INTRODUCTION AND CHALLENGE

We were approached by an early-stage venture capital firm to help find a CEO for one of their portfolio companies which had recently completed a significant Series A raise. 

The company had developed an innovative charging technology and a CEO with experience of successfully scaling deep tech start-ups was required. The patented technology could have multiple use cases, so it was determined that the CEO would not only have a strong commercial grounding, but also ideally an appreciation of both hardware and software as well as a track record in taking disruptive technologies to market. 

SOLUTION

The challenge was finding potential candidates who could take a company from early- stage start-up to scale-up but who also had worked both in hardware and software companies. During our initial discussions with the investors, we already had a key understanding of the tangible requirements, but further meetings were held in order to understand the intangibles before we went to market with this opportunity.

RESULT

Over a period of 8 weeks of intensive searching across the UK and Europe, over 25 potential candidates were spoken to. This was reduced to a short-list of 4, of whom 2 went through the full interview process including meeting with the board and investors.

This resulted in a successful hire being made within 14 weeks of our initial engagement. In addition, once the new CEO was on-boarded we helped the company grow with further engineering hires in both the hardware and software domains.