Ask most founders whether they have access to talent, and they’ll say yes. Between LinkedIn, AI sourcing tools, job boards, referral networks, and the wave of experienced operators who’ve left Big Tech over the past year, candidates aren’t the bottleneck.
Getting to a confident hiring decision is.
We sat down with Alec Wright, President and Chief Operating Officer at OneValley, and Richard Gent, Chief Talent Officer at Zeki Data, to unpack why that gap exists — and what founders can do differently.
Alec has spent the past decade on the investing side of early-stage tech, backing and advising companies through OneValley Ventures — including Tueo Health (acquired by Apple), Kylie.ai (acquired by Directly), and NERv Technologies — and advising innovation teams at Fortune 500s like Cisco, Intel, and JetBlue. From that seat, he’s watched the same pattern play out across dozens of portfolio companies: strong founders, real funding, and still a hiring process that stalls at the exact moments when speed matters most.
Richard has spent over 20 years building and running recruiting functions for organizations including HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, BAE Systems, Volvo, and the BBC. He joined Zeki Data after a talent-industry webinar where Zeki’s founder walked through the depth of data behind their talent scoring — data Richard says he’d never seen matched in two decades of recruiting. That conversation led to an idea: instead of just selling companies data about candidates, why not connect them directly with the people behind it? That idea became Zeki Talent Market.
Between the two of them — one watching hiring break down from the boardroom, the other having spent a career inside recruiting functions trying to fix it — they had a lot to say about where the process actually goes wrong.
Access Invitation-only high-signal talent for venture-backed companies through Zeki Talent Market
1. The hiring playbook that built your company won’t scale it
Early-stage hiring runs on trust, proximity, and founder gut instinct — and that works, right up until it doesn’t. Most companies hit a real complexity threshold as headcount grows: what used to live in a founder’s head — expectations, standards, ways of working — has to become explicit and repeatable.
That’s when the hiring system itself needs to evolve. The challenge stops being “can we find candidates” and becomes “can we tell who will actually raise the bar.”
2. The problem isn’t access. It’s signal.
Talent is more visible than it’s ever been. Every candidate has a polished profile, a well-written CV, a refined narrative. But polish isn’t a proxy for capability. In a market this noisy, surface-level information — titles, résumés, self-reported claims — tells you less than it used to, not more.
That’s the shift founders are running into: they’re not short on candidates, they’re short on a reliable way to tell who’s actually exceptional.
3. More candidates doesn’t mean a better hire
It feels logical: see more people, improve your odds. In practice, larger pipelines mostly produce more screening, more comparison, and more second-guessing — without getting you any closer to a decision.
For a busy founder or leadership team, that turns into a hidden tax on velocity. What started as “keeping options open” becomes hours spent reviewing candidates every week — more interviews, more opinions, more process, but not more conviction.
The fix isn’t a longer list. It’s a shorter one you can trust: a small number of people who are highly likely to be right, not everyone who could conceivably do the job. Precision beats volume — a high-confidence shortlist of three to five candidates will get a team to a decision faster than fifty maybes ever could.
4. Titles are a starting point, not the answer
Founders often start a search with a job title or spec because it’s the obvious place to begin. But the more useful question is rarely “who fits this title” — it’s “what outcome does this hire need to produce, and what capability actually gets us there.”
Two people can share a title — Head of Product, Senior Engineer, GTM lead — and be operating at completely different levels, shaped by different environments and different track records. The best hires often don’t look like a clean match for the job spec on paper; they bring a combination of skills the company hadn’t fully defined in advance.
5. When one hire changes the trajectory of a company
Not every hire carries the same weight. Most roles round out a team; a handful reset what’s possible for the whole company — the first technical hire who finally lets the roadmap move at the speed leadership has been promising investors, the GTM lead who proves out a motion the rest of the plan depends on, the Head of Talent who fixes a bottleneck that’s been quietly capping growth for two quarters.
The hard part isn’t filling those roles — it’s recognizing which roles they are before the fact, not after. Founders who hire well treat a short list of upcoming roles as disproportionately important, and protect the time, rigor, and patience those searches deserve, rather than running every open req through the same process at the same pace.
6. Strong founders sequence talent — they don’t just fill roles
The founders who hire well aren’t just asking who’d be an impressive addition to the team. They’re asking what capability the company needs now to unlock its next stage of growth, and what comes after that. Hiring becomes part of a sequence tied to business timing and leverage — not a reactive scramble to fill open seats.
What this actually changes
None of this is about adding process for its own sake. It’s about trading a wide, shallow funnel for a narrow, high-confidence one — so leadership spends its time on judgment, not administration. Less filtering. Less fatigue. Faster conviction on the right hire.
This is the first in an ongoing look at how the best startups are approaching hiring — the patterns behind the decisions, the mistakes that are easy to repeat, and what founders are learning the hard way so you don’t have to. More to come.
