Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. And today we are here with two people from our

executive talent team, Caroline Horn and Matt Oberhart. Welcome, guys. You guys are all about

finding the right executives, helping people put that process in place. So what I want to do today,

we're going to talk about recruiting. And I should say we live

in a world that includes LinkedIn, and I thought all our recruiting problems and witches and dreams

had been solved. Is that not true? Well, I think LinkedIn has definitely changed the way

recruiting works. It's certainly having learned

recruiting at a time when LinkedIn didn't exist yet. It has changed things for recruiters in

general, but it's very useful in some cases and not in others. Yeah, I'd say, you know, LinkedIn is still no substitute for having a really strong

internal process to manage candidates and really create a great employer brand out in the

marketplace.

You know, if you've sourced, let's say, 15 or 20 candidates for a position on your own and you've had

difficulty bringing them through a process effectively, all LinkedIn is going to do is create

150 or 200 potential profiles and it's going to choke the process you already have if it's not

well set up.

We obviously invest in startup companies and you guys work with a lot of startup companies, but also big companies too. I mean, both of you, Caroline, you came from Google. Matt,

you've been in the recruiting world for a long time. So we're working with big companies and

small companies. But you say process. Do most startups have much of a process or what do you

often observe when you go into a young company

and they're trying to sort of recruit their first big-time executive?

So I think it depends on the founders, right, and what their experiences.

Like, if they're experienced and they've come from other big companies,

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