Jonathan Downey is an experienced technology entrepreneur, CEO, and investor, having founded two companies and invested in more than 50 startups, including 3 worth more than $1B.
A YC-Combinator alum, Jonathan was named USA Today's "Small-Business Innovator of the Year" and MIT Tech Review's "35 Innovators Under 35”. He has built out high-performing teams across hardware and software engineering, cloud services, recruiting, machine learning, and enterprise sales.
Over his career he has raised over $100M from Tier-1 investors, including A16Z, KPCB, Signalfire, and First Round Capital, and has secured six and seven-figure enterprise engagements with Fortune 500 enterprises including State Farm and Caterpillar.
He is an instrument-rated commercial multi-engine pilot and worked at Boeing as an engineer contributing to the development and flight testing of the A160T Hummingbird, a 6,500 lb fully-autonomous helicopter, which broke the world record for longest helicopter flight.
Jonathan remains an avid pilot and recently flew a small plane across the United States, visiting 14 cities in 14 days. He lives in San Mateo with his wife and goldendoodle puppy named Mochi.
Michael Zhang is a second-time founder and experienced startup operator with a background in highly-operationalized, technology-enabled business.
Michael started his career in the startup world as an early employee of Recyclebank, a KPCB-backed cleantech startup building a gamified rewards platform for environmentally friendly actions.
In 2011, he co-founded Trumaker, a technology-enabled menswear brand focused on built-to-fit clothing. Over the course of eight years, Michael helped Trumaker hire over 4,000 sales reps as stylists, operationalizing numerous systems along the way and introducing technology leverage into a highly-manual legacy industry. Trumaker scaled from a seed-stage company to Series B and was then acquired in 2018.
In his free time, Michael is learning the art of being a new dad to his son Milo and loves to explore his hometown of New York City.
Ryan has over a decade of experience building high-caliber engineering teams and establishing team cultures oriented around personal growth. As the CTO of Candidate Labs, he is responsible for scaling the engineering team and building the technology to supercharge recruiters.
Ryan moved to San Francisco in 2011 with the life-long dream of working at a venture-backed startup. He started as the technical lead at BandPage, a music tech company that powered artists' presence on social media. Ryan was promoted to Director of Engineering responsible for the frontend and backend engineering and built the application serving 32 million monthly active users.
Ryan carved out a speciality in Node.js where he found his way to NodeSource, the industry’s premiere Node.js company. As a principal consultant, Ryan gave architectural evaluations and high-performance training to Fortune 500 companies aiming to level up their adoption and best practices of the technology. Just prior to co-founding Candidate Labs, Ryan led an engineering organization that implemented the first experimentation platform, raised loan origination, and ultimately ushered in a quant-driven software development process.
Ryan enjoys spending time with his family where most recently he and his daughter have been getting more serious at playing chess.
Jim has decades of experience building and leading product, design, engineering, and operations teams at multi-sided marketplace and network/ecosystems businesses. He has helped scale and operate digital-native organizations across all company stages, from early, seed-funded ventures like Candidate Labs to large, public companies like Google/YouTube. His products and teams have been acquired by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!
Jim enjoys teaching and mentoring founders and product leaders. Outside of work, he is an avid trekker and alpine mountaineer who has scaled many of the largest peaks in the world. In his spare time, he maintains a hardcore meditation practice.
Kendra Morales has completed over 400 executive searches for venture-backed technology companies in her 23 years of executive search experience. At Candidate Labs, she oversees our client services organization.
Kendra launched her career at Hobson Associates in 1999 where she was Rookie of the Year and the youngest person ever promoted to Partner and then Senior Partner. She later joined The Millard Group where she was promoted to Associate Partner 15 months after joining and broke her own record six times for the largest fee closed in company history.
Most recently, Kendra came to Candidate Labs from Betts Recruiting, where she was hired to build out continuous training and development programs, create segment playbooks, and facilitating the overall Betts go-to-market strategy.
Kendra actively serves her community and, in 2013, founded a 501(c)3 non-profit organization For Goodness Sake which is a furniture bank in Central CT that has helped over 2,500 families coming out of homelessness/crisis get back on their feet. She also teaches yoga and meditation at a local prison.
Kendra graduated from Kent State University in 1999.
Kendra Morales has completed over 400 executive searches for venture-backed technology companies in her 23 years of executive search experience. At Candidate Labs, she oversees our client services organization.
Kendra launched her career at Hobson Associates in 1999 where she was Rookie of the Year and the youngest person ever promoted to Partner and then Senior Partner. She later joined The Millard Group where she was promoted to Associate Partner 15 months after joining and broke her own record six times for the largest fee closed in company history.
Most recently, Kendra came to Candidate Labs from Betts Recruiting, where she was hired to build out continuous training and development programs, create segment playbooks, and facilitating the overall Betts go-to-market strategy.
