Jake Huber

Scaled 3 unicorns🦄 & teams from 0→250+ | 125+ founders read my newsletter to scale their teams smarter 📈🧠

At Uber, I scaled my team from 0→50 people <1yr.

Now I help Seed & Series A+ startup founders scale their teams. Here's how ↓

I learned how to scale teams the hard way.

At Uber, I grew our team from 0→50 in under a year. 

At Industrious, we launched 10 locations and I built a 30-person team. 

At Veho, we 4×’d headcount (70→285) and increased weekly inbound applicants +495% in 6 months. 

Those wins all had one thing in common: a great recruiter embedded with the team—and simple, repeatable systems.

Before that, my first startup failed. I didn’t know how to hire, train, or manage yet. If I could go back, I’d tell “Past Jake” to stop duct-taping recruiting and bring in real help—without signing up for agency commissions or a full-time hire too early.

That’s why I built Venture Scaler.

🚀 Venture Scaler = A Startup-Friendly Way to Hire

We place an expert, senior recruiter (ex-Uber/Dropbox/Spotify, etc.) directly on your team—fractionally. Hourly. Month-to-month. No commissions. No long-term contracts. We run the full search like your in-house recruiter so you can stay focused on building product and talking to customers.

How It Works (It’s simple on purpose):

1. Perfect-Fit Profile Guarantee: We align on 5–10 candidate profiles before outreach so we don’t waste cycles.

2. End-to-End Execution: Sourcing, screening, coordination, and candidate experience handled.

3. Tight Comms: Weekly check-ins + async updates so you always know pipeline, blockers, and next steps.

4. Flex Up/Down: Add hours when you’re sprinting; pause when you’re not hiring.

Why founders pick us:

4× Faster to Hire: UpSmith’s first sales hire closed in 5 weeks after a 5-month stall.

~90% Cost Savings vs Agencies: Honey Homes saved ~$230k in two months of hiring.

Scale at Speed: At Veho we 4×’d the team and built an engine for inbound talent.

If you’re Seed or Series A, need to make a few critical hires, and don’t want to overbuild headcount or pay 25% fees, this model was built for you.

💬 Hiring right now? DM me here or visit venturescaler.com. I’m happy to share my hiring playbooks (the same ones we used at Uber/Veho) or dig into your roles and recommend a plan.

Learn more: https://venturescaler.com

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P.S. Outside of work and scaling startups:
👯‍♀️ I’m a girl dad x2
🏕 A backpacker/camper
🎭 Trained at UCB in improv comedy
💍 Secretly proposed to my wife using Uber: https://youtu.be/uRi_B5CxWZ8

Startup Mentor

“Jake is an incredible sounding board that provides tactical tips, resources and introductions to help navigate crisis’ and challenges. He has an innate ability to level with you on any subject. During my three months with Jake I looked forward to every call as we hashed through 5-10 topics at a time spanning from affiliate & growth strategies to recruiting and mindset.”

~April Dominguez, CEO & Founder of Handsome

First Round Fast Track by First Round Capital matches seasoned startup leaders with early-stage founders and team members within a unique mentorship community. First Round Capital is a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on building a community of technology entrepreneurs and companies.

I wasted 3 weeks interviewing a candidate only to have them reject my offer over salary 🤦

And it wasn’t even a small amount. We were worlds apart.

I never made that mistake again.

Here's how you can avoid it:

Have the compensation conversation EARLY.

I'm talking first call with the recruiter or hiring manager. Get it out of the way upfront.

Why this works:

- Saves everyone's time if there's a huge mismatch
- Shows candidates you value transparency
- Allows you to gauge interest/excitement level
- Gives you time to get creative on comp if needed

My go-to script:

"I like to have an open conversation about compensation expectations early on. What I'd hate is to go through this whole process only to realize we're worlds apart on comp. So what are your expectations in terms of base salary?"

Then be prepared to share your budgeted range as well.

Pro tip: Frame it as "aligning expectations" rather than "negotiating." You're just making sure you're in the same ballpark.

What's your take - should comp be discussed early or saved for the offer stage?

Drop a comment with your view. Curious to hear different perspectives on this!

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🤝 Need hiring help? Let's chat! DM me or check out 𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗦𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗥 in my bio to learn more.

Scaled teams from 0→250+ at 3 unicorns🦄 | Early Uber | Startup Founder & Operator

Recruiting agencies are bleeding startups dry.

Most charge 25% of first-year salary as commission.

Hire 4 people at $100K each? That’s $100K in fees.

Congrats—you just gave away Employee #5's salary to an agency.

Founders at Seed and Series A can’t afford that kind of burn. And you also don’t need a full-time recruiter yet.

That’s where a fractional recruiter comes in to save your runway.

