Caption: SeekOut co-founders Aravind Bala (left) and Anoop Gupta (right)
The traits that make a great company and the traits that make a meaningful career turn out to be remarkably similar: a passion for learning and growth, tenacity, and the willingness to follow a path without knowing where it leads. Anoop Gupta has spent his career demonstrating this. And SeekOut, which he co-founded with Aravind Bala in 2017, is a strong expression of that.
I’ve known Anoop since our years together at Microsoft, and even then it was clear he had the right qualities for a founder: intellectual curiosity, relentless drive, and a genuine obsession with solving hard problems for customers. When he told me he was leaving to build something from scratch, it made sense, and I was eager to support him on the journey.
What I didn’t fully anticipate was how well-timed his instincts would prove to be. SeekOut started with a simple but important premise: that great talent, across backgrounds and experience levels, deserved to be visible and accessible to the organizations looking for it. The AI infrastructure to act on that premise has evolved enormously since 2017, and Anoop and Aravind evolved with it; staying ahead of the curve from early machine learning applications through the transformer era and now into agentic AI.
Starting May 4, Anoop moves into the role of Executive Chairman, and Sean Thompson takes over as CEO. I’ve had the chance to get to know Sean through this process, and the confidence Anoop and Aravind have placed in him is well-founded. He brings deep enterprise software experience — most recently as CEO of NAVEX, and earlier in senior roles at SAP Ariba and Microsoft — and he understands how large organizations adopt and trust new technology. Agentic AI is powerful, but earning its place inside enterprise talent teams takes a leader who knows what good looks like from the buyer’s side. Sean does.
Recruiting has long been a process defined by its inefficiencies; slow, manual, and prone to missing remarkable candidates. Agentic AI has the potential to change that, and SeekOut is out at the front, delivering a category leading product. SeekOut Spot is how “service as software” can work for the recruiting space: agentic AI collaborating alongside expert recruiters to compress the time from job description to interview-ready candidates from weeks to days. Madrona has experienced this firsthand as a user of Spot. When we needed to hire a data scientist, the process ran start to finish in under four weeks, and the resulting hire (Baxter Black) has been a tremendous asset to our organization.
Anoop has always said: focus on outcomes, not hype. SeekOut Spot is the product expression of that belief, and Sean, Aravind, and the SeekOut team are well situated to continue transforming the recruiting world with these agentic outcomes. I’m glad Anoop will stay closely involved as Executive Chairman, and we at Madrona look forward to supporting this team through the next chapter of SeekOut’s growth.
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