In this conversation, Peeyush Upadhyay, Managing Partner at Pekamiar, sits down with Beth Scheer, Head of Talent Intelligence at Theory Ventures.
Beth explains why founders overhire without realising it, and why that is the most expensive mistake she sees. What to tell a founder whose engineer has a million dollar offer from a frontier lab, and why a candidate interviewing at the big labs at the same time is usually window shopping. How she counsels founders who have been told by their board to hire a CRO when what they need is a founding AE.
She breaks down what a modern talent function at a fund actually does, from diligence through the first ninety days after a cheque is signed. She is candid about how she picks search firms, why she wants the partner making the calls rather than someone a year out of college, and why "no search firms, please" sits on her LinkedIn profile.
On what goes wrong, her answer is calibration. Almost every search that breaks, breaks in the same place, and it is rarely the search firm.
She also gets into what a fourteen person fund with five AI engineers changes about her job, how you measure a role that has no obvious metrics, synthetic resumes and candidates who turn out not to be real people, why she has always gone to work for people rather than companies, and what happens to leadership in five years when nobody is hiring juniors today.
This is the first episode in a new series on The Scaleup Flight, featuring the talent leaders inside VC funds. The people who watch hiring play out across an entire portfolio, and whose knowledge almost never gets written down anywhere.
================================================
CHAPTERS
================================================
00:00 Highlights
03:18 1997 to 2026, and what has not changed about hiring
04:53 When a frontier lab offers your engineer a million dollars
06:39 Fourteen people, five AI engineers, one talent team
12:49 "I'm a talent therapist"
14:42 The three pillars of a modern talent function
18:49 The first ninety days after the cheque is signed
22:28 "No search firms, please"
26:27 Why searches break. Calibration, calibration, calibration.
31:45 How do you measure a job with no metrics
35:08 Where inflection hires actually fall apart
38:08 The number one executive hiring mistake
41:41 Comp plans, and the discomfort filter
44:49 Nobody is hiring juniors. So who leads in five years?
45:54 How founders should vet a VC on talent
================================================
LINKS
================================================
Follow The Scaleup Flight on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/thescaleupflight
Follow The Scaleup Flight on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/thescaleupflightpodcast
Follow Beth Scheer on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethscheer/
Follow Peeyush Upadhyay on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/peeyushupadhyay/
","author_name":"Peeyush Upadhyay"}