early stage startups, it's a six person engineering team with a CTO and the

like it's an amazing engineering team, but like no product sensibilities. And like they've built a bunch of amazing backend stuff that is just not super user facing and is ugly and really needs to be cleaned up. You know, that's an extremely different type of head of product that's going to come in than say it's been sort of a bunch of design oriented engineers who have built something really beautiful and incredibly functional, but really need like

people leadership. And that's also a head of product. And those are two incredibly different things that both have the same title. Yeah. There's a couple of different archetypes of product people that I think you just kind of hit the nail on the head with. Let's talk about the process of recruiting. All this is great, aligning on what you want, figuring out the team, what kind of archetype do you need? Who are the candidates? Like,

But then like the battle plan meets the enemy. Yes, yes, indeed. So we're ready to go. We think we know what we're looking for. We have a very good idea of what we're looking for. Step one in terms of kind of executing the search is to identify the target ecosystem of companies that we're going to look at for this particular search. And so, you know, that's interesting. So you think about companies.

Yes. Rather than like... Yeah, I mean, you know, being in this market, of course, anytime we go off search, you know, there's a couple names that are floating in my mind of people that I think could be an interesting fit. But systematically, how you execute a search is step one, you identify the companies that it makes sense to

pull from. So if it's a consumer facing, if it's an e-commerce company, obviously tier one is other e-commerce companies, but going out in concentric circles, consumer facing companies, maybe companies that have sort of a logistical complexity on the backend, but really most e-commerce companies are trying to differentiate on their consumer experience. And so you want people who have built consumer products for the most part. Right.

And so, you know, I think the one thing that has kind of shifted in the past few years is kind of this blend now in terms of what consumer product versus B2B product actually is. And we're seeing more consumer product people be successful in the B2B environment because users in the workplace are expecting their products to look and feel more like consumer products. Yeah. The Slacks, the Zooms, the Dropboxes, these kind of end user adoption products

Products look and feel a lot more like consumer products I mean slacks first CPO April Underwood came from Twitter and she brought a lot of Twitter people with her and and you know we're seeing a lot of that within kind of this this b2b world of Consumer product leaders kind of making that shift. Okay, cool. So universe of companies. Yes. Yes, you're right. I went on a tangent. No, no, no, no, this is great This is great. Yeah, I do this thing sometimes I don't know if it's a good idea or not, but I try and like find like

I'd like to hire another Annie or another Jill and I'll like grab their LinkedIn's and send them and say like, like, more like this. Like, is that part of your process at all? I say send me a dream person that you know you can't get because they're already in this other thing and you respect them staying there. But if we could find a clone, that'd be great.

Yeah, I mean, we can definitely do that at the beginning. Like, you know, what is your kind of ideal profile for this search? And then if they're an early stage company, they probably would say someone that is very unattainable for them. And so we walk that back and say, well, who were they before they are the person that they are today? Right. So find me the next Danny.

Yes, exactly. Who was April Underwood before she was the CPO at Slack? Well, she was a director at Twitter working on data products, right? And so like, could you see yourself hiring someone like that with that career arc and that trajectory and kind of betting on their upside similar to what Slack did? And so you just kind of have to walk them back a little bit and help them understand holistically, you know,

people's career arcs. And, you know, I think that's, that's kind of leads, leads to success more times than not is when they get a better understanding of like, how did April Underwood become April Underwood?

Okay. So you got the company universe and then who sources candidates out of that universe? Yeah. Yeah. So we have a team at Riviera. We have analysts, we have researchers. With product specifically, because that's all I do all day, every day, I'm pretty much kind of in that world sourcing candidates because for the most part, these companies...

especially the ones that are working with us, like I said, VC backed, scaling rapidly, they're going to want a product person who has seen significant scale as well. That's kind of a finite amount of companies for the most part. When I kick off any product search, obviously, you know, step one is identify the target companies and

But I already know for the most part who the relevant product people are at those companies that I want to add to this specific job. To answer your question, I would say it's myself that's doing most of the sourcing and the outreach. And because...

we work on so many different product searches at any given time, the candidate pool doesn't see me as just sending a one-off email about this job, but as, hey, let's build a relationship because we're working with all of these great companies and they see it less transactional and more, you know, I want to get to know this person because even though I might not be looking now, I might be looking eight months from now and these guys are working on really cool opportunities.

