SPMB is the #1 executive search firm serving the technology market, recruiting C-Level Executives and Board Members across industry sectors.

“At SPMB, we grew up in the technology ecosystem where the name of the game was aggressively and consistently pushing the envelope, changing the way that businesses and consumers interact with the world.”

SPMB is one of the top executive search firms in the US, specializing in recruiting C-Level executives and board members to disruptive, growth-oriented startups as well as Fortune 500 companies across technology, media, consumer, financial, health, and renewable industries.

The Silicon Review reached out to one of SPMB’s Managing Partners, Mike Doonan, and here’s what he had to say.

Interview Highlights

Q. When it comes to longevity, SPMB has it. It’s unique that an organization has what it takes to continue to offer services for 45 years. How did your company evolve and continue to adapt?  

We model ourselves after our longtime client base — technology companies that consistently innovate or they die. It’s an ongoing flywheel; our clients innovate on behalf of their customers and we innovate on behalf of our clients. And we’ve been doing this successfully for 45 years. SPMB has worked alongside clients through tech booms and busts, market peaks and troughs, and rapid digital transformation. We have had the good fortune of partnering with some of the world’s most transformational companies and investors to build strong leadership teams and lasting client relationships — and, remarkably, some of our earliest clients remain clients today.

At SPMB, we grew up in the technology ecosystem where the name of the game was aggressively and consistently pushing the envelope, changing the way that businesses and consumers interact with the world. The entire ethos of our community is to challenge the status quo. We take this role seriously; in fact, we could not survive in such an environment if we did not have the same mentality as our clients. We are consistently sharpening our craft, and adding new research tools, technologies, and methodologies while hiring the best talent to match our clients’ needs.  

Looking back, the first 30 years of our existence were focused on building out pre-IPO, venture-backed technology companies. But over time, this evolved quite organically. In fact, we were originally pulled into the public company market by a former CHRO client we had previously worked with. She had since moved into a public company and had just taken over a search from a SHREK firm that had been languishing for 18 months. She asked us to take over the project, explaining that SPMB would never allow a search to take such a course. She argued that, when you grow up and operate at the breakneck pace and in the boiler room ecosystem of venture capital search and Silicon Valley as SPMB did, “failure is not an option.” We closed that search in 50 days — and the cadence and caliber of work we do with public companies took off from there.

So while we are still the go-to firm for the venture and private equity communities, having built the teams at one-third of the companies that have IPO’d since 2018, we now count Disney, Google, Baker Hughs, Viking Cruises, Hyatt, Comcast, Morningstar, Capital One and many others as longtime clients — an evolution that we’re really proud of.  

Q. What strategies did SPMB implement to build a culture of trust and communication? And how did this culture impact the company’s relationship with clients over the years?

We are now considered a search firm of significant scale and that came by intentionally building the firm brick-by-brick over decades. I was employee number seven in 2004 and it took us close to two decades to get over 100 colleagues. Many of our peers add 100 people a quarter. We have taken a more measured approach to make sure that we never deviate from our foundational promises to both our clients and our colleagues:

1. Constantly innovate on behalf of our clients.
2. Stick to our core values and culture.
3. Continue to build a cross-company platform that fosters creativity and growth, and enables our colleagues to build their careers at the firm and pursue what excites them.

We have had several opportunities present themselves over the years that would take the company down a path of higher growth or profitability. In each instance, we always came back to the same three questions, (1) will our clients benefit? (2) does it put our core values and culture at risk? and (3) will it create opportunities for our colleagues? If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’ or even in question, we would not pursue it.

Because we have made these hard decisions as a company time and time again, our employees understand that we are not willing to deviate from our mission — and because of this, they tend to stick with us through the good and the bad, and oftentimes for decades. The frothiness of the market over the last three years has really put this corporate framework to the test. Our employees likely could have chosen different paths and potentially more money in the short term, but they stuck with us and chose to play the long game; this speaks to the maturity of our team. And this ‘long game’ approach also plays out in the way that we engage with our clients. This is the flywheel we worked so hard to create and maintain.

Our team brings this mentality into every engagement we have with our clients — and it’s served us well. Many of our clients have worked with us for decades, sometimes from initial funding, through IPO, later to be taken private and then public again. They appreciate the aggressive yet consistent hand that we use in any project we approach — we treat each search as if it’s our last. We grow with them over time, often recruiting 20+ senior executives to a single company throughout several growth and innovation cycles. 

Q. You mentioned, “Treating every search as if it’s your last”. Why?

Often, our channel to market is through the investor community. A venture or private equity investor puts money into a company and takes a board seat. That investor recommends us to the management team to execute a search for a specific role. The roles we work on with them are so critical that if we screw up once, it is well known within not only the company but the company’s investors. And because that investment firm partners with many other investors and companies, our name can become mud very quickly if we are not successful. So we build that client trust brick-by-brick and search-by-search, which keeps us from becoming complacent and lazy. This mentality of believing that, as recruiters, we are only as good as our last search motivates us and benefits our clients.

