Executive Search and Advisory for Series B through pre-IPO
Usually nobody interrogated the role against what the business is actually trying to achieve, and nobody named the organizational gaps around it. So the executive never fully integrates, or spends months pushing on the wrong priorities against constant friction. Nobody can say what went wrong. Only that it isn’t working.
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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 you have a hire who was right on paper and wrong for the moment, and you have lost a year of momentum.
Before I write anything 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.
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.
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. I meet every candidate, and I make every call about them. You get a partner rather than a process.
A placement is not the finish line. Onboarding is. Most early executive turnover traces back to gaps there, not 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.
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.
I’m Sandya Swamy. I founded Scalar Ops, an Executive Search and Advisory firm for growth-stage technology companies.
I started my 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 I have looked at companies from most of the angles there are: technology valuations at Lehman Brothers, consulting at McKinsey and Company, growth equity at Insight Partners, operating roles at Facebook and Walmart, and three years flipping houses on my own account.
At Facebook I led go-to-market expansion across six international markets. At Walmart Global eCommerce I led the first integration of global logistics and e-commerce data into Retail Link, after ten years of failed attempts, and stabilized a pipeline thousands of suppliers depend on.
The thread through all of it is mechanism: not only why a system produces the result it does, but how to design one that produces the result you want. A search should start in the same place.
I hold an MBA from Chicago Booth and an MPP from the Harris School of Public Policy. I read constantly and I play music: over twenty years of training in voice and violin, and a music minor from George Washington. I travel as much as I can, and I like getting to know a place through its daily life. Oaxaca, Barcelona, Istanbul and Bali are the ones I keep going back to, with my dog Lily along whenever possible.
If you are working through an executive hire and want a second read before you commit to the spec, put some time on my calendar.