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I might only be asking this because I'm a workflow and productivity obsessed junkie, but how do you manage all this? Is it a CRM? Is it Google Docs? Is it something institutionally that you share among your colleagues? Yeah, that's a great question. So at Riviera, we have a proprietary database called Sutro, and there's both a client-facing portion to that and an internal-facing portion to that. And

That's actually a huge... Is that something you guys built? Or is it licensed? It's something that we've built. It's something that we've built. We don't license it. It's proprietary. We have about 20 software engineers and a couple of product managers actually on staff at Riviera. We hired a former director... I mean, I guess you guys know a lot of engineers and product managers. Yeah, that's true. That's very true. But yeah, we hired a former director of data science from Zillow. And so we're building all of this logic

into our database. There's rankings, there's filterings, there's recommendations. There's, if you like this profile here, five others that are similar. Yeah. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of emphasis that we put into our, our recruiting system at, at Riviera. And it's been a big selling point for us. This is maybe a total aside. Why, why,

is there not a significantly better LinkedIn out there that does this? Like LinkedIn is so flat right now. This exists in venture too, like SignalFire, DriveCapital. There are people who are doing a lot of this sort of like really, really data-driven people, people CRM stuff as their like in-house core competency. Well, and also like for LinkedIn,

we're also later going to switch and talk about the Canada pool and talk about for anyone who's a PM out there, how should you think about being on the other side of this marketplace? But yeah,

For them, you know, if you have like your system like Sucho, the candidates are incentivized to interact with you all because you're going to get them great opportunities. The companies are incentivized to interact with you all because you're going to find great candidates. And so like you're pulling all this data in and you're like the incentives are aligned for more and more data to come into you guys. Like, yeah, exactly. Why does this not exist as a product?

Well, I think it probably doesn't exist as a product because most of the candidates that we interact with are not actively looking. And so that's kind of why I think executive search is defensible to an extent from technology is because there's just always kind of this inherent...

human element of the best candidates are not actually looking. And so because they don't want to publicly flow, like if they're publicly putting out like all this data, then exactly. So, so LinkedIn has added actually a feature, uh, on LinkedIn recruiter saying open to opportunities and that helps for the most part. Those are not the best candidates. Right.

Right, because the best candidates truly are not open to opportunities. Exactly. The best candidates are compensated well, are in impactful roles, are not looking whatsoever. And more times than not, as much as we would like to say it's Riviera, it really is the job. It's the role we're recruiting for. Now the process is running. You've identified candidates. Yes. Who makes the first move?

direct contact to candidates? Like, obviously, you know them, you have a relationship with them. But do you tee up the intro? Do you want the CEO to be reaching out directly? Like, does that change depending on... So our job starts at the top of the funnel. So we will be the ones who are reaching out to the candidate pool, vetting them, writing up notes on why we think they're a fit, and then sharing that with the CEO.

So before anyone at the company meets a candidate, you've done... Yes, we have screened them. We have vetted them. We have probably back-channeled them to an extent. We have sold them to an extent on the role. And so by the time they meet with the CEO... Total side, by the way, what a like...

I mean, you're earning your fees right there because like, especially for hyper growth scaling companies, time of anybody, but especially time of executives is the scarcest resource in the company. Totally. And that's the worst email that you can get as an executive recruiter is if you submit a candidate and the founder gets back to you saying they felt like they wasted 45 minutes of their time. You know, no one is, I've never heard anything that black and white, but just reading in between the lines of why this person wasn't a

fit or whatnot. That's our goal. And that's fundamentally actually why a founder would hire an executive search firm is to save them time. You know, is to send them thoroughly vetted, screened, probably back channeled candidates so that by the time they are on the phone or they're in person with the hiring manager, they already know that they're going to be a fit. It's now about selling them on the role. And that's the goal. And that's how you run an effective search.

