Talent Watch

Tracking top talent moves & fundraising announcements. DM us leads!

side project by @katiekirsch @eriktorenberg @samkkaufman

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

@bradzacher @canva @cursor_ai let's go

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

@sunrao @grok @bot @a16z @poteto @clairevo @stuffyokodraws 👀

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

@arorasar6 @OpenAI 🫡

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

@msieb1 👀

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

SIGNED: Anil Chakravarthy is becoming President & CEO of Adobe.

Currently, Anil is President of Adobe's Customer Experience Orchestration business and worldwide field operations. He succeeds Shantanu Narayen, who's been CEO since 2007.

@achakravarthy12

[Katie Kirsch @katiekirsch]

Never a dull day in tech news! @Adobe is about to get a new President & CEO.

@achakravarthy12 is stepping into the role on Dec 1, succeeding Shantanu Narayen who's been CEO since 2007 (!) - one of the longest tenures of any major tech CEO.

Anil joined Adobe in Jan 2020 - and currently serves as President of Adobe's Customer Experience Orchestration business and worldwide field operations.

Under his leadership, Adobe developed CX Enterprise, GenStudio, and Brand Visibility. Anil also led the acquisitions and integration of Workfront and Semrush.

cc @talent_watching

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

@covacut @OpenAI let's go!

[Katie Kirsch @katiekirsch]

Never a dull day in tech news! @Adobe is about to get a new President & CEO.

@achakravarthy12 is stepping into the role on Dec 1, succeeding Shantanu Narayen who's been CEO since 2007 (!) - one of the longest tenures of any major tech CEO.

Anil joined Adobe in Jan 2020 - and currently serves as President of Adobe's Customer Experience Orchestration business and worldwide field operations.

Under his leadership, Adobe developed CX Enterprise, GenStudio, and Brand Visibility. Anil also led the acquisitions and integration of Workfront and Semrush.

cc @talent_watching

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

we're streaming live, every week on @MTSlive

[MTS @MTSlive]

Apple just entered the AI talent wars.

This week was Tim Cook's last day as CEO. @johnternus takes over, and hires Pinar Donmez away from Multimodal AI at @Meta

It's Talent Watch Episode 3 with @sophiadew and @katiekirsch.

Also this week:

-@nvidia reportedly agreed to buy @huggingface for $12.9B
-@OpenAI added @feitong_yang, @thenanyu (ex-Linear, joining Codex), and @covacut
-@ElevenLabs hired OpenAI's enterprise sales lead @ashleyekramer as CRO
-@METR_Evals picked up @derifatives (19 years at Google) and @JoeJBenton (ex-Anthropic)
-@air__security out of stealth with $50M and an ex-Disney/Costco CISO
-@Meta lost three: @vincent_jh_cho to Thinking Machines, Vikas Chandra after 8 years, and Donmez to Apple

Finally, we interview Laurel Prime, who announced on the show that she's leaving Google after exactly four years to start her own company - first time she's said it publicly.

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

@MTSlive @johnternus @Meta @sophiadew @katiekirsch @nvidia watching this space

[Katie Kirsch @katiekirsch]

another fun day co-hosting the @talent_watching segment with @sophiadew on @MTSlive! 🎤

🚨 today we covered the biggest CEO handoff in tech in years, a wave of major frontier lab hires, and a few meaningful meta departures

some highlights:

- Pepijn Rijvers joining Airbnb as Chief Business Officer (prev booking dot com, tripadvisor / viator)
- @nvidia reportedly agreed to buy @huggingface for $12.9B
- @air__security, an AI agent security startup, came out of stealth with $50M and landed Ryan Knisley (ex-CISO of Disney and Costco) as Chief Strategy Officer
- @OpenAI added 3 strong hires this week: @feitong_yang (science products), @thenanyu (ex-Linear, joining Codex), and creator/design engineer @covacut
- @ElevenLabs hired OpenAI's enterprise sales lead, @ashleyekramer, as CRO
- @METR_Evals picked up @derifatives (19 years at Google) and @JoeJBenton (ex-Anthropic)
- @Meta had 3 departures: @vincent_jh_cho (→ Thinking Machines), Vikas Chandra (8+ years, Reality Labs AI), and Pinar Donmez (→ Apple)

watch the full episode here! https://t.co/4vjNs5uwBh

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

SIGNED: @ashleyekramer is joining ElevenLabs as Chief Revenue Officer.

