Suzanne Heske

>> Craig Gould: Suzanne Heske, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. Suzanne, you’re a partner at executive search firm spmb, where you lead the firm’s investment practice. In that role, you focus on recruiting senior investors, operating partners, and functional leaders in venture capital, private equity and asset management firms. And I have so many questions about what you do and how you do it. But I love to start these conversations with one common question with all my guests, which is, what are your memories of your first job?

>> Suzanne Heske: Ooh, that’s a great question. And I actually have a really good story about that. So unlike I would say the majority of my peers, my first job was actually driving a, 40 foot passenger bus during, undergrad at UC Davis. So the students there run the transportation system and they have restored double decker buses they use to transport both students and just the citizens of Davis, California around the town. And I thought it would be really fun to make friends and be the conductor, the person who lets everyone on the bus. And that turned out to be the lowest paying job on, as part of this transportation company that the students run. So I immediately upgraded and went to get a class B driver’s license so I could drive buses between classes and make more money. and it was a great job. So I used to always joke with my friends in San Francisco that in case of a zombie apocalypse, I’m your gal. I can hijack and drive a 40 foot passenger bus.

>> Craig Gould: So if the economy really tanks, you can go be our hop on, hop off driver. Right?

>> Suzanne Heske: Exactly. And as I say, I only crashed once, so you’re in pretty good hands.

>> Craig Gould: Oh my gosh. So is there anything from that job that you, you still take with you? Like, did you. Was there a lesson that you learned that you think is kind of still useful in what you do today?

>> Suzanne Heske: I was actually thinking about our conversation today and so many of, the takeaways of what I’ve had experienced in my own career and what we’re obviously doing every day helping other people with their careers. But I think it’s a sure sign of I think success generally at all ages in is people who are inherently curious. Right. So I’m just a student athlete at school trying to earn some extra money and decide that somehow I have the confidence to go take on the challenge of getting a driver’s license for a passenger bus and how hard could it be really? And so I think the throughput of just being unafraid to take risks and to believe and have confidence that you can learn new things New skills. I do think that you see that throughput from now, you know, as we’ve evolved from where we started in our careers. But as you watch younger people entering the job market, that arc of interest and curiosity is really one that lends itself to, I think, outsized success.

>> Craig Gould: No, it’s really interesting because curiosity, just keeps on coming up over and over again in these conversations with C level executives in terms of how do you run your organization, what are precepts of their own personal success? And you know, terms that keep coming up are curiosity and trust. You know, like harnessing curiosity, being willing to look under rocks that other people aren’t looking under. You know, how do you develop trust with your customers, your colleagues, you know, people that want to hire you, which, which is an interesting segue because you spent a long time in the financial services realm, right. Wall street and big financial services firms, and then at some point you decided not necessarily get your class B license, but you decided to take a pretty big hard pivot. Yeah, right. And so can you tell me about what led that? I mean, was it curiosity about something more or was it. What was it for you personally?

>> Suzanne Heske: Well, it was a combination of a couple things. I was working at Merrill lynch and had my third son at the same time that we had a global financial crisis. And so at the time I was based in San Francisco, but my team I reported into is based in New York. And so there were frequent, I would say bi monthly trips to New York for that role. And when bank of America bought Merrill lynch, everyone who was a part of our team was being asked to relocate to Chicago. And I had three kids under the age of five and in laws on both coasts, but nobody in Chicago. And so that just wasn’t a practical solution. So while you. So what happened for me in particular was I had always been very good at, I’m going to use the term match making people. So setting people up who got married, introducing people for potential jobs. That, that natural, instinct of being a connector always had brought me joy throughout my life. And so it became an interesting thing to pursue. The other thing that was happening in California, specifically San Francisco at the time is that all of the hedge funds that I had worked with for many years were also blowing up and shutting down. And you had a bunch of very senior people who were going to have to iterate and find their next thing. So my timing to pivot into sort of, I would say, launching a, an executive search practice on the back of a staffing agency Coincided with all of my peers restarting their careers as well. And it was, I would say from a business school standpoint, a terrible idea to have all supply and no demand and start a business. but over time it became a great natural segue where it became very lucrative and allowed me to launch a career out of that really difficult financial time for everyone in the financial services industry.