I would imagine a big portion of this depends search to search. But what do you guys typically see is in terms of like once a candidate passes through to the company, what should the process look like on their end? Yeah. So assuming that it's an executive level role, so VP or above reporting directly to the founder or CEO,

The relationship really with the founder or CEO is what's going to make or break that person's interest in the role. And so I think sometimes clients...

companies can get into this mindset where, you know, they hired an executive recruiter and we're going to manage the candidate all the way through the process. And we certainly do on the back end. Deliver somebody with their like I-9 ready to sign on day one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, exactly. You know, to an extent, sometimes clients feel like that. But the reality is it's up to the founder to really kind of build this relationship with that person. You know, it's like dating in a way.

Our job, once we send a candidate over to the client, is we're on the back end. We're understanding how the candidate is feeling about that particular conversation, if they have other conversations going on, how active they are, what their timing looks like, what their compensation looks like. You're like a dating consultant. Yeah. I'm Hitch. I'm Hitch. That's me. Yes. And so that's really our job. I've failed if...

client founder really likes candidate X and they get an email blindsided saying from candidate, I've accepted this job at X other company, right? It's my job to know when I've submitted a candidate, who else that candidate is talking to, how active they are in those processes so that we can put together a plan in place to figure out how we can close this person. Yeah. So it sounds like one of the things we're talking about, and this makes sense to me too, having watched it a few times,

The best process on the company side then, assuming that the executive is reporting to a founder, is that they spend a lot of time together. Yeah. Like, not just like, oh, I come, I interview you, I ask you my, like, you know, scripted question, but like, they go out to dinner. They, like, meet each other's families. They, like, you know, build that relationship. And especially for product because it's such a personal thing.

thing for the founders, right? Because they're probably the ones who have been running product. It's been their vision up to this point. It's like, like Ben said, it's their baby. And so giving that up to a stranger is a very emotional process for them. And so they really need to be comfortable on a personal level with that person. And I would imagine...

commensurately for the candidates who are in a great job already, they're happy and have probably plenty of other offers. What's going to make the difference for them accepting a role and joining is feeling like, yeah, like this is a relationship. That's right. That's exactly right.

I always like to try and think about what are the natural tensions that exist in everyone's business. And I'll give you an example. Like the classic tension that exists in venture capital is you want to be able to work with someone early so that you have the opportunity to invest before anybody else does. And of course, this is early stage investing. But you don't want to necessarily go so early and like...

I'm not representing this as my view on this. I actually don't think this, but you could make a case. You don't want to go so early that no one else would fund that thing for another six months because then you're paying to fund something that, gosh, really somebody else should be paying for and then it's the same price by the time it actually gets to you. That would be the natural tension in early stage capital. What is the tension in your business that you think about trying to manage this

threading the needle or doing the dance or what separates someone who's really good at your job from someone that's pretty good at your job? Okay, so let me answer that a different way. In terms of the tension that I deal with on a daily basis with early stage executive product recruiting, it's the threading that needle of finding a candidate who can straddle both strategy and execution.

That's the hardest thing to find because when you're at an early stage, all these clients want someone who set the vision for how Spotify was going to win their category. But when you're at an early stage, you need someone who's comfortable rolling up their sleeves and executing. And for the most part, people who have elevated to a point in their career where they're highly strategic are

don't necessarily want to go back to a role where they're going to have maybe one direct report, sometimes even no direct reports and have to actually be the one, you know, filling out the PRDs and the roadmap and executing themselves. It's funny. I'm just smiling and laughing the whole time here because

for many of the folks that we talk to at Wave, given my partners Riley and Sarah, their time at Airbnb and their colleagues there and then all of our networks, we have the exact same problem of people who were there in the early days of

uber airbnb doordash what have you like oftentimes if you've been through that it's brutal like you don't want to do that again you know like and you're not naive enough to go do that yeah right like you know most of the obviously you know when we were fundraising for a way people asked us like you know oh well like if you know the one of the founders of airbnb or whatever like started another company yeah you gotta be you guys would have the best access right and we're like