Kendra actively serves her community and, in 2013, founded a 501(c)3 non-profit organization For Goodness Sake which is a furniture bank in Central CT that has helped over 2,500 families coming out of homelessness/crisis get back on their feet. She also teaches yoga and meditation at a local prison.
Kendra graduated from Kent State University in 1999.
Jaycie Moller is an experienced GTM recruiter who has completed key hires for some of the most well known startups in Silicon Valley. She has worked across a variety of functions including Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Operations. Jaycie joined Candidate Labs as one of the first recruiters and first female in the company. As a Client Partner, her focus at Candidate Labs is to help top startups make their critical “first of” hires.
She has completed searches for high-growth startups including SurveyMonkey, Bill.com, Vonage, Lever, ADP, Pilot.com, Rippling, Deel, Airbase, and OneSignal. While Jaycie started her career in technical recruiting, she quickly realized that she was most passionate about the GTM side of the business. Before Candidate Labs, Jaycie spent 3 years at TheLions, a boutique GTM recruiting firm in San Francisco. There, Jaycie quickly became the #1 producer, was promoted to a leadership role, and completed over 60 searches for both private and post-IPO companies.
Jaycie grew up in Los Angeles and attended the University of San Francisco where she graduated with a BA in Psychology. She was an active member of the Psychology Honors program and spent her senior year researching ADHD in elementary-aged students. Jaycie also worked as a stylist at Stitch Fix during college which was her first taste of the power of a tech-enabled services model - one of the many reasons she was excited about the technology at Candidate Labs. Today, Jaycie lives in San Francisco where you can find her hiking with her GSP (Frankie), figure skating, cooking, and wine tasting in Napa in her free time.
Liam Naughton is an experienced search professional who has completed C-level and VP searches for some of the highest profile companies in the technology world today. He has worked across a variety of functions with expertise in sales, marketing, technology, and finance. He joined Candidate Labs in October of 2020 to continue to expand their executive search practice while providing top notch service to their prestigious clients.
Before joining Candidate Labs, Liam spent several years with top tier boutique search firm Daversa Partners. While at Daversa, Liam completed C-level and VP searches for public and private companies in the technology space, and quickly rose through the ranks to senior associate. Based in the New York and Connecticut offices, Liam’s work expanded across the country with placements based in LA, SF, NYC, Boston, and other geographies.
Liam is based in Manhattan and grew up in Darien, Connecticut. While New York is his home today, he finds any and all excuses to go back to Vermont and spend weekends hiking in the Green Mountains. Liam is passionate about youth sports and athletics, and has helped coach multiple YMCA and travel sports organizations. While he played basketball in college, today you’re more likely to find Liam on the golf course rather than the court.
Liam graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont with a degree in history and minors in political science and religious studies.
Over the past decade, Stacey Gabriel has cultivated a broad understanding of the inner workings of multiple industries, from Napa Valley luxury wine, to bespoke fashion, to clinical healthcare settings.
Starting her journey straight out of UC Davis in the Marketing and Communications industry, Stacey found purpose in optimizing intra-business workflows and facilitating environments where all can succeed. Combining her experience in professional writing and communication with an inherent capacity for empathy, Stacey excels in strategizing business efficiency around the strengths of her leaders and peers.
In her free time, she challenges her physical limitations as a rock climber, and finds joy in exploring her identity as a Filipina-American through cooking.
Danielle Wood has over 10 years of experience in Business Development, much of which has been spent at early-stage companies. At Candidate Labs, she is focused on cultivating both new client relationships and deepening our existing relationships with our base of high-growth clients.
Danielle graduated with a B.S. in Advertising from top-ranked Moody College of Communication in 2011. Her transition into the high-tech space was driven by her move to Impulse LLC, a Network Security company, where she received the award for Top Revenue Sold Annually as a National Account Manager. During her near 5-year tenure at Impulse, she was responsible for building out the CS function for over 200 customers, which included wide-scale customer education and identification of usage gaps in the software to increase ACV through client expansion.
Danielle later moved into an Account Executive role at PeopleGrove, a mission-driven software company focused on providing scalable mentorship solutions to underprivileged students. Within 6 months, she was solely responsible for owning business acquisition for the Southeastern US. Most recently, Danielle came to Candidate Labs from Betts Recruiting, where she was hired to grow new business in both the software and services segment for the Eastern US.
Danielle currently lives in Dallas, TX with her pup. You can find her paddle boarding, bike riding, and enjoying the Texas sunshine.
Bassam Aoun has more than 12 years of experience solving machine learning problems across various industries. At Candidate Labs, his algorithms power job matching, creation of knowledge graphs, and process automation.
His strong background in mathematics makes his expertise domain-agnostic. At AIMCO, his statistical models ran the risk management of $20 billion in assets while his trading strategies had $7 billion in assets under management. At Sizmek, the world's largest independent ad serving company at the time, his AI algorithms powered real-time ad targeting across web, mobile, video and social channels.
