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Hiring a partner used to be a secret process. Now it’s an open book.

Hello and welcome to Pipeline. This week: Venture firms actually list jobs, goodbye golden handcuffs, and Hunter Walk's idea for an IMDbB, but for products.
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Hiring a new partner at a venture firm has always been a largely opaque process with no cover letters or resumes involved. Instead, many partners I've talked to have described yearslong courting where you're just hanging out, doing a deal or two together, and then suddenly there's engagement talks to join the partnership without even realizing you'd been formally dating.
"It's not clear when VCs will be hiring, and by the time you find out, they've already gone and teed up who they're going to bring in," says Initialized's (newly promoted) president Jen Wolf.
But that's changing, starting with job listings. In the last year, more VC firms have started to advertise when they're hiring a partner — a move that both increases transparency and (hopefully) diversity in the venture industry.
Hundreds of people applied to Initialized when it listed two roles in April, orders of magnitude more than it would have traditionally considered, Wolf told Protocol.
Advertising a job has the added bonus of forcing the firm to really think through what kind of candidate it's looking for. Initialized is a generalist firm, but partners often have special knowledge in different areas. Instead of evaluating a handful of candidates in a more personality-driven search, Wolf said the firm is spending a lot more time thinking through whether someone with fintech expertise would be an addition versus someone with health tech experience.
But posting a job listing doesn't automatically do the work for diversity, Wolf said, although it's a good first step. Initialized is still working with a recruiter on proactive outreach to increase the diversity of its candidate pool.
It may be a higher administrative burden to sort through the applications and run more people through the process, but it's the legwork the venture industry will have to do to progress and change.
DevOps and the Alternative Cloud provides insight into the capabilities and priorities developers expect from cloud infrastructure providers. In a market where hyperscalers dominate, a small band of alternative cloud providers — which includes DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Linode, and OVHcloud — is having an outsized impact.
Hunter Walk is a co-founder and partner of Homebrew, a seed stage venture fund that has invested in companies like Chime, Plaid and Gusto. He formerly led consumer product management at YouTube and was a founding member of the Linden Lab's team, which created Second Life.
What's your favorite pandemic meal?
I read that Goldbelly recently announced some funding after 300% growth in 2020, and I'm fairly certain that my household is responsible for most of that new revenue. We've been ordering BBQ from restaurants across all parts of the country through their platform, and it's given me new appreciation for foodies who roadtrip to find America's best brisket.
What product or service are you totally, even irrationally, loyal to?
Fancy Hands! It's a task-based virtual assistant service, which has persevered through all the ups and downs of similar venture-backed startups pivoting or going out of business. I use FH more so for weird personal requests than work-related stuff. Like if we're going to be visiting a new city with our pet, I'll ask them to make me a list of the best dog-friendly parks. The founder/CEO also seems to be a really nice, genuine person, and it makes me happy to support them as a result.
What's one way you changed working in 2020 that you plan to keep going forward?
This has been a big topic in my life recently — wanting to be deliberate about what I keep, and what I discard, from this past year. A few of our portfolio founders sold me on the value of asynchronous video/voice messages and I've been integrating this into my toolbox, too. So rather than trying to write a long email or set up time for a call, I'll share thoughts in, for example, a Loom video. This is especially useful when working with Homebrew-backed founders during a fundraise process: reviewing their deck and doing a voiceover or talking through how I'd answer some of the questions they're likely to get from VCs.
What problem do you want to see a startup solve?
IMDb for products! I've got a long-held belief in the power of teams, and it's frustrating to not be able to look at my favorite tech companies and see the "credits": Who were the teams that built these awesome products and what were people's roles? Media and gaming do this really well, and it saddens me that we haven't broadly adopted similar standards for celebrating the teams, not just the executives. It's also, in my opinion, one of the backdoor ways to compete with LinkedIn, which is oriented around individuals and their own role narratives.
What's one of the worst predictions you've ever made?
Biz, despite being one of the earlier creators/participants of a virtual currency (Linden Dollars in Second Life, the startup I was at before I joined Google), I totally misjudged Bitcoin. It was interesting to me, but I thought something like Facebook Credits was going to break through in a big way.
DevOps and the Alternative Cloud provides insight into the capabilities and priorities developers expect from cloud infrastructure providers. In a market where hyperscalers dominate, a small band of alternative cloud providers — which includes DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Linode, and OVHcloud — is having an outsized impact.
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