love them. They're like, but like, we wouldn't back that like, A, they wouldn't start another company. Right. B, if they did, we wouldn't invest because like, they don't have another one. You can't have another one in you. You know, you can't go back to the days when they were selling cereal to survive. Like, you know, exactly. And, and, you know, I think the other thing too, with that Airbnb or the Uber example is if someone was there pretty early and went through the rapid scaling, went through the IPO, all of that,

financially, they're probably set at that point. And they're not super incentivized to then go to do it all again at someone else's company. They're probably just either going to go start their own company, become an angel investor, continue staying at their current company. Become a VC. Yeah, exactly. It's rare to find someone go through that scaling exercise, especially if it's been super successful multiple times. At that point, they probably have a

family they're probably paying for private school you know it's just it's it's a tougher the every now and then you get that that person who says you know that was the most fun I've ever had in my life I'm ready to kind of do that again but it's rare but it's rare yeah yeah totally so you really want it that your bread and butter just like you're saying is betting on those people who have the right set of experiences in their career to set them up to be able to do that but like they haven't done it yet exactly still hungry exactly exactly all

All right, Andrew, another another question, the same line is what do the like top one to three executive product recruiters in the world do that you look up to where you're like that sets them apart, that makes them great?

Yeah, so I would say my colleague Austin is probably the best executive product recruiter in the entire world and he's who I've learned a lot from and and work super closely with I think Where he sees so much success is is predicated on his ability to build relationships and build trust with candidates and when you're able to do that you just glean information about

about the market, about candidates, about what drives them, about what companies are looking for, around what success looks like in a way that's just so far from being publicly available that it comes down to your ability to do that. And he's fantastic. A lot of the things that you're talking about that make you great at what you do are extremely similar to that of an early stage venture capitalist. It's relationship building. It's incredibly deep

background checking to understand how people have operated before with former colleagues who you have really trusted relationships with. It's thinking strategically about what someone's excited about, what problem they're trying to solve in the world. In your view, what's different? And David, I'd actually be curious to get your perspective on this too. Like what's different? And why don't you two just go switch jobs? Like what would be harder? Yeah.

We could probably learn a lot from swapping jobs. Yeah, I mean, I don't necessarily know what the biggest frustrations are that you have in your world. I would say what we deal with on a daily basis in terms of the job of executive search is it all really comes down to expectation setting.

It comes down to helping clients understand what they can actually get in this market, who's actually going to be a fit for what they're looking at. And if the expectations are aligned, it makes the job so much easier and a search go so much more smoothly. In what ways, if any, are you evaluating risk and return in your business?

When you're betting on someone to do a job that they haven't done before, you're certainly evaluating risk, right? Especially because it's the opportunity cost that a client is facing of hiring that person versus every other person that's out there that might be interested. Our job is to effectively mitigate the risk they have of making that hire. You know, on the parallels between VC and executive search, you know, I mean, you're

probably not as often as you would expect, but you've seen people move back and forth between the two worlds. And, um, Catherine Gould, one of the founders of, uh, foundation capital, uh, sadly she passed away a few years ago, but she's a legend and pioneer in the industry, especially as a female VC and a founder of a firm. Um, she was an executive search before she got, uh, got into, into VC. And, um,

She had a tremendous, tremendous track record. Yeah. David Byrne, one of the, he was not one of the original four Benchmark partners, but he was the first non-founder partner that Benchmark brought on was an executive recruiter before joining. So, you know, yeah, many of them.