Bassam got his PhD in Mathematics and a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in Canada. He is the recipient of various academic awards, and his publications have more than 500 references, ranging from graph algorithms to hedge fund arbitrage strategies to quantum mechanics.
Outside of work Bassam likes to travel across Asia and run renovation projects.
Michael Donahue joined Candidate Labs as its Founding Software Engineer and first employee and has since worn many hats including engineering, design, and product management. He has recently become our first Product Manager as we substantially grow the breadth of our technology offering.
Michael started his career with FactSet in Customer Success and then moved to California to start his career in Software Engineering. He worked at LendingClub as an Associate Software Engineer where he grew into a Senior Software Engineer.
At LendingClub, he was a part of an Engineering “Tiger” team responsible for tackling high-profile projects, which led to him becoming part of the Personal Loans and Platform Engineering team.
Michael drove substantial A/B testing, improving conversion rates by as much as 5% per test, which ultimately led to an additional $200M in loan originations through the borrower funnel, amounting to $35M of additional bottom line in revenue per quarter.
Michael created “Propulsion”, LendingClub’s Design System from scratch and eventually led a team of engineers and designers responsible for growing and maintaining the project, which is still being used today.
Michael enjoys snowboarding and travelling, which allows him to explore and experience different cultures.
Josh is an experienced product engineer who cut his teeth on early stage startups. He previously worked under Candidate Labs CTO Ryan Stevens at BandPage, where together they routinely pushed the boundaries of UI engineering into uncharted territory. After BandPage was acquired by Google, he spent the next few years at YouTube solving UX challenges at scale for the Music and and Premium teams.
Grant Hulegaard is a seasoned software engineer with a breadth of experience throughout the software development lifecycle. At Candidate Labs, he is chiefly responsible for architecting and scaling our data platform, working closely with our CTO, Ryan.
Grant was the first US software engineer at NGINX (later acquired by F5 Networks) and the second backend developer on the NGINX Amplify project. He helped build and scale it into a monitoring and analytics platform ingesting data from NGINX+ and OSS installations alike, tackling challenges scaling big data in a SaaS environment with strict SLA requirements.
Prior to Candidate Labs, Grant was a senior engineer on the platform team at United Masters where he built out the next generation of the UM platform to help empower artists to publish music without labels. This included the occasional moonlighting as a data engineer - helping the data science team scale their PostgreSQL database.
When not enabling novel data-driven solutions, he enjoys unplugging in the great outdoors. He has combined his passion for the outdoors with a desire to give back to his community by serving as a volunteer Ski Patroller for the National Ski Patrol.
Brian Kennedy oversees cross-functional engineering projects at Candidate Labs. His team focuses on delivering quality software at a rapid pace.
Before Candidate Labs, Brian worked at Future, a KPCB-backed startup, where he was responsible for building a bespoke customer-facing web experience, as well as optimizing customer acquisition from first impressions, all the way to signing up. He was at Future from the beginning of their Series A through a successful $24M Series B.
Brian graduated from the American University in Paris, majoring in both Computer Science and Comparative Literature. He also holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris, France.
Kennedy also writes, produces, and performs in various theatre productions around the Bay Area.
Nathan is a passionate software engineer skilled in building web experiences for organizations ranging from three-person startups to publicly traded companies. Nathan works closely with the product and engineering team to build web applications that empower Candidate Labs search professionals to deliver a world-class experience to our clients.
Before joining Candidate Labs, Nathan started his career splitting time between a small web development agency and a charitable Austin, Texas-based startup. After gaining valuable early experience, Nathan moved to San Francisco and worked for Lending Club and Plastiq prior to joining Candidate Labs late in the spring of 2021.
When not behind the keyboard, Nathan loves doing anything outside, be it hiking with his dog Otis, backpacking in Colorado, or playing golf.
Xiaolei Zhu has been writing computer programs to tackle some of the world's most data-intensive problems for 15 years. At Candidate Labs, he is responsible for data pipelines, transforming raw data into valuable information and serving it to recruiters.
Xiaolei received his Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry from Johns Hopkins University, where he developed methods to create models that accurately predict the quantum mechanical behavior of molecular systems, which are used to research energetic materials, explosives, and the interaction of materials with lasers.
He later moved to Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where he developed programs to utilize one of the world's largest GPU supercomputers to perform large-scale computations. He was responsible for computations in a number of breakthrough scientific projects, such as capturing a molecule switching quantum state in a chemical reaction on tape for the first time and engineering carbon negative plastics. Many of these were published in the world's most prestigious scientific journals.
Most recently, Xiaolei joined Candidate Labs as a Data Engineer, where he created and managed a network of data pipelines that bridges the front and backend engineering efforts to deliver our unique data product to the recruiting team. He is also responsible for productionalizing machine learning models.
In his spare time, he enjoys playing a variety of sports with friends and family, exploring the wilderness and traveling the world, preferably with some good chocolate in his pockets.
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