After 15 years of building teams at hyper-growth companies, I kept seeing the same problem: Exceptional startups failing because they couldn’t find the right executives fast enough.
Traditional search firms didn’t get it. They’d never operated in startups. They didn’t understand why a Series A VP Engineering needs to be fundamentally different from a Series D hire. They couldn’t move at startup speed.
In 2021, after helping SWORD Health scale from 50 to 500 people, I realized the best executive recruiters should be people who’ve actually been executives. Who’ve made the great hires. Who’ve made the mistakes. Who know what excellent looks like because they’ve built it.
So I left my cushy Head of Talent role and started Plenty from my apartment. No office. No clients. Just a belief that startups deserved a different approach to executive search.
Four years later, we’ve placed 200+ executives, maintained a 4.95/5 client satisfaction score, and become the go-to firm for YC, a16z, and Sequoia’s most promising portfolio companies.
But the thing I’m most proud of is that we’ve stayed small, stayed focused, and stayed true to our promise. Every client gets our full attention. Every search gets our A-team. Every placement is someone we’d hire ourselves.
That’s why we call it Plenty—because exceptional talent isn’t scarce when you know where to look and how to move.
Thach (Tak) Nguyen
Founder & Managing Partner