>> Craig Gould: Did, did you go straight into this particular niche of focusing on those investors and partners and functional leaders for you know, venture capital, pe, you know, family offices? How did that, how did that progress?

>> Suzanne Heske: Yeah, the way we describe the ecosystem that I lived in is alternative asset. I worked in the alternative asset ah, class industry for lack of a better term. And that encapsulates specifically on the west coast hedge funds predominantly were very large outsized impact on that capital, markets ecosystem. private equity has always been an outsized impact and venture capital was just institutionalizing, meaning it had been in the industry for a very long time, but it wasn’t structured quite as formally as these other firms were in terms of working with limited partners. and you obviously had other areas that fall into that such as private credit and other strategies. But within, in our ecosystem in San Francisco there’s sort of this throughput of tech. And so you had tech bankers working with capital markets teams, working with hedge funds, venture capital and private equity. And the through line was kind of the west coast tech ecosystem. So I started and served the west coast tech banking franchises for global investment banks. I worked for hedge funds, I worked for venture capital firms and nominally some multi asset class strategies and very few private equity firms at the time. And then what’s happened is over the course of time the hedge fund capital spigot has gone down, more assets have come into venture capital. So it just shifted the, the nature of who we’re servicing for their hiring needs. But it’s always been within that kind of west coast forward ecosystem.

>> Craig Gould: So in, in those you know, decades, you know, decade and a half, what the, the amount of time that you’ve been focused in this space, how have the hiring needs in the C suite of these organizations, how has that changed? Has it gone from something that was organic to their own networks to understanding that they needed to cast a wider net to find the right people? And is there, I guess that you know, a second question there is, you know, regarding like culture, like do those people have concerns about finding the right fits?

>> Suzanne Heske: Oh, let me answer your first question first and second question, the big evolution within the alternatives industry, most specifically within venture capital, came because there was a genesis or there was a period of time when all of the very largest firms began to spin out an enormous amount of talent who then started their own firms. And as those firms started to grow up, the number of venture capital firms grew exponentially. from in the hundreds to now in the thousands across the US and the way that traditionally firms had been run, if you weren’t one of the mega firms were, let’s say you had three to four general partners who co founded a firm. Each one of those partners took responsibility for the operating for a subset of the operation of their actual firm. So one partner might be responsible for finance, one might be responsible for the day to day operations, one might be doing the LP and the fundraising component. So they kind of divided those tasks equally. what really changed is when, when tier one limited partners started to really come into venture capital with significant amounts of dollars, their expectation on those due diligence questions that they’re asking before they give you capital were much higher than the way that the organizational structure of venture capital firms had previously been. So the first expectation is we do need you to have an independent state CFO who’s managing the finance function versus a general partner. You know, there’s just concerns about fiduciary responsibility. secondly it became it, you know, maybe it might be a chief operating officer that took on that responsibility to help the partners both run the firm and also help fundraise and to work directly with the limited partners to make sure they were getting the bespoke documents they needed, the meetings they expected, the feedback loop or all of those types of I would say formal processes that already existed on the hedge fund side and the private equity side that just became a needed expectation when you took in capital from tier one institutions. So a lot of our hiring happens when a firm has started and grown to a certain asset size and then it becomes, I need to find the first non investing partner to join the firm and help manage the non investing functions of the firm. you can imagine this also scales for finance. As the finance team grows you start to add in subspecialists, a controller, a fund accountant. you can see that across the actual investing side as well, where they’re building out their teams. So for us what really began to happen is the ecosystem of venture is such that it’s, it’s a different model because it’s typically founder centric and founder forward about who the firms themselves are investing in. So the mindset about who you’re serving is a little bit different. The culture is very different from a private equity firm to a venture capital firm. And so the culture fit is quite significant when you’re talking about the types of clients and the types of hires that they need to make. So what works well at a private equity firm in terms of both background training expectations on a day to day basis might not work for a venture firm where there might be an expectation around nimbleness for example or flexibility. And that’s, that may not be a desired skill set for people that are joining private equity firms. So that culture fit becomes incredibly important about top line firm wide culture and values. and then how that shows up in interviewing and hiring is also pretty critical.