Many of the skill sets are very, very similar. Yeah. And we see a lot of executive recruiters go in-house at VC firms and becoming talent partners where they're working with the portfolio of founders or whatnot, counseling them on what they should be looking for and helping them with recruiting and whatnot. And sometimes they will graduate up into actually becoming investors. And so, yeah, I mean, I do think that there's a lot of similarities. Yeah.

last phase of the recruiting process for a company and then we'll jump over and talk about the candidate side okay so you've got the perfect candidate the

the perfect relationship, the founder, whoever this candidate is going to be reporting to, their siblings separated at birth, their families get along great, they have mind meld. There's still one piece of the negotiation that has to happen here, and that's compensation. Yes, indeed. How does that work? We like to help facilitate that process because...

you know ideally you're not the one who's actually negotiating with your boss at the end of the day and i think you know the founder ceo typically is the one who who seals the deal at the end but our job is to provide the founder the ceo the hiring manager whomever with the ammunition needed

to close that candidate. So it's our job to get candidates' expectations on what they might be looking for, on where they're at today. We need to get information around vesting schedules, around just feasibility of even if they can leave, because maybe they haven't thought about the fact that their company has a 90-day exercise window and the price of their options has gone up significantly and they actually can't afford to buy their options. And you don't want to get to the very end of the process and find that out.

Our job all the way throughout is to make sure that, and you can start seeing pretty early on if the client is responding really well to a candidate. If the client gets back to you after a first meeting pretty blown away thinking this guy could potentially be our guy,

you're pretty much at that point starting to kind of suss out comp expectations. And, you know, you don't want to kind of give it away that like we're probably going to be making an offer to you after the very first meeting. But you want to get a sense of how realistic this person is for this company. And so our job is to supply the client or the founder with a recommendation of what an offer should look like. We supply them with market data of what other companies at their stage are.

are offering this, this position. And then we act as kind of the intermediary between client and candidate on, on finding an offer where everyone's expectations are aligned and they're happy. And a successful placement is where the candidate is, is going to go into this job, not thinking about compensation. And I would imagine like, you know, if you're talking about hiring, um,

non-executive role. Market benchmarks are super relevant and important and you're like gonna fall in that band. Yeah. But I would imagine a lot of stuff here is like this is...

market data is like instructive yeah but like there could be situations like you said we're like somebody can't afford to buy their options so they need like they're gonna need a cash up front to buy their options or like right every situation is unique in that way it is yeah every every exactly every situation is unique do you find yourself needing to like kind of play financial planner hat a little bit and like understand how like when people need to pay taxes on what appreciations and like help model that out

To an extent, yeah. I mean, you know, I'm not the one actually doing the modeling for them, but we have financial planners that we set candidates up with to help them better understand, you know, realistically. Because once you get to the very end, you don't want that to be the first time that they sit down, look at a spreadsheet and start crunching the numbers and realize, man, you know, I'm making 2 million bucks a year at Google. I'm going to be going to this series A startup and making, you know, 200K in base. Well, there's also just like, it continually surprises me

it's easy to assume, uh, for us being VCs and, and you know, probably a lot of listeners to the acquired podcast, like who are just kind of like thinking about and in the flow and like, Oh, like this is how things work. Uh,

I was just talking to a candidate, one of our portfolio companies this weekend, that's at a very large, newly public tech firm and thinking about like, oh, okay, here's my equity package. Here's what I'm vesting every year. That's liquid public stock. That's how I'm thinking about my comp. Talking about then going to a very, very early stage company where it's just like the levers are very different. I can offer you, we can offer you, the company can offer you a chance to

be wealthy at a scale beyond anything you could ever achieve staying in this role. But it involves risk and it involves timelines. And that's just a different language for a lot of folks. It is. It is. And that's why if we're talking to a candidate who has been at Google or Facebook for seven plus years,

and they're just kind of kicking the tires around. Like we oftentimes tell our founders not even to consider candidates from Google or Facebook if they haven't come to us saying, "I'm ready to leave Google or Facebook."

Because it's such a different perspective. It's such a different world, especially if they haven't been an earlier stage company before. There's just so much sticker shock at the end of the day as to what they're actually trading off and giving up. And it's a big change in their lifestyle too. You know, it's our job very early on in the process to make sure that person's actually viable versus that person is just, you know,

Yeah, I can do that for $3 million a year. And there might be $2 million in the bank account of the company. Yeah, exactly. Well, let's flip over to the candidate side. So say you are somebody at a Google or a Facebook and you have an incredible set of experiences. Or even let's take the April Underwood example. You're a director of product at Twitter. You're interested in going to an earlier stage company, but they...