[Mati Staniszewski @mati]

Very excited to announce that @ashleyekramer is joining @ElevenLabs as Chief Revenue Officer.

Ashley joins us from OpenAI, where she led enterprise sales. Her career spans an incredible range of companies and roles, all the way back to starting as a software engineer at NASA!

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

watching this space

[Katie Kirsch @katiekirsch]

interesting talent moves lately in tech/AI:

cc @talent_watching

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

Tech talent 2026 in 4 lines:

1. AI skills: 62% wage premium
2. AI roles: ~31% of tech postings
3. NYC passed SF on headcount
4. Juniors got squeezed while seniors got scarcer

Not a jobs crisis.

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

Most “AI talent shortage” talk is very vague.

The actual shortage is this:
- people who are technical AND commercial
- people who will go hands-on
- and talent that can run the transformation instead of decking it

Comp still hasn’t caught up to that scarcity.

[dom @ryiacy]

trends from talking to companies trying to hire applied ai / GTM engineer ppl this week

- very few meet both commercial and technical bar

- main scarce skillset is technical ability, second is deep domain knowledge

- increasing desire to run internal ai transformation function that runs across GTM, talent, operations etc, partly to try and attract more senior talent

- comp for FT roles generally hasn’t adjusted to match scarcity yet

- reluctance to hire consultants, perception that they’re bullshitters who lack desire or ability to be hands on and go deep

- most companies have no idea what they’re doing, want someone who’s gonna come in and figure that out for them

- frequent role duplication, multiple internal people informally leading ai efforts

- lack of real understanding of the specifics of what ai transformation work involves; in particular overrating workflow tooling like n8n relative to data eng work

- desire for founder type personalities who will act as internal FDE

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

SIGNED: Feitong Yang has joined OpenAI to build products for the science community.

OpenAI is building deeper into science. @feitong_yang

[Feitong Yang @feitong_yang]

I’ve joined OpenAI recently to build products for the science community.

Our first step is Rosalind Workbench — a new environment that brings AI, scientific tools, data, and workflows together, so scientists can follow a question from data to evidence and discovery.

Let's go

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

It's quite hyper today

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

SIGNED: David Yi has left Ramp to join Natural as its Founding Talent hire.

At Ramp, he served as Director of Talent and helped scale one of fintech’s fastest-growing teams.

@davidyiworks

[Kahlil Lalji @bykahlil]

Today, @davidyiworks is joining @naturalpay as our Founding Talent hire after helping scale Ramp as their Director of Talent.

I interviewed a lot of recruiters to find David. One of the beautiful, but challenging, parts about building a team is that recruiting, to me, is not primarily about parsing resumes for conventional signals of status or success. Building a team is about energy.

My interviews tend to be far less about the work someone has done, and far more about the person. What motivates them. How they think. What they care about. What kind of energy they bring into a room.

If you’re going to help scale Natural, you need to understand those things deeply enough to recognize who someone really is, whether they’re going to thrive here, and why they should want to be here in the first place. David is that person.

Watching him come onsite, quickly understand the culture, dissect what motivates each person on the team, and introduce exactly the right amount of process to help us scale has been incredible.

We’re going to be growing the team aggressively over the next few months, and I’m excited for a lot more people to get to know Natural through David. As part of that next phase of growth, we’re also expanding Natural to New York City.

Going forward, we’ll be building teams in both San Francisco and New York. If you’ve been excited about what we’re building but geography has kept you from joining us, that’s changing. We have a lot of hiring to do.

Read more about why David joined below.

https://t.co/oe3PfjVzvQ

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

@bykahlil @davidyiworks @naturalpay BIG TIME!

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

SIGNED: Rif A. Saurous is leaving Google after 19 years to join METR as a Member of Technical Staff.

At Google, he worked across probabilistic ML, speech and machine perception, contributing to projects including Tacotron, TensorFlow Probability, VoiceFilter, and AudioSet.

Google → METR. @derifatives

[rif @derifatives]

After 19 years at Google, I'm delighted to announce I'm joining METR as a Member of Technical Staff. I'm excited about METR, their work to date, and their mission. Society needs independent expert orgs that can deeply understand and communicate about AI's capabilities and risks.

[Talent Watch @talent_watching]

OpenAI is quietly assembling a serious product bench around Codex.

Nan Yu → from Linear
Manas Bam + Samath → from Kairos

Coding agents aren’t just a model race anymore. They’re becoming a talent race!