Andrew Reid

Cutting Teeth Before the Tools Existed

His first job out of university was an internship at a search agency based, of all places, in Manhattan Beach. The work was what most people in the industry would recognize as the grind: high volume sourcing, in the 2015 and 2016 timeframe, when there were far fewer tools on the market and barely any AI anywhere in the recruiting landscape. The assignment was to move Big Four consultants between the Big Four, and the only real leverage available was good old LinkedIn Recruiter and the discipline to work it properly.

He parlayed that into a role at SPMB, the San Francisco executive search firm, where the work moved several altitudes up: VP and C-suite mandates, board advisors, and the kind of search that gets judged over years rather than weeks. His clients ranged from Series A companies to public ones. Some of them were the businesses being built in his own backyard, including Uber and Lyft before Uber and Lyft were household names, and he came in late to the growth journeys of Google and Facebook. It was an education in what happens when a single hire changes a company's trajectory, delivered at close range.

The Mentors Who Set the Standard

Ask Reid who shaped him and two names come quickly. The first is Andy Price, co-founder and former CEO of the executive search firm Artisanal Talent, widely regarded as one of the top firms in the market. Price had built talent functions at funds including Index and Redpoint before parlaying that work into something more unusual: a separate arm of his search firm that makes investments into clients, giving the team a first-hand view of how a company actually operates and who is at the helm. Diligence, as Reid puts it, is a good deal easier when you are inside looking out. Price was among the first to make that model work, and Reid credits him with a rare command of both recruiting and the broader venture ecosystem. "One of the strongest people that I've ever worked with," he says, adding that whether it came through osmosis or brutal effort, Price also invested seriously in the careers of the juniors around him.

The second is Nicole North, now leading the platform team at Lightspeed Ventures, who was Reid's first partner at SPMB. He credits most of what he has accomplished so far to the foundational skills she taught him: how to run a healthy, concise and professional search process, how to manage client relationships, how to handle stakeholders. The unglamorous fundamentals, in other words, that no model has yet replaced. She was, and in his estimation still is, one of the best.

Reading the Signal Through the Swirl

Reid's view of the current market is neither breathless nor dismissive. Whether you are an early stage startup or an enterprise that has been public for decades, AI is in the conversation, and that creates enormous noise. Plenty of organizations are over-indexing on what AI actually is and what it can do. Having been around long enough to watch other trends come and go, he believes this one is different and here to stay, while expecting some correction back toward normalcy along the way.

He is also alert to the part of the story that gets less airtime. Regulation and legislation continue to evolve, and recruiters, he argues, should be paying close attention. California and New York usually lead the charge, and Illinois has recently introduced some genuinely distinctive laws. Within those guardrails, though, he sees an unusually rich moment: content generation for job descriptions and interview questions, sourcing, qualifying candidates against open roles. Recent developments across the infrastructure layer, from OpenAI to Anthropic, have unlocked much of that potential, including API access to information and datasets that models can now surface at the drop of a hat.

The Prompt That Unlocked Everything

His advice to other talent leaders is deceptively simple, and it begins with naming the real obstacle. The market is moving fast, the tool landscape is crowded, and the questions pile up: who do you use, when, for what, how, and at what cost? For many, the result is analysis paralysis and a quiet decision to stick with what they know. Reid's encouragement is to reconsider that philosophy and go test things. Basic plans cost a fraction of what people assume, and the point of buying them is not immediate productivity but understanding: a foundation in what AI can do and, more importantly, what it cannot. That will keep evolving. Having the baseline is what breaks the paralysis.

Then comes the move he considers his single greatest unlock. When he set out to build his first talent platform, the very first prompt he gave Claude was an honest declaration that he was a beginner trying to figure it out. The model treated him accordingly, and kept doing so all the way to the end, telling him exactly where to click, which datasets to search, what things would cost. "You tell it you're a noob," he says, "it will treat you as such, but that means you get every single piece of information that you probably need to learn as you build." The model, in his framing, treats you as someone who will become an expert and takes every opportunity to teach along the way.

His working stack reflects hard-won preferences rather than brand loyalty. For quick one-off questions, habit still sends him to ChatGPT. For building, Claude Code and Anthropic's tooling have been winning the day of late. For deep infrastructure work, back ends and genuinely complex processes, Gemini tends to come out ahead.

Recruiters Who Became Technologists

Reid is quick to point to peers walking the same road, and the pattern he admires says a lot about where he thinks the profession is headed. There is Dylan Love, a former SPMB colleague who went on to Uber's executive search group, then Facebook, then four years at Lightspeed working alongside Nicole North, before spending roughly two years as head of talent science at Stone Agency, building the underlying technical infrastructure for one of the market's strongest search firms. He is now a GM working with Andrew Ng, incubating AI businesses. There is Jared, another SPMB alumnus recruited into Andreessen Horowitz, where he was one of the conceivers of Talent Place, the firm's internal talent marketplace and relationship management tool, and the mastermind behind the platform ever since.

What unites them, and what Reid himself embodies, is a refusal to treat recruiting and engineering as separate disciplines. His read on the AI incubation world captures the thesis neatly: talent matters as much as the technology, and the enduring question is how you get the right technologists in the room to build something that stands the test of time, generates real returns for the stakeholders involved, and manages to be fun along the way.