Joining Hunt Club

Portfolio life

For the past two years, I’ve lived the portfolio life, a mode of multitasking that Diane Hessan pointed out to me long ago and so masterfully lives today. Instead of working at a single company, the portfolio life enables you to be selective and choose projects that most resonate. Embracing this during the pandemic, I allocated 1/3 of my time to advising startups and brewing new ideas, 1/3 to angel investing through TBD Angels, and 1/3 to working with student entrepreneurs across universities in Boston.

While the flexibility of the portfolio life is hard to beat, I gradually felt a swirling undercurrent of unrest. To test the waters, I explored a few different paths: full-time roles at universities, a social entrepreneurship foundation, and a venture studio - each of which appeared great on paper. However, when it came time to make the decision to jump onto the boat, I got cold feet and reluctantly turned down each of those options. I finally realized that I was itching to get back to where I thrive: a startup with a focused mission, building something meaningful, alongside a deeply committed team.

Joining the club

I’m so excited to join Hunt Club, a fast-growing startup in the recruiting space. Hunt Club is a new type of talent company that leverages technology and the power of trusted connections to help companies recruit great hires. Our customers range from tech startups like Acorns to big brands like Dollar Shave Club to venture capital firms like Bain Capital. We’ve helped them find and hire thousands of talented people.

In disrupting the recruiting and executive search industry, Hunt Club’s three key differentiators help us to find better talent and hire them faster for our customers:

• Expert network of 15,000 business leaders who make trusted connections to 7m+ talented candidates. Imagine hundreds of marketing leaders helping to find and refer your next VP of Marketing.
• Technology and machine learning developed over years that power the search process to create a customer and candidate experience with one of the highest net promoter score (NPS) in the industry
• Personalized full-service from our team that improves, rather than degrades, at scale by leveraging our network and technology

Perfect fit ?? ?? ? ?? ??

Hunt Club is the perfect fit for me for five reasons:

?? Big opportunity in the talent industry

As a startup operator, I’ve long recruited people to join my companies. What’s more, I’ve been drawn towards understanding people’s career desires and their growth, informally playing matchmaker to their future opportunities. The entire recruiting and executive search industry hasn’t changed in decades, and there’s a big opportunity for an agile player that’s network and technology powered. With the recent turmoil in the tech startup job market, it’s the ideal time for us to make a big dent on the space.

?? Goldilocks stage: not too early, not too late, just right

I truly respect for entrepreneurs who excel at the art of creating from scratch, going from zero to one. I also respect executives on the other end of the spectrum who thrive at billion dollar public companies. My Goldilocks zone is somewhere in between, where a tech-enabled startup has the right balance of upside and risk and a strong signal-to-noise ratio. Hunt Club is at the stage where I thrive, where there’s solid traction and the company is well positioned to accelerate growth.

? Multiplier effect with my other business passions

There’s so much great overlap between Hunt Club and my other business interests: advising growing tech companies, angel investing, relationships with VCs, and working with student founders and rising entrepreneurs. I get to focus on the parts of portfolio life I enjoy and channel those energies towards a common goal. The number of win-wins will increase as the network grows, killing two (maybe three) birds with one stone.

?? A new role that builds on the past

In my new role as General Manager, Expert Network, I’ll be growing the community of business leaders who make trusted introductions to talented candidates. If we’ve worked together in the past, you know how strong my desire is to connect people and create community. What’s more, I’ve long been obsessed with how personal relationships can be supercharged by technology, and now I get to geek out on creating these network effects. I’ll be applying 20 years of experience in product, engineering, marketing, growth, strategy, and operations - a perfect blend of my past experiences and current passions.

?? Exceptional team and culture

Finally, none of the first four reasons matter if the team isn't a fit. Before I join any company, I do a ton of pressure testing to see whether I’d work well with the people. After meeting the first dozen people at Hunt Club, I discovered a talented team with complementary skills, shared purpose, ability to move fast and execute, acutely self-aware, and without egos - just a magical combo. Finding a team that gels so well is rare (maybe 5 of 100 companies). I'm lucky to have had not one, but two, prior startup experiences like this. In both cases, I was introduced through referrals from a trusted connection, and being a part of those two "work families" were the most rewarding experiences of my career. I have high hopes that this will be the third.

What’s next?

I can’t express how excited I am to join the [Hunt] club. I'm feeling a mix of adrenaline and anxiety, and my I'm thinking nonstop about ways to build the network, help companies grow, and find more rewarding jobs for people. With the disruption in the startup job market, this is the perfect time to devote my time and energy to making an impact on today’s workforce.

I’d love to find a way to work together:

?? If you’re an experienced business leader, join the Expert Network - with no effort on your side, you can help people you know get introduced to great new job opportunities (and be rewarded if they get hired)

?? If you’re at a growing company, contact our partnerships team to find out how we can help you hire the best talent for your open roles

????? If you’re looking for a job, drop me a line if you’d like to chat. I enjoy helping people think through what’s next in their careers, and we’ve got plenty of resources to help you with your next step.

Let’s do this!

-David