There's so many unknowns, right? Like, how do I know what are good companies? How do I know what are good roles? Am I going to mess with the founder? How do I think about, like, where do you start? Yeah. So where do we start in terms of as an executive recruiter? What are kind of the trigger points that I'm pitching to candidate experts?

Yeah. Or how should, let's take it from two perspectives. Where do you start as a recruiter talking to them? But then where should candidates start in terms of thinking about, I'm thinking especially what you said about like, are you really ready to do this? And I've talked to so many people at these big companies.

And the reality is they're not really ready. Like, how do you know and how should you think about asking yourself, are you really ready to do this? Yeah, that's a good question. So to the first question of what should a candidate be looking at? I think, you know, and I've explained this to candidates before, they almost need to be looking at these earlier stage companies almost like an investor would in a lot of ways because so much of their compensation is going to be tied up in the equity value that they're ultimately going to create with that enterprise. And so you're looking at things like,

Who are the VCs? What is the founder's background? How big is this total addressable market? What is the impact value that I'm going to be able to make and the value that I'm going to be able to create here? Am I passionate about the problem that this company is solving? Especially at an earlier stage, you have to be passionate about the problem that you're solving because you're just going to be living and breathing that product 24-7.

There are certain reward centers in a PM's brain that we try and kind of get to the bottom of. Light up. Yeah, get to the bottom of very quickly. I think having impact, a sense of purpose or mission, having autonomy, obviously financial outcomes are there somewhere. And ideally at an earlier stage, that's probably not going to be number one on their list.

It's more around the impact. It's more around, you know, who's going to be using my product, the purpose or mission of the company. Am I going to be learning? Am I going to be growing? Those are kind of the trigger points. And you almost want to get them to rank those in a way in terms of what's most important to them to get an understanding of a how you position the opportunity to kind of match what they're looking for and be understanding of this.

opportunity is even going to be a good fit if it's going to offer you the things that you're really optimizing for. Follow-up question on that. We've been talking a bunch recently, a wave here about founders. And my sense is this is going to be a key difference between executive hires, especially like a head of product and a founder.

When we start hearing things from founders along those lines of like the second part of what you were just saying, my growth, my trajectory, those are red flags for us. Because if you're a founder, like you shouldn't, if you care about your personal growth, like you should not be a founder. Like you should be doing this a hundred percent because of the mission, the impact, the product, you know, everything.

Well, David, at some point in my career, I'd like to be a founder. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'd like to have a director level role. Yeah, that means you're not going to be a founder. But that's probably not a red flag for you guys in terms of a hire. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you...

Ideally, someone is looking or open opportunities because they feel like their growth has stagnated. It's because they're looking to flex a new muscle. They're looking to try something new, probably at a different stage of company. And that's growth in and of itself. Even if they're the first VP of product there and they don't have a product person to learn from, they look at being able to lead a product organization from a very early stage and set the vision and strategy as a form of growth.

And so that's the kind of growth we're looking to kind of key in on at that point. As a product manager, and I'm sure this is probably also somewhat applicable to other disciplines to engineers as well, but let's take product. Yeah.

If your goal is to grow, how should you be thinking about first meeting folks like you? Like, what are you looking for when you are building your candidate pools? And then how do you, how do you evaluate it? Because I would imagine much like us with founders and potential founders, you're

You meet, you get a baseline. But what's really interesting is like where they go from that baseline over time. Like, so how are you thinking about that? Yeah, I mean, I'm looking to meet people who have aspirations to become an executive. When you're early on in your career as an IC level product manager, kind of just getting started, you might not necessarily see the value of forming a relationship with an executive recruiter because...