>> Craig Gould: Does venture capital have a preference for folks that have been founders and operators versus people that come from a traditional, you know, numbers background?

>> Suzanne Heske: I would say that it depends on the firm and the scope of the role in terms of what people are being asked to do in their day to day functionality. Each venture capital firm we work with is as different and unique as a fingerprint as you can imagine about team values and structures. But for example we do have firms that have a agreed upon mission statement about what they’re trying to accomplish in the world in terms of solving the world’s most challenging problems in terms of returning I’m going to say sort of social capital to the world or it might be within the climate tech ecosystem, sort of the value system of where they’re investing to help solve some of those challenging problems they’re trying to solve. What you’re seeing is the ask for each firm is slightly different from a cultural perspective. The shared commonality does tend to be that if you’re serving on both sides, your limited partner investors and the founders that you’re backing and those businesses that you’re backing, that their value system that you hold on, the types of founders you back and the types of LPs you have that cultural consistency between both sides that most of our firms are looking for, team members and employees that are going to sit on that value chain and, and share their value, the opinion of the value that the firm is trying to deliver. So if you were at a deeply technical firm, for example working deeply within subsets of AI right now, there might be a very strong bias that we need to hire folks that have technical degrees and technical backgrounds because the founders we’re working with and serving are so technically oriented, that we need to be able to speak that language and translate back to our LPs, you know, what the overall mission is and what we’re doing. So in that instance, for example, if you were hiring an operator, an EX operator, somebody to come in and help you, it might be that you wanted to hire folks that have already been working in large language models and had actually done the coding and who could come in and help with the diligence and analysis on whether or not someone’s idea in those very early stages was going to become a lucrative business proposition down the road. In that instance, it might make more sense to hire an EX operator to be helpful than to hire someone to your point, that maybe has more of, an investment banking or a financial training from a different previous set of work experiences.

>> Craig Gould: So for you as the matchmaker, how do you go about having the type of conversation that illuminates what, what’s going to be the best fit in terms of. Some teams may say they’re looking for one thing, but what would they would really value in their organization may be something a little bit different and the same thing with prospects, right? I mean, how do you get to know your customers and know the prospects in a way that you can identify what, what might be a good fit? Because, you know, it, it feels like you’re in a very consultative cell, right? That you’re, you’re there in between and sometimes maybe you see how a candidate fits in a way that maybe they wouldn’t have seen if they were digging through a stack of resumes on their own.

>> Suzanne Heske: Well, what I would argue is we solve that in two very distinct ways. So in the first regard, having sat on the other side and hired prior to be going into executive search, we try to solve this from the idea that research can help you paint a picture and tell a story and a narrative about who’s available in the market. So to that end, we’ve built out a proprietary database of everyone who’s sitting and working in venture in the US right now. So we can see the macro picture, we have the data, and typically we run a data driven process that’s 100% transparent to the client. So we can show you based on what you’re describing, there may be 10 people who fit this or there may be hundreds. And we will run a search to help you narrow it down if it’s too large or to expand it if it’s too small. And so the goal is to use the data to drive that process, that decision tree. The way we try to work in partnership to your point about being consultative, is we’ll say let’s create prototype A, prototype B, prototype C. Let’s build out research to support each one of these options. Let’s have you interview and see which one resonates. And if you find this particular skill set at a certain level, then we can replicate that. It may be that we scope it out by seniority, it may be that we scope it out by different sets of operational experience. A really good example of this is when cryptocurrency, was first starting as an institutional business, we partnered with a company to help them. they had one of the very first ETFs for cryptocurrency where it was an index and they needed to hire a salesperson that would sell specifically into a certain demographic on Wall Street. Their assumption was that person should be sitting on you know, let’s just say it was the equity desk. What we had to show them was the clientele they needed to call on was actually sitting on a different desk and that those individuals, based on trying to convert someone from traditional finance into a very new asset class, that where they needed to focus was in a completely different area. And again that’s just our understanding of the macro understanding of how the capital market sales teams function in New York and who would actually be calling and selling specific products to the end consumer that they were trying to reach. So everything we do is I’m going to say bespoke, but it’s grounded in hard data and then that usually yields better outcomes, better results for the clients.

