Building a Premier Talent Pipeline: Meet Kandace Elam, Our New Director of GTM Talent
Attracting and retaining great talent is mission-critical to a startup’s success, and the stakes have grown higher in today’s competitive market. At Menlo, we work closely with our portfolio companies to help them win the war for talent, partnering with founders to strategically plan for growth across every function of the business, and maintaining a deep network of qualified leaders across key functions. While recruiting great technical talent and engineers has always been a focal point, placing go-to-market experts in sales and marketing roles is increasingly competitive. At Menlo, we’ve seen a noticeable spike in the demand for GTM talent—75% of the open roles we helped fill in the past year required sales or marketing expertise.
With that in mind, we’re expanding our talent team. I’m thrilled to announce that Kandace Elam has joined the firm as Director of GTM Talent. Her focus will be to cultivate relationships with top sales and marketing executives across Menlo’s focus areas, concentrating on SaaS, infrastructure, and cybersecurity. Leaders in these areas should make sure to connect with her on LinkedIn and follow her at @Y2Kandace.
Kandace comes to Menlo with deep experience in go-to-market recruitment and has already placed top executives at several of our most prominent portfolio companies, including Poshmark (NASDAQ: POSH) and Benchling. Prior to Menlo, Kandace spent the past decade as an executive recruiter at Daversa Partners, building management teams for venture-backed startups, growth equity deals, and public companies. Most recently, she was Head of Talent Network for Dreamscape, a division she helped build within Daversa to create more Black representation at the board and executive levels of tech companies. This experience will be critical as she helps founders build out their boards with an eye toward diversity.