you just think that we're recruiters. And oftentimes there's kind of this negative connotation around the word recruiter because there's so many emails being sent out, so much of which kind of seem like

spammy to an extent. In mail, in mail. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, we really avoid in mails as much as humanly possible. And so I think that the real value in an earlier PM in their career and associating with an executive recruiter is just to better understand from our vantage point what these companies are actually looking for in executives. So then for the outcome of that,

for the candidates that you guys get really excited about, the top 5% in your candidate pool where you're like, this person is great. What have they done to get to that point where they are super, super in demand? Is it that the back channels you get from other people who've worked with them say like,

this is one of the best people I've worked with in my career. Is that like the highest value weight or like, are there other things that you can see? Yeah, good. That's a really good question. So I think there's a baseline with products specifically because fundamentally your job is to effectively determine what to build and then deliver that to market. Um,

I think there's probably a very strong correlation between how successful the products are that you've worked on and how good you are as a product manager, right? Like if you're a product manager that's just worked on a lot of products that haven't really gotten product market fit or haven't gotten to scale, it's hard to say that you really have a good sense of the end user around how to leverage data, around how to use data to inform continuing developed products. So what I'm trying to say is there's a finite amount of companies that have reached a certain scale where...

the product people are probably very good because they've worked on built products that have gotten to mass usage. And so I'm imagining even like within a big company, like there's a difference between somebody who was the product manager for, I don't know, let's pick a, um, whatever Netflix decided to like,

do their own video production. Yeah, sure. That's like something that's been incredibly successful versus the product manager that decided to do the Quikster spinoff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Or, you know, even within like a Google, right? I think that was a CEO-driven decision. Well, I wouldn't hire Reid. No.

But like at Google, for example, just a specific example there, like, you know, the Google Maps team has been known to produce fantastic PMs. Yeah. It's just a really strong it's such a core product to Google. It's been so successful, such big scale, a lot of innovation that has happened within Google Maps. And, you know, people have gone on the CPU of Uber, Uber works at Google Maps for a while. There's, you know, just a ton of really strong talent that's come out of Google Maps.

Other organizations at Google, maybe, you know, I won't say any specific ones, but like, it's just important to understand within a company as big as Google, where kind of the pockets of talent actually reside. And you can only really glean that from, again, continuing to network, continuing to know the market, continuing to back channel and understanding that. Totally. Yeah, you can't hold it against the people that worked on Google+. They were like, you know,

There were many executives who forced it in that decision. There might have been many good product people on those teams. But I think what you probably can do is like, say somebody worked at Google+. It's a test of their judgment. Like how long did they stay working on Google+. How did they choose to invest their own time? Did they go down with the ship or did they realize that this was a sinking ship? Exactly, exactly. And there are still things that you can do within maybe a field product.

that exhibit the skills of a strong product manager. So maybe you increased product velocity. Maybe you just kind of launched into a number of different new categories and it's clear that kind of you were leveraging consumer feedback to iterate all along the way, even though it didn't necessarily result in a successful product. There's probably people there, engineers, designers, cross-functional partners who said, you know, without this person, the product might have even been a lot worse, you know? But you're always looking for an executive level

at least somewhere in their career where they've worked on a successful product. In terms of what could make for a good founder, I'm even thinking like several cases of incredible founders that have come from like being at a product within a big company that is like clearly not right and being like, we need to stop doing this. And then the inertia of the organization is like, and then they get so fed up and so frustrated that they leave and like start a company despite the old company. Like that's a great argument.

archetype. It really is. I mean, that's what we look for. That's a huge kind of attribute that separates leaders in product versus, you know, really strong individual contributors is the ability to kill projects. You're kind of representing what the market is saying about your product and it's your job to have to kill things, to even have to let people go. And that's actually a big thing that we look for in product leaders is can you deliver the bad news in addition to the good news? Yeah, totally.

That's true. All right. So last question for Andrew. What's something that we haven't really talked about that is commonly misunderstood about what you do? I would say that in general, the word recruiter has kind of a negative stigma because like I was saying earlier, there's just...

So many of them are very transactional and not strategic about who they're reaching out to. The biggest misconception about our job and what we do as executive recruiters at Riviera is that we're not contingent recruiters just trying to fill a role. Rather, we're actually trying to build relationships and solve problems for these companies, critical problems for these companies.