Here’s why our model at 𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗦𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗥 works better for early-stage teams:

1. A-player recruiters hire A-players
↳ Our team comes from Uber, Dropbox, Spotify. You’re not just renting offshore juniors, you’re renting experts with playbooks.

2. Keep your runway
↳ We helped our client (Honey Homes) hire 13 people in 2 months and saved them $230K vs agencies. That’s basically 2-3 hires “for free.”

3. Flex with your needs
↳ Ramp up during a hiring sprint, scale down when roles are filled. Our model is month-to-month and low risk.

4. Pay for time, not commissions
↳ Hourly recruiting means you only pay for the hours worked. No hidden fees.

Pro tip: Every dollar you don’t spend on recruiter commissions is a dollar you can reinvest into growth.

At your current stage, does paying 25% per hire actually make sense?

👉 DM me if you want to explore the “anti-agency” way of hiring.

“We kept losing our top candidates right before the finish line.”

That’s how a founder started our first call.

They were running a 6-round interview process.

Each candidate met seven different people across three weeks. By the end, the team was exhausted, and the best candidates had already accepted other offers.

Classic startup trap: thinking more interviews = better hiring decisions.

It’s actually the opposite.

Our fractional recruiter stepped in and ran a quick audit.

We realized every stage overlapped and half the interviews asked the same questions.

Here’s what we changed:

1. Consolidated six rounds into three, each with a clear focus area.

2. Built an interview scorecard so decisions were based on evidence, not “gut feel.”

3. Trained the team on closing tactics—how to sell the opportunity throughout the process, not just at the end.

The next three offers? All accepted.
Same team. Same talent market. Completely different results.

The founder told me afterward:

“I can’t believe we made hiring feel like a second full-time job—for the candidates.”

That’s the difference structure makes. A fractional recruiter turns chaos into momentum.

How long is your interview process right now?

DM me and I’ll tell you exactly where most startups lose candidates before they even realize it.

“Our People team is literally just me... and I’m drowning.”

That’s what a Series A Head of People told us on our intro call.

She was managing everything: recruiting, onboarding, payroll, benefits... everything.

Oh, and she still had five open roles to fill across engineering, ops, and GTM.

Her calendar looked like a Tetris game that never ended.

Every founder’s dream—“we’ll hire HR early”—had turned into one person juggling 12 jobs.

So we plugged in a fractional recruiter to take the hiring load off her plate.

Here’s what happened next:

Week 1: We built a sourcing plan for all five roles, complete with target company lists and outreach templates.

Week 2: We handled all outbound sourcing, first-round screens, and scheduling—freeing her to focus on onboarding and culture work.

Week 3: We delivered qualified candidate slates for every role and prepped hiring managers for final interviews.

By the end of the first month, two offers were out, one already accepted, and (most importantly) she finally got her calendar back.

When we wrapped, she told me:

“I finally got to do the strategic part of my job instead of living in my inbox.”

That’s the power of a fractional recruiting team—you don’t need to scale your HR headcount to scale your hiring.

If your People team is wearing every hat right now, you don’t need another HR generalist.

You need backup.

DM me and I’ll show you how we give teams like yours their time (and sanity) back in week one.

Recruiting agencies are terrible for startups.

🤩 What startups want:
→ Interviews with high-fit talent
→ Flexible month-to-month plans
→ Transparent, affordable pricing
→ Expert recruiters with startup exp.

😿 What startups get:
→ Most candidates are poor fit
→ Exclusivity, binding contracts
→ Expensive commissions per head
→ Offshore recruiters with low exp.

That's why we created Venture Scaler—the exact recruiting service that we, as founders, would actually want to work with.

Our recruiters worked at high-growth startups like Uber, Dropbox, Lime & Spotify

We've hired hundreds of people for dozens of clients.

Our recruiting team all has a median 7+ years of experience.

Whether you're hiring for the first time or trying to scale your team—we can help.
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👉 Need help with hiring? Let's chat! DM me or check out 𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗦𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗥 in my bio to learn more.

graphical user interface, text, application, chat or text message

Is it just me, or does hiring feels like a second job when you already have a FT job, lol?

If you’re a department leader, you know the loop:

- You’re trying to hit goals.
- Unblock your team.
- Ship product.
- Close deals.

And now you’re also expected to be a recruiter, coordinator, and full time inbox monitor.

I’ve been there.

Earlier in my career, I owned hiring while running a team and it was exhausting.

Not because I didn’t care.

Because recruiting expands to fill every empty crack in your day.

Here’s what the “hiring manager black hole” looks like from the inside:

- You finally get a slate of candidates.
- Then your calendar explodes.
- You tell yourself you’ll send feedback tonight.
- Tonight turns into tomorrow.
- Tomorrow turns into “can we push to next week?”

Meanwhile the candidate thinks you’re not interested, or the company is disorganized.

...And they move on.

