Beacon Talent partners with growth-stage founders across the VC/PE ecosystem on tech leadership search. We built and ran their entire outbound + nurture function for a full year. These are the actual numbers.
Beacon Talent was founded in 2018 by David Berk and Juney Ham. David's background includes building a search practice on Wall Street, launching his first agency in 2009 (eventually acquired by Hired.com), and scaling GTM teams at Hired.com, Harri.com, and Porch.com.
Beacon isn't a generic exec search firm. They partner with growth-stage founders across the VC/PE ecosystem on the tech leadership hires that matter most. CTOs, VPs of Engineering, Heads of Product, technical operators who can build and scale a team from zero to dozens.
Beacon's reputation in the VC/PE ecosystem was excellent. But like a lot of strong delivery firms, their BD was patchwork, referrals, founder LinkedIn, and a failed retainer agency that produced nothing usable.
David and Juney both have strong personal brands in the tech community. But manual outreach scales poorly when you're also running searches and managing the firm. Conversion was inconsistent, time spent was high.
Sporadic email campaigns sent from the main beacontalent.io domain. No warm-up, no segmentation by hiring signal. Domain reputation was at risk and replies stayed in single digits.
~$4K/month for 90 days. Generic templates not built for executive recruiting. Meetings booked were mostly with junior HR teams, not the founders Beacon needed to reach.
Years of vetted tech leadership candidates sitting in their ATS. CTOs, VPs Engineering, Heads of Product. The bench was the asset. Their outbound never used it. Every campaign led with "we're a recruiting firm", generic, ignorable.
We treated Beacon's candidate database as the strategic asset. Each top tech leadership MPC became the spearhead of a campaign, matched to founders showing real, live tech hiring intent.
Pulled their full tech leadership database. Identified the strongest MPCs across CTOs, VPs of Engineering, Heads of Product, engineering managers. Built marketing-ready profile cards anchored on scaling experience and shipping history.
VC/PE-backed growth-stage companies showing live tech hiring intent: fresh Series A-C funding, new CTO hires (they need their VP Engineering next), engineering org expansion, leadership churn at the director-plus level.
Set up dedicated sending domains (not Beacon's main). Custom human + AI workflow generated copy in David's voice, anchored to the specific MPC + the specific tech hiring signal. Email + LinkedIn in parallel. Founders only, never procurement.
Qualified replies routed straight to David with the relevant MPC pre-loaded. He took the meeting. He signed the fee agreement. We shared in the placement fees that closed.
Lead gen agencies stop at the meeting booking. We didn't. Beacon's founders are busy running searches and managing the firm, so we built an entire nurture function on top of the outbound, the kind of work an in-house BD team would do, but for a fraction of the cost.
For every prospect Beacon was about to meet, we delivered a pre-built talent map. Who's hireable in their market, what compensation looks like, who's likely to move. David walked into every call already credentialed.
Live comp data on the exact role each prospect was hiring for. Sent before the call. Founders use this to calibrate their offers, and they remember who handed it to them.
Founders who showed interest but didn't sign on round one. We kept them warm. New MPC profile drops. New funding triggers. New search signals. Plenty of Beacon's signed agreements came from prospects we re-touched 60-120 days later.
VC-backed founders ignore most outreach because they're heads-down on shipping. Our cadence is built around that, multi-touch, multi-month, multi-channel, with the kind of pause/resume logic that respects when a founder is in deep work versus open to talk.
7 placements closed in 12 months, ~$200K in fees collected. Below are 4 of them, the other 3 are CTO and VP Engineering roles at growth-stage SaaS companies under NDA.
"We tried doing this ourselves. We tried an agency. Neither produced anything. Montazzo built a system on top of our bench and the meetings just started showing up. The pipeline they've created is the most consistent BD asset we've had. We've been working together for over a year now, they understand our space."
VC/PE-backed founders don't respond to "we place tech talent." They respond to "we have a VP Engineering who built and scaled a Series B SaaS team from 12 to 50 engineers, and we noticed you just raised your B and hired your new CTO." Specificity is the entire game.
Combine that with a real signal, fresh funding, new CTO, engineering org expansion, and reply rates are an order of magnitude higher than generic agency outbound. Beacon's bench was always great. We just made it the centerpiece.
Non-overlapping engagements: we keep our roster small and intentionally pick clients that don't compete with each other. Beacon's tech leadership focus doesn't overlap with anyone else we work with. That's how the partnership compounds over a year-plus.
15-minute fit call. Tailored proposal in writing within 24 hours.