>> Craig Gould: How often do you reach out to a prospect? And this alternative asset management PE VC world is something that they’ve never thought about and they’ve never considered. I mean do you identify people out there that have never considered this world? And you in doing so do you have to kind of get them up to speed on the opportunity? And if so, what is, what does that sales pitch sound like?

>> Suzanne Heske: I would say that the natural progression, the most education that we are doing, you know, where we’re making calls to people and having to educate them, are truly going to be folks that are sitting in operating seats within technology. So think of it as working on a product team or an engineering team and we call them saying, would you ever consider taking a full time job investing as an investor or an investor in training at a venture capital firm? And so most people who work in technology understand in theory what a venture capital firm does, where they would interact with a firm and at what stage that they’d come in to be an investor. But the day to day practicality of what they’re doing, how they would be compensated, what their career looks like. We have to spend an enormous amount of time educating them about the distinction between what their day to day would look like that they flip from being an actual person who’s executing a particular strategy for a particular client to moving into really an advisor seat where they’re advising multiple firms to. So it’s sort of like having a basket of relationships you’re managing and how you work in collaboration with other investors internally, what that career path, career trajectory looks like. So we spend a lot of time at the educational level I would say in that capacity. the rest of the time it’s typically educating folks on a particular opportunity and allowing them to due diligence on a team, a strategy where they’re investing whether or not it’s of interest to them but that, that the big hurdle is to take someone who’s never done it before and say would you consider a radical career change?

>> Craig Gould: So do you find that there are some executives that, you know the story is the opposite, that they are more in the middle of their career and they’ve always had it in the back of their mind that they would want to shift to being an operating partner. And that’s always sort of been a goal versus because I mean I think in some people’s minds if you’re a founder, you think of yourself as a serial entrepreneur. I’ll do that until I get gray enough that maybe I’ll do that on the back end of my career versus Are there others that maybe they’re thinking more seriously about being an operating partner earlier in their career?

>> Suzanne Heske: I think that that’s a great question. Historically I do believe many people who built a career in let’s say the technology field would, I’m going to say semi retire or think about what’s my next chapter. And then it becomes I’m going to be a board member or I’ll be an operating partner or a venture partner. And the idea is I’m going to work, work in an advisory capacity. And I think that that’s always been an option for people. It will continue to be an option for people. I think that what’s happened most recently though is we have seen a, ah, pretty big shift where founders are now seeing or executives with large outcomes are now being allowed to, or many people are now investing as individuals into deals which traditionally historically used to be just for actual institutional, just in venture institutions themselves. So what’s happening is shifted the narrative much younger. So people are participating more frequently earlier in their careers in angel investing rounds. They’re getting involved in networks much earlier in their careers and they’re trying to, I would say straddle both sides to make sure that at the point in time they want to become investors, that they’re setting themselves up for that success. And that feels like a very recent shift within the most recent sort of seven to 10 years where it is now an earlier option for people versus ten plus years ago. It just wasn’t as common that you would see the founders launching venture firms and investing at a much younger, earlier age is what I would say.

>> Craig Gould: You mentioned launching VC firms at a younger age. You talked about the explosive growth of VC firms over the last couple of decades. But the biggest names on Sand Hill Road really kind of came to prominence in the 80s. And if we think about, you know, how old those guys were when they were founding those VC firms, you know, we’re talking about guys that are probably going to be approaching their 70s or 70 plus the oldest, founder partners. I guess it brings to mind what is Sandhill Road beginning to deal with in terms of secession planning. Can you talk about the intricacies of generational leadership shifts in venture capital? What is your view?

