The best people get pulled toward the best people. That’s the recursive truth of company building, and it’s especially true right now, when founders have never been able to achieve more with a small, locked-in team, but have also never faced steeper competition and pace of disruption.
It’s an exciting, but challenging time for founders and talent alike. In all our years here in the Bay Area startup ecosystem, we’ve never seen a period where a single hire has the potential to be so transformative to a startup’s success — or so hard to find and close. Helping our founders attract those transformative operators has been Madrona’s work for thirty years. So has helping those operators find the founders worth betting on.
And today we’re glad to further enhance our ability to deliver that support, as we share that Roxy Hoffman has joined Madrona’s talent team here in the Bay Area. Roxy joins Matt Witt (based in Seattle), helping founders win strong hires, but also advising founders on the full-cycle and long-term considerations of building an executive bench and equipping teams as they grow.
Meet Roxy
Roxy comes to us with a rare vantage point on how talent shapes company outcomes. She began her career in executive search at Daversa, spent time in venture at B Capital and Sapphire supporting portfolio companies on talent strategy, and then returned to Daversa to help build out its West Coast healthcare practice over nearly five years. She has seen successful talent programs from multiple facets, and this gives her a deeply practical understanding of how leadership and hiring decisions can unlock startup success as the company scales.
Across that experience, Roxy has developed a strong point-of-view of the emerging playbook for AI talent. Tuned in the high-output context of a top tier talent agency, Roxy brings both the methods of sourcing and evaluating candidates for an AI-centric world, and the strategic depth to advise founders on the nuance of building out AI-native teams for long term success and impact.
We were intentional about wanting our next talent leader to be based here in our Bay Area office to complement our team in Seattle. By many accounts the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle are the top two pools for AI talent. And as our portfolio of founders has grown, we want to support each of them with a high level of excellence, empathy and support as they scale their teams.
Talent For a New Era
When AI makes the “how” faster, the “who” matters even more. Which is exactly why Roxy has joined the Madrona talent team: to rapidly expand the surface area for Madrona founders to bring on catalytic talent — in the bay area and beyond — that can propel the company’s next phase of innovation and success.I am excited to welcome Roxy on behalf of the Madrona team and can’t wait to see the impact she will have on Madrona, our founders and the ecosystem.
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