Executive Search and Advisory for Series B through pre-IPO

A failed executive hire is almost never a capability problem.

It is usually that the role was never interrogated against what the business is actually trying to achieve, or that the organizational gaps and risks around it went unidentified. What follows is an executive who never fully integrates, or who spends months pushing on the wrong priorities against constant friction. Most of the time nobody can name what actually went wrong, only that it is not working.

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The mismatch is usually visible before the hire starts.

A company writes a spec for the person who just left, or for someone a board member hired somewhere else. A search firm takes the order at face value. Six months later there is a hire who was right on paper and wrong for the moment, and a year of momentum is gone.

The wrong archetype Hiring a sophisticated enterprise sales leader when the business actually needs a high velocity SMB motion. Both are excellent operators. Only one is aligned to the company's business model and skill gap.
The wrong environment fit Dropping a builder who thrives in ambiguity into a mature organization with real process, or the reverse. This is the one that looks like a performance problem six months in and never was.
Expectations nobody defined The new hire fails to meet expectations that no one took the time to define or communicate. There is no agreed view of what success looks like at ninety days, and no named owner for any part of it.

How I work

Diagnose the business

Before anything gets written down, I want to understand how the business actually runs: what you are trying to achieve, what has to happen for you to achieve it, who is doing that work today, and whether what you need is ongoing leadership or a defined piece of work. Sometimes that confirms the role you had in mind. Often it changes it.
Define what the hire will need in order to succeed

Most of what determines whether an executive works out sits outside the job spec: reporting lines, decision rights, how information moves, and which parts of the organization have to change to absorb someone new. We name those gaps before going to market, and the spec comes out of that work rather than the other way around.
Run your search end to end

Every part of it is mine: the market map, the outreach, the screens, the assessments. A lean and highly efficient tech stack carries the administrative load, so you lose nothing on speed or on volume of candidates, and every judgment call about a person is made by the one who met them. You get a partner rather than a process.
Set your new hire up to succeed

A substantial share of early executive turnover traces back to systemic gaps at the onboarding stage rather than to the hire. I work with you to build a real onboarding plan: your success criteria, translated into a 30-60-90 day plan with named owners. Once your executive starts, I check in against it and help course-correct. The guarantee runs nine months, and twelve when we build that plan together.

Who I work with

Founders and operators making their first or second serious executive hire. Commercial and go-to-market leadership, from Series B through pre-IPO.

A large share of my work has been in HealthTech, Vertical SaaS and Consumer, though I have worked across many tech and non-tech industries. I have also spent an extensive amount of time outside the US and take on cross-border searches for critical talent, where the most expensive mistake is assessing a candidate through a purely domestic lens. I have watched a company lose a year on a leader who looked right on paper and could not operate inside the team's culture.

About

Sandya Swamy is the founder of Scalar Ops, an Executive Search and Advisory firm for growth-stage technology companies.

She started her career in Teach for America, then ran a workforce development pilot for the City of New York at the Department of Small Business Services. Since then she has looked at companies from most of the angles there are: technology valuations at Lehman Brothers, consulting at McKinsey and Company, growth equity at a New York investment firm, operating roles at Facebook and Walmart, and three years flipping houses on her own account.

At Facebook she led go-to-market expansion across six international markets. At Walmart Global eCommerce she led the integration of global logistics and e-commerce data into Retail Link for the first time, after ten years of failed attempts, stabilizing a pipeline that thousands of suppliers depend on.

What runs through all of it is an interest in mechanism: not only why a system produces the result it does, but how to design one that produces the result you want. That is where a search should start too.

She holds an MBA from Chicago Booth and an MPP from the Harris School of Public Policy. She is a constant reader and an avid musician, with over twenty years of training in voice and violin and a music minor from her undergraduate years at George Washington University. Travel is her other passion, and she enjoys exploring new places through the lens of daily life. Some of her favorite places are Oaxaca, Barcelona, Istanbul and Bali, with her dog Lily joining the adventures whenever possible.

A failed executive hire is almost never a capability problem.

The mismatch is usually visible before the hire starts.

How I work

Diagnose the business

Define what the hire will need in order to succeed

Run your search end to end

Set your new hire up to succeed

Who I work with

About

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