Bragging

As a general matter I try not to use this blog as a megaphone for shameless promotion of my portfolio companies and/or my firm. And, at least when I do I try to remember to admit as much up front. So consider this such an admission, and apologies in advance.

At Polaris, portfolio recruiting is not just a “value add,” it is a central foundation of how we operate.  In addition to being what the investing partners spend a good deal of our time working on, we actually have a team of four full time folks focused 100% on portfolio recruiting.  This includes not just helping portfolio companies with candidate referrals, and helping them manage outside recruiters — our guys (actually, 3 of them are gals!) spend most of their time doing full fledged searches for our portfolio companies, with at least as much rigor as an outside recruiter.

It just came to my attention that over the last few years our search team has successfully placed 143 senior executives in our companies. Here is the distribution:

8 Board Members
13 Chief Executive Officers
5 Presidents/Chief Operating Officers
11 Chief Financial Officers
4 Chief Scientific Officers/Vice Presidents R&D
12 Vice Presidents, Engineering
19 Vice Presidents, Marketing
10 Vice Presidents, Business Development/Sales
2 Vice Presidents, Content/Programming
4 Vice Presidents, Professional Services
55 Additional Vice Presidents and Director Level Professionals across all functions

Congrats, and thanks, to Peter, Lindsay, Joanna and Barbara for a great job well done!