We help elite startups hire exceptional people.

Most hiring fails because signal is misread.

Pedigree is over-weighted.
Raw ability is under-measured.
Slope is misunderstood.

We partner with a small number of venture-backed startups to underwrite judgment where it matters most.

If you’re considering working together, you can reach us here.

What we believe

Across companies, roles, and markets, the same pattern repeats.

The people who change outcomes:

These traits are hard to screen for and easy to miss.

We build our work around finding them.

Recent work includes:
Cursor (a16z) · Hedra (a16z) · Black Forest Labs (a16z, BCV) · Luma AI (a16z) · Graphite (a16z) · ‍Decagon (a16z, Accel) · Finch Legal (Sequoia) · Salient (a16z) · Rillet (a16z, Sequoia) · Vercel (Accel) · Endex (OpenAI) · Charta Health (BCV)

The work itself is reflected most clearly in the people.

Representative outcomes

We focus on people whose impact compounds after the hire.

See more outcomes →

How we work

We start with a kickoff with the people who know the bar best. “Great” looks different company to company, and a job description rarely captures the nuance.

We send fewer candidates, with more context — and we get sharper as we calibrate.

We rely on tight feedback loops. “yes/no” isn’t enough; a sentence of why is often the difference between missing and hitting.

We stay close to the candidate experience and flag when conviction is getting lost.

Operationally, we keep it simple: your ATS + a shared Slack channel.

This works best with responsive teams and candid feedback.
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Where this work applies

We’re most useful in roles where the downside of a miss is high and the upside of the right hire compounds.

In practice, we’re typically brought in for:

‍Engineering IC hiring
‍Engineers and technical ICs across fullstack, backend, infra, research, and more

‍GTM IC hiring
Early, high-ownership roles in sales, solutions/forward-deployed, partnerships, and marketing

‍Retained leadership search
Technical and GTM leaders: Head/VP Engineering, CTO, Head/VP Product, and GTM leadership.

Across all of these, the common thread is the same: we’re underwriting judgment when signal is sparse and the outcome matters.

A note from the founder

I didn’t set out to build a recruiting firm.

Before Candidate Labs, I started two venture-backed companies. Like most founders, I spent a disproportionate amount of time hiring — often under pressure, with incomplete signal, and real consequences attached to every decision.

Over time, patterns became hard to ignore.

The most reliable signal wasn’t pedigree or polish. It was trajectory.
Who took responsibility early.
Who learned faster than their environment.
Who other strong people trusted.

Recruiting became a byproduct of being in the trenches: building teams, watching them evolve, and seeing where judgment failed most often.

Candidate Labs was built to operate around that idea.

We work with a small number of teams, spend more time per hire, and accept that this costs us speed in the short term. That tradeoff is deliberate. It’s also the reason the work compounds.

— Michael Zhang

© 2026 Candidate Labs