Q. How does SPMB help startups achieve scale and help companies at scale continuously innovate?

Our firm sits at a very unique place in the market—at the intersection of scale and innovation. Our early-stage growth clients seek scale. Our large incumbent clients seek innovation.

Large search firms give their clients’ exposure to executives at large companies. Boutique search firms give their clients access to start-up talent. Given our unique positioning over the past 45 years, we not only offer our clients the best of both of these worlds, but we are also uniquely able to give clients exposure to a third candidate community that sits at the intersection of these two ecosystems. Those are the individuals that we find create the most value for our clients.

Q. What makes SPMB the number one tech-focused executive search firm in the United States?

It may seem trite but it is our people. We have a system by which, if we as senior leaders at our firm find ourselves with an unexpected free hour in the day, we go through a very specific list. It looks something like this:

1. Is there anything more we can be doing to develop our people?
2. Are our search projects on a path to success?
3. What does our business development pipeline look like?

If #1 is in order, we move to #2 and so on. The theory goes something like this — if we are continually investing in programs to develop our people, then our clients and search projects will be well taken care of by our team. Further, if our searches are going well and our clients are happy, then those clients will continue coming back to us and we never actually have to do #3, outbound marketing and business development. And that is how it has played out over the past four decades; in fact, 95% of our business every year is through referral, which is a great proof statement to us that we continue to do our job well and support our clients throughout their ongoing growth and innovation cycles.

Q. Can you provide us with one or two success stories describing the challenges your clients faced and how your solutions helped them solve those challenges?

In late 2021, we were asked by Disney to recruit a new Global Chief Technology Officer for Disney Streaming. We had executed on close to 20 executive searches for the organization since its inception, and as the company had blown through every goal put in front of it, overtaking long-time incumbent Netflix in the process, they sought a new CTO that could take Disney Streaming to the next level.

Given the global scale of the organization and technical complexities of the product, you could count on two hands how many individuals, globally, were actually qualified to take on such a role. Given this reality, the normal long-list, short-list approach employed by much of the search industry was not going to get us to the right answer, at least not on the timeline required by the company. 

This is where our roots in research and technology, along with our decades-long network and relationships enabled our success. Over 30% of our employee base is currently and exclusively focused on deep market research, and most of our senior partners came up the research ranks, including all four Managing Partners — Kevin Barry, Eamonn Tucker, Dave Mullarkey, and myself. 

We were able to very quickly map out the market of relevant talent and get in front of every single person around the globe qualified to do this role. However, our “spidey” sense told us there was one hole in our research and it really bothered us.

As you would expect, we engaged technical executives from all of the major consumer technology, media, and streaming platforms, with YouTube being one of our most critical target companies. We were able to map out every evolution of the YouTube engineering organization from the time of acquisition in 2006. However, we felt there was one piece missing and we could not figure it out using our third-party or proprietary tools — and it was driving us nuts. We, therefore, leaned into our network of relationships, who could shed light on the organization. As an aside, we have been told time and again that not only do we take care of our clients but that we consistently and intentionally give back to the candidate community (which is an anomaly in our business) and because of this, that community helps us when we need it. We spoke to dozens of firm friendlies who were able to help us connect the final, hidden, pieces of the puzzle. In the end, our spidey sense was correct. There was, in fact, one missing piece and we were able to triangulate on this individual. He had been the original head of engineering at YouTube and given the nature of his work at the time of our search, had essentially zero online presence.   

This candidate hadn’t taken a recruiting call in nearly a decade and was in the process of embarking on a new role within his current company. He was not looking for a new job and was, in fact, intentional about flying under the radar, which included dodging recruiters. Without our commitment to an intensive research process, our loyal network, and our “failure is not an option” mentality, we never would have found and ultimately placed him, providing the best solution for our client. And that’s precisely our charter — to bring in executives that can scale our clients’ businesses to complement and capitalize on their ongoing innovation.

Mike Doonan | Managing Partner

Mike Doonan leads the firm’s Digital Transformation and Data practice and has successfully executed over 350 C-Level and VP searches across all market verticals. Over the past two decades, he has earned a reputation as a strategic partner and leadership architect, helping his clients build executive teams that bridge the gap between innovation and scale. Mike enables innovative pure-play technology to achieve scale by recruiting senior leaders that have been through large, complex growth scenarios. He also works closely with large incumbents to evolve their technology, IT, product, data, security, and digital capabilities.

“We are now considered a search firm of significant scale and that came by intentionally building the firm brick-by-brick over decades.”