A few weeks ago we mentioned that we were looking for the right person to replace Charlie, who had left us to take a product management position at Oddcast. Prior to this post, we had informally reached out to a few friends to let them know that we were looking for a talented person to fill Charlie’s shoes. We saw a number of strong candidates, but had this nagging feeling that we were missing something.
After one set of interviews Fred and I were re-hashing the candidates and the process and one of us – I don’t remember who – said lets run a post. The idea immediately struck both of us as crazy, or brilliant or possibly both. On the one hand, we instinctively believed that there were people out there following our firm through our blog who would be a great addition to the team, on the other hand, we had never seen a post dedicated to an analyst search, and had visions of being overwhelmed with resumes we didn’t want.
Fred, however, quickly came up with a refinement of the idea – asking people to reply by commenting on the post and pointing us to their web presence, a blog, a site, or a profile page - that made the idea work. You can see the results by looking through the comments on our post. We did not get over run and the quality of the folks who commented blew us away.
We knew that we wanted a young person who was an active participant on the web – a net native. All of the respondents pointed us to their presence on the web. These web presences were much more revealing than a resume. So when candidates arrived in New York, we already felt like we knew them. In each case, we jumped right into a conversation about the net’s impact on our society and economy – something we were both passionate about.
In the end, the toughest problem we had was choosing from among a bunch of very qualified people. We hope to keep all of them in the Union Square Ventures orbit and are working to introduce them to our portfolio companies where it makes sense.
That said, we are very pleased to welcome Andrew Parker to the Union Square Ventures team. Andrew blogs here and you can more about his thoughts, life and art by following the link embedded in his comment on our post.
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