Trove is a disruptor company, and like every disruptor, we started from zero. In the early days you're solving two problems at the same time: building something people need, and making sure anyone knows you exist.
I knew early on our team would benefit from a different kind of opinion in the room based on our skillsets. We cared about the problem personally, but we needed people who deeply understand careers at a larger scale. Most often that's people leaders. They're practitioners inside real organizations. They see, nurture, and assess tens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of careers a year, on top of managing their own.
So I set out to build a small group of advisors whose opinions we actually wanted.
The board isn't complicated. We have five stellar people leaders with two jobs to be done: shape the product from the user side, and help us tell the story when we go to market.
To build this board, we took a highly targeted approach. My team and I built a curated list of people we admired in the space, then pursued a mix of referrals, warm networking, and cold outreach to open conversations with potential fits. Rather than rushing to sign people up, we had in-depth conversations to assess whether our working styles and their bandwidth aligned with what we needed. We were explicit that we wanted advisors in it for the long haul, not just a logo on our website.
The fantastic people who will be building alongside us:
- Mike Gutner: Chief People Officer, Toast. Former astrophysicist, nine years at Google.
- Tessa White: Founder, The Job Doctor. Author of "The Unspoken Truths for Career Success." Former Fortune 50 HR exec.
- Claude Silver: Chief Heart Officer, VaynerX. The world's first Chief Heart Officer. Author of "Be Yourself at Work."
- Sharon Pollard VP, Head of People & Culture, CloudZero. AI systems builder and organizational psychologist.
- Andrew Stockwell: People leader, formerly Vendr. 20+ years scaling teams, including ZoomInfo.