>> Suzanne Heske: I think that there are multiple forces that you’re seeing impact the asset class. On the whole, I do think that for the bulge bracket, the largest of the venture capital firms, they’re taking a different tack, which is they are now institutionalizing, they are registering and becoming registered investment advisors. They will at some point have a product for everyone. You know, the goal is if, if they’re, they could get approval to actually have 401ks and retirement plans allocate into this space. You would have sort of a way to put little bits of venture capital on everybody’s retirement plans. You know, that that larger model, that long term term pattern of success, like they are setting themselves up to really be able to serve a variety of investors at all levels, meeting their needs, where they are. Then I think you have an opposite. And so to do that you obviously have to create a different leadership structure and succession planning as a part of that. And I think all of those larger firms are having those conversations and have identified folks to help going forward. I think you’re also seeing interesting shifts where for example General Catalyst has taken an attack where they’re saying we’re going to be both an asset Manager and actually an operator. And they’re expanding the way they’re thinking about their future, succession planning in a different way. The more typical pattern of succession conversations we’re having now though are around Solo GP founded firms that have been around for maybe 20 years. And what most of these firms are faced with, even if it’s maybe two gps, is the amount of work that it took to build a firm for 20 years that one person has done turns out to be about four jobs. And so when you go start planning of who’s going to take over, for me it’s external relationships, internal relationships, it’s founder relationships, it’s network effects and speaking engagements. And when you really parse it out, trying to find the next generation to take over all those functions, many times it could be multiple people have to step in. in other instances I think you have LPs driving the conversation of what’s our risk if something were to happen to you and we’re, you know, you’re raising for a fund right now and that’s a 10 year commitment and what happened to us if you were to step away? I think those conversations are being I would say forced upon many of the general partnerships because of the LPs and the questions they’re asking in a diligence process. But I also just think it’s the natural generational shift of where businesses were 20 years ago and where they are today and where they’re going to be 20 years from now. I think as people are spinning out of larger firms, many newer firms are establishing venture firms that are designed to be intentionally, I would say turned, over to the next generation. So they’re launching with innocuous names. So it’s not my last name and your last name. And then we can’t ever turn it over to other folks. So people I think are being more thoughtful and more intentional about trying to incorporate long range planning into even relatively recent startup businesses and entities.

>> Craig Gould: You know, I lived in Silicon Valley for a while, I was doing the startup thing, VC back. And you know what I find is interesting is that there are these waves in the VC world where you know, in the early 90s it was like biotech. And then you know, there winds up, you know, being a bit of a crash and people say, well you know, this is the end of VC as we know it. And then there winds up being the Internet and then that bubble burst and like, well, this is the end of VC as we know it. And then. But there’s always it always seems like there’s the next thing. And so I’m just wondering what are you seeing in terms of investment trends like because you, you do have a bit of a front row seat here. I’m sure AI is, is an easy answer, but what do executive hiring patterns tell us about where capital is going?

>> Suzanne Heske: I think that within our ecosystem I, what I know to be true is if you think about the capital markets as a macro, from a macro perspective, that what you’re going to see is that there will always be capital going into early stage businesses and founding and backing great founders and backing great ideas. And that was the, the genesis of what the venture capital community was designed to do. And then I think there is an idea of picking the winners. there are great statistics out historically that show for example, that consumer tech has outperformed as an asset class within venture, versus all other areas of investing over a longer period of time. But they’ve had the longest, I would say dip in performance returns most recently, when everybody was so enterprise focused. So depending on how you slice and dice the data that you can always tell the story that you were just telling. I think that from a hiring perspective what we continue to see is that this is a community of folks that are really trying to build the next generation of fill in the blank. And that innovation within America, within Silicon Valley is not stopping anytime soon. And that in many ways what is more exciting, I think within the ecosystem in this more recent time period is a couple years ago we had very outsized valuations which I think were causing everyone some concern. So I think when we reset valuations to an appropriate level, it allows investors to come back in. It allows checks to be written at more, I would say, responsible or accurate levels. And then obviously we’ve had this AI boom which has just sort of blown all of that up all over again. But we continue to see that what the needs are within these firms, it just doesn’t change. It’s basically bright people who are passionate about helping other people build great businesses and scale them, and want to invest on behalf of their LPs and sort of create positive outcomes for everyone. That that flywheel hasn’t changed, I would say over the course of the history of venture, it still is as robust as ever.

