Product recruiting and executive search (with Andrew Abramson from Riviera Partners)

Ben Gilbert (0:00)

All right, LPs, good to be with you again.

Here I sit in Seattle, David in San Francisco in Way of Capital HQ, and we have a guest with us today to shine a little bit of a light on something that you sort of hear a lot about behind the scenes, but I personally just don't know a lot about the mechanics of how it actually works, and that is executive recruiting, particularly as it applies to sort of product and engineering roles. David, you know a lot more about our guest than I do, so why don't you take it from here on the intro?

David Rosenthal (0:29)

We are super happy to be joined today by Andrew Abramson, who's a director at Riviera Partners here in San Francisco, which is a fantastic executive search firm that specializes in several disciplines, tech companies across engineering, product, and others, but Andrew specializes in product.

So we're here to talk about a couple things. I mean, A, Riviera, and what it's like to work with an executive search firm, and how companies should think about that, and how they should think about recruiting in general, but then also specifically, product, and how companies should think about recruiting for product, how product folks should think about looking at companies, and I think this is gonna be super helpful to many of our listeners, no matter where you sit in the ecosystem. So thank you so much for being here.

Andrew Abramson (1:12)

Yeah, thank you guys for having me on. It's a dream come true right now, being on the show, so thanks guys.

David Rosenthal (1:19)

Likewise, we're super happy to have you. Let's dive in and start.

Tell us a little bit about you and how you came into this industry.

Andrew Abramson (1:25)

Yeah, people ask me that and it's interesting. Most people don't grow up wanting to be an executive recruiter because when you're growing up, you don't really know what executive search is.

So I went to USC for business school. I was going at night and through business school, I got this big interest in tech and that was when Snapchat in LA was starting to get popular and Dollar Shave Club and some of these other tech companies. So I found this other executive search from a boutique executive search firm in LA called Sapphire Partners where I became a partner for about two and a half years. My last search there, I worked with Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg on their Chief Product Officer. Yes, exactly. Yeah, from Wonderco, then New TV, now Quibi and that was my final search there.

My wife who was a dentist got a fantastic job in San Francisco and so given I had really gravitated towards recruiting product and tech, we decided to bite the bullet and move up to the Bay Area. We've been here for about a year now and I focus exclusively on product searches and it's been great.

Ben Gilbert (2:31)

Andrew, how do you define executive? What levels when you're talking about, you're not hiring a product manager one.

Andrew Abramson (2:39)

I would say for the most part, it's VP plus, but for the bigger companies, we'll go down to director level. Executive search, it's more like management consulting in a sense where it's really truly a partnership between us and the hiring manager, usually the founder or CEO of the company.

David Rosenthal (2:56)

The other models are contingent are is a, you're recruiting for a defined role. You get compensated when that role is hired, but not before then. And then in-house is obviously lots of big and medium sized companies have recruiters in-house that are working on roles. Those tend to be, I think for mostly lower level roles in the organization, but for retained executive search, like when is the right time to engage with you guys?

Is it like when the founder or CEO or the board has decided like, we need this executive or before then?

Andrew Abramson (3:26)

Yeah. Yeah. I would say over 50% of the time, executive search is usually the company's last attempt at solving this hire. The CEO will probably have a network, the venture community that's invested will probably have a network. The peers at that company will probably have a network. They will always try and solve that.

Maybe not always, but they will typically try and solve that on their own before going to retained executive search.

Ben Gilbert (3:51)

For founders where they have strong product sensibilities, bringing in that first product manager is hard, but I would imagine bringing in that first VP of product and handing over the reins is like handing over your child.