Stacking the Talent Bench

We’re excited to welcome two extremely seasoned talent leaders to The General Partnership—Jose Guardado and Rockman Ha. 

Jose has seen almost all sides of the talent universe, with a track record of making hires that strengthen company valuations. Early in his career, Jose spent time at Google and Cisco before leading recruiting for multiple startups, including Dropcam, which was acquired by Google and Nest in 2014. From there, he spent nearly five years as a Talent Partner for Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator before founding Build Talent in 2019, which was sold to Riviera Partners in 2023. At Riviera, he served as a Partner and team lead in the Venture Capital practice, focusing on early-stage startups and venture studios.  

Rockman is the best talent leader in New York City. Period. He previously led recruiting teams at Gilt, Facebook, MongoDB, and Transfix. He’s also a two-time founder and sold his company, Clear Talent, to Patreon, where he then worked as VP of Talent for the past three years. Having worked with many of New York City’s biggest tech companies, we’re excited to have him on board as we continue expanding our community there across investments like Stainless, Graphite, Dandy, 1099 Policy, and Libretto.

Talent isn’t just a priority—it’s the foundation of everything we do at TheGP. Throughout my entire career, I've been laser-focused on building and surrounding myself with exceptional talent. Internally, we have hired some of the most skilled practitioners in recruiting, GTM, and product development. Aside from making these folks available to our companies, we firmly believe that founders should invest in building strong internal recruiting capabilities early. It’s a particularly crucial belief now, as the renewed funding market and focus on AI investments are driving a resurgence in tech hiring. 

Comp has been relatively flat for the last two years. We expect that to change dramatically, and aside from being exceptional at recruiting, leaders need to be prepared for what is likely to happen next. The next talent war has already begun—you're fighting it whether you know it or not. For founders, this means you will need to: 

1. Rebuild the depleted recruiting teams that were downsized over the past few years. 

2. Compete for top talent in an increasingly heated market. 

We’re seeing this play out firsthand. Our bench of recruiters (who built teams at Stripe, Robinhood, Uber, Meta, and Google) is fully deployed into our portfolio companies right now. We’ve placed over 400 candidates at portfolio companies, and over half of our investments in Fund I included a ‘sweat equity’ engagement for talent work as more founders required support to double their headcount, make critical first hires, establish scalable recruiting processes, and build internal talent teams. 

Our Partner, Anthony Kline, recently wrote that talent acquisition will likely become the biggest bottleneck for many tech companies over the next 12-24 months. Great recruiters will become invaluable assets in this environment. They bring not just networks and process management skills but also the crucial ability to align company culture with candidate potential—a task that, despite AI’s progress, still requires a human touch. 

Jose and Rockman are pros at helping founders accelerate along the curve, and I’ve spent nearly a decade trying to recruit them. They bring both the networks founders need to place the right early team and the customized strategies organizations require to scale. We’re thrilled to have them do the work with us at TheGP. If you are a founder who wants to build the greatest team possible, please reach out.