>> Craig Gould: Our capital markets are changing. And back 20, 25 years ago, the exit strategy for all these startups was an ipo. And that’s not necessarily the number one exit strategy. And what would have been, hey, I would love somebody to hold someone’s hand and help them get to the ipo. I feel like some of these relationships can be much longer term between the fund and the investments than they would have been in the past. Would you agree?

>> Suzanne Heske: oh, definitely. And I think the data supports that. I think that what we’re also seeing, when we looked at, let’s say, all of the exits that took place in 2024, 2023, there’s an enormous amount of corporate buyouts. So the CVCs are buying businesses and that is a big source of exit liquidity that I don’t think we would have predicted 10 years ago. So when you look at where the returns are coming from, you’re now seeing, seeing this big shift to the secondaries market and that there is a need for liquidity for the LPs and it’s being created in this hyper growth area of the venture secondaries market. And the ability to have that market be available has been helpful. For the LPs, for example, you’ve also seen the ability to create liquidity for employees that’s been created in the secondary marketplace. That’s been very helpful. But I think to your point, the average length to a liquidity event is far longer than it was historically. you know, even five years ago to 10 years ago.

>> Craig Gould: If somebody were listening to our conversation and is thinking, you know what, this, this sounds like the right fit for me. This is the brand of caffeine I want to drink. What can someone do in actively managing their career to make themselves available, make themselves backable, make themselves a reasonable candidate for what we’re talking about?

>> Suzanne Heske: I think that where we see folks adding, if you think about adding value as an actual investor within a venture firm, we talk about it from three core pillars. And one is the most important premise, which is the actual diligence around making a good deal. Right? So you can identify great technology. But if you don’t understand the underpinnings about how to structure a deal that is beneficial for your LPs or for the firm, or you overpay for something. The diligence of the actual business operation and how to understand scaling and building a business like that. Diligence is the core competency around what makes a person successful. The secondary, I would say core competencies that they’re looking for are then also your particular core expertise. So if you’re sitting in an operating seat and you have been effective, in your role, the way I think about it is matchmaking is where have you been professionally? So if you’ve been at A startup as you were, Craig, and you helped scale it or watch it fail. Knowing how to go from $0 to, you know, 100 million in revenue is a particular skill set that’s very different from being a person that knows how to take a $250 million business and grow it to 3 to 5 billion in revenue. And so it’s matchmaking your career into where you want to invest. So if you’re working in early stage companies already, it’s a more natural transition when you’ve had success to step in as an investor. If you’re going later stage, perhaps you want to look at venture growth and join a firm where they’re making investments along the way so you’re more helpful in advising the underlying leadership, teams that you’re investing in and backing. the third leg of the stool that’s incredibly important is now more than ever is your network. So who are you actively engaging with all the time to talk about, your ideas, your passion, your core expertise professionally? The idea behind it is, okay, if I were to say, here’s $100 million check, where would you go invest? Who would you back? What would you do? Where are you passionate? What are you looking, to be a part of as it grows within this ecosystem? And so that core network plus the business diligence, plus the, I would say sort of financial rigor, plus the actual operational experience all together, what you’re looking to do is to be an impactful board member, to be an impactful peer within your team. And those three legs of the stool are what help you and enable you to get there. So to reverse engineer, this is to say, if you think about where your career is and where you’re spending time, maybe outside of work, the area that’s easiest to prop up is that network effect, because that’s typically something you can do by choice outside of your day job. you can always become an angel investor and start participating in deals and getting involved in many of the networks and ecosystems that are available to folks. And then the other two components are things you can learn. you know, you, you lean into your day to day job and then I just say you learn as you go. And the other two aspects on your professional career.

>> Craig Gould: If I were going to write a book on executives excelling, exceeding, being all they want to be? Given your long career, you know, observing, talking, interacting, what insights might you have that others may have missed in regards to leadership or, you know, reinvention or these things that make a quality leader? Like what, what have you seen from your purge?