And so because of that, it's really important to what we do every single day to help them find the best answer for that. And that only comes with forming relationships, with getting to an understanding of what's actually motivating and driving people to leave their company and join your role. There's just a lot more that goes into it than sending an email and submitting a couple bullet points to a client. And so I would say that's probably the biggest misconception. Yeah.

how does Riviera as a firm think about like growing? I mean, you guys have an amazing brand here in the Valley. How do you guys think about that and growing that? Cause like that's the difference between people taking your calls and not, right? Yeah. Yeah. So we actually recently raised $25 million in private equity a few months ago.

And we're using that to continue kind of expanding into different geos and like Seattle, like New York, continuing to build out our tech presence. But part of that is maintaining the culture that we've created and kind of that ethos around

relationship building, both with clients and candidates. And so we have pretty regimented training programs around kind of how you do that, how you build relationships, how you can add value to candidates, even if you're not reaching out to them with a specific opportunity, right? Just how to kind of differentiate from being transactional into more relationship building. And that's something that has been preached at Revere from the top down. And I think they do a really good job of kind of enforcing that company-wide. Yeah.

That's awesome. Well, congratulations. Has that ever happened before in the recruiting space? Raising capital like that? Not to my knowledge. I think, you know, Korn Ferry obviously went public and so they raised capital that way. But yeah, I don't know of any other private firms. And how do you value the business? I'm like fascinated by, is it like,

you know, 1X trailing 12 months because it's a services business? Is it like we just waded into a whole new territory? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That'll be our next episode. Yeah, that'll be on the next LP show. That might be a little bit above my pay grade in terms of how the mechanics of that work. But no, it's a really good time right now to be in executive search in the Valley and specifically within product. That's such a good...

spot to end on because Jenny and I went on a vacation this summer which was much needed we did an awesome two week vacation that we hadn't done in a long time and I was thinking about it and I was like what's the scarce resource in I was thinking about like early stage VC right now but I think it's the valley as a whole we talked about this on one of our recent LP shows it's judgment you know like there's so much capital flowing into the ecosystem right now there's so much talent there's so many companies there's abundance yeah exactly

I think what's super cool about what you guys are doing, the way you're practicing recruiting, and obviously everybody at the executive search level, but you guys in particular with what you're doing is like judgment is what separates you, you know? And like if you double down on that, like that is the scarce resource. Yep, agreed. I would also say that executive level product people are certainly a scarce resource as well. Like you would...

it's actually timely because I know you guys did the, uh, the caviar door dash episode today. And, and there were about 10 different clients that asked us about Gokul from caviar, um, and saying, Oh, is he, is he available now? Is he going to be looking at like,

we actually had a bet on how many clients would ask us about that. That was the first thing that Sarah asked Nick when it wasn't as available as, is he going to start a company? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that too. Yeah, of course. So yeah, I mean, it's with all of the really kind of high profile executive searches,

we always hear the same 10, 20 names. Can we get this person? Can we get that person? Um, and so it's about kind of finding that next layer of, of talent that people might not know yet, but could become into that, into that tier. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Well, Andrew, thank you. This has been awesome. Uh, LPs, we hope you, uh, enjoyed this no matter where you sit in the ecosystem. Uh,

I'm sure you took away something valuable from this. And, you know, certainly for me and I think I speak for Ben here, for us as helping build early stage companies, this is such a critical piece of what goes into that. So super helpful. Thank you for sharing. Thanks, guys.

Yeah, appreciate it. Hey, listeners, this is normally where I would say share the episode with your friends or tweet about the LP program. Different ask this time. This is a short window that we have to win a little contest and we need your help. Pretty cool. Acquired has been sort of nominated and accepted as a candidate to

to do a live show at South by Southwest for 2020. And we're super pumped about that. I think it'd be awesome to do a big fan meetup there for anyone who's going and maybe do a cool guest and just be really fun to use that venue for a live show. So if that idea excites you, or if you just want to help the cause, you can click the link in the show notes or go to acquire.fm slash SXSW.com.

you can vote for us there. There's a little login process. It's not too bad, but a vote very much appreciated. Indeed. Thanks, guys. We'll see you next time. See ya.