>> Suzanne Heske: Oh, I guess the joy that I get in doing my job is that age is just a number in this industry and everyone that we’re dealing with at any age, at any stage in their career, typically, if this is the right passion career for you, they are waking up excited to go do their job every day and stop. They are so, they have so much energy and so much passion and so much curiosity and so much I would say fire in the tank to go get to be a part of what they do every day. It is a phenomena that’s fascinating. It doesn’t matter how many years of experience you’ve had. That joy of getting to do this job, which is an incredibly hard job, is what drives everybody. Right. It’s the idea that I get to go talk to some of the smartest people in the world and help them achieve incredible things. And people feel great really, that it’s a privilege. So within venture, it’s a, it’s a very humbling experience to get to be surrounded by hyper, passionate, very bright people who are really excited every day they get up to go to work and do what they’re doing and build the firms they’re building and build the companies that they’re backing. And it’s inspiring. So I don’t feel like I have anything to say to write a book about leadership per se, but I just feel very lucky that on the whole, on the margin I get to work with groups of people who are fairly consistent about their intensity and their excitement and their general curiosity, and that we’re just helping to, I would say, backfill their needs on a day to day basis.

>> Craig Gould: Is there a particular story that you like to lean on in terms of, ah, a really bold, exciting, reinventive move that you’ve seen. for one of these candidates we.

>> Suzanne Heske: We tell the story frequently where there will be a candidate that I will relentlessly stalk who I know and say this job will change your life.

>> Craig Gould: I don’t think that’s legal in California.

>> Suzanne Heske: Yeah. And then they’ll, they don’t believe me. And eventually they’ll concede that they’ll have a conversation and then they’ll take the job and then it changes their life. And there’s great joy in knowing that, you know, the person who should take a job and that that team will be successful. I would say on the counterpoint, we also love being challenged into the construct of putting somebody in a job that doesn’t exist or in a way that no one’s thought about previously. So some of the projects we get to work on are where they’ll say we absolutely do not want to hire from a peer or competitor. We have this idea, we want to take a tech person and put them in over here as an operator or for this venture firm. And here’s how we’re thinking about it. And then we get to sort of help make that transition work. And then lo and behold, it will become a norm. We just happen to have, might have done it like very early. And then you’ll see the pattern that everybody else is adding that type of role or person to their leadership teams. So I feel like it’s a lot of pattern recognition, that we get to see. And so I like to say in search that there is 100% a lid for every pot. Some pots are pumpkin terrines that only get pulled out at Thanksgiving and have a very particular top. But we are in the business of finding the lid for every single pot for our clients.

>> Craig Gould: Awesome. So if I were an executive listening to this conversation and say, you know what, I want to find out more, more about spmb, I want to reach out to Suzanne, where’s the best place for someone to either get in contact with you or kind of poke around and try to learn more on their own?

>> Suzanne Heske: Yeah, I think that our website is spnb.com it’s relatively straightforward. But what’s interesting is our firm itself is 50 years old and started to serve those portfolio companies backed by the earliest stages of venture and has advanced, evolved into what exists in this modern day format where we’re serving the next generation of all of both the portfolio company side and actually the firms themselves. So when you look at our, the partners in the search work that we do historically, you’ll see that things have evolved, where now we’ve got a sustainability team and we’ve got, you know, the, the, the mapping of what this current iteration of venture looks like in a way that 40, 50 years ago we didn’t have the terms go to market. We didn’t have, you know, all of the, the, the framework that we’re using to talk about all of our current AI clients today, for example. So hopefully the website can map out all of the explanations about the teams and what everybody is doing. And then it includes obviously our investment team and our, our investment practice.

>> Craig Gould: Wonderful. Well Suzanne, I really appreciate your time today. I know you probably shouldn’t get back out there stalking people, but I really appreciate your, your insights. It’s you know, it’s it’s one of those, you know, industries that we, we don’t all have a great deal of insight to. And so it was. It was great getting to. To pick your brain and learn more. And hopefully the. The right person out there hears our conversation and maybe that person’s one click away from me. So I really appreciate you being my guest today.

>> Suzanne Heske: Thank you so much for having me. I feel like we just scratched the surface, and it was a great conversation, so I appreciate it.

>> Craig Gould: Absolutely.