The painful part: you didn’t lose them because you’re a bad leader.

You lost them because nobody owned the process end to end.

A simple fix that respects your time:

1. Set a 24 hour feedback rule: Not because it’s fun, because it keeps momentum.

2. Batch interviews into 2-3 days a week, or a specific block each day: No constant context switching.

3. Schedule debriefs in advance and assign an owner: Decision time should not be a scavenger hunt.

4. Give one person full ownership of scheduling, follow ups, and pipeline hygiene: So you can focus on evaluating and closing.

This is exactly where a fractional recruiter helps.

At Venture Scaler, we run the machine so hiring managers can stay in their lane: leading their team and making great decisions, not chasing calendars.

If you’re a hiring manager, what part feels most like the second job: scheduling, feedback, or selling the role?

DM me if you want to take this recruiting work off your team's plate.

We helped Veho scale their team 4X from 70→285 people & increase their applicant pipeline by 500% in 6 months.

When we started working with Ita, they were already at 70 people and didn’t have any internal recruiters. Not even a HR/People Ops person.

(Honestly, they should have had one like 40 people ago)

We placed two of our expert recruiters to work with his team to hire across multiple depts including Ops, Eng & Product.

One of our recruiters worked directly with their Head of Driver team, and the other worked directly with their CTO.

It was like they were part of their team, acting like the in-house recruiters they needed so badly.

And the Veho team loved it.

This is the origin story of the “rent-a-recruiter” model we use today.

But the thing I’m most proud of is this:

We were able to help Veho “replace” us. 

We hired their VP of People Ops and multiple full-time internal recruiters.

I’m so proud that we got to be a small part of their growth story during those early years.

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👉 Need help with hiring? Let's chat! DM me or check out 𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗦𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗥 in my bio to learn more.

Does your growing startup need a r̶e̶c̶r̶u̶i̶t̶e̶r̶ Erin?

The founders who work with us—they get it.

They get how we’re different and a better fit for them:

- Startup-friendly flexible terms
- Expert recruiters (like Erin)
- Zero commissions

Our client results speak for themselves:

- 6x more applicants
- 90% cost savings
- 4x faster hires

And not only that, they talk about us with their founder friends.

Fun fact: Marisa came from a referral from another one of our clients!

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👉 Need help with hiring? Let's chat! DM me or check out 𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗦𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗥 in my bio to learn more.

graphical user interface, text, application

Have you felt this pain before? Needing somebody in the seat so badly, but not finding the right hire after months of searching.

Maybe you're in a similar situation as Wyatt?

He was getting good intros from his investors and network.

But Wyatt was still struggling to find the right person for his first sales hire.

He wasn’t getting the right fit.

And he had a small team without an internal recruiter to support him.

And that's where Venture Scaler came in...

We matched Wyatt up with an expert recruiter and got tight on exactly the right profile for the person he needed in the role.

We started scouting and outbound sourcing immediately (which they weren’t able to do much of before) and started setting up interviews within the week.

We helped Wyatt find his “dream hire” in less than 6 weeks.

👉 Struggling to find the right candidates? Let's chat! DM me or check out 𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗦𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗥 in my bio to learn more.

“I’m doing payroll at night... and recruiting during lunch.”

That’s what a Series A People lead told me on a call recently.

She was the People team of one.

Hiring. Onboarding. Benefits. Payroll changes. Manager questions. Policy stuff.
Plus six open roles that the business needed yesterday.

And the scary part wasn't the open reqs.

It was the slow creep toward burnout.

Because when your only People leader is spread that thin, two things happen:

1. Hiring becomes reactive.
2. And retention becomes an afterthought.

So we plugged in one of our fractional recruiters to take sourcing and screening completely off her plate.

Here’s what we did in the first two weeks:

1️⃣ Built role scorecards with each hiring manager so everyone agreed on the persona up front.

2️⃣ Created targeted sourcing lists per role, not “spray and pray.”

3️⃣ Ran all outbound outreach, first-round screens, and candidate comms.

4️⃣ Delivered weekly shortlists with clear signal, not resume piles.

Suddenly she wasn’t living in her inbox trying to keep candidates warm.

She was back doing the work that actually protects the company:
Onboarding, manager coaching, culture, and keeping great people from leaving.

Her message after Week 2:

“I forgot what it felt like to close my laptop at 5.”

That’s the point of fractional recruiting.

You don’t need to hire a full-time recruiter to get full-time recruiting coverage.
You just need the right support at the right moment.

If your People leader is drowning right now, what’s it costing you?

DM me and I’ll show you how we plug in fast without adding long-term headcount.

I've wasted $300k on bad hires. Here are 5 red flags I now look for:

1. Frequent job changes without growth 

Occasional moves are fine (esp with all the layoffs the last 2yrs), but a pattern of short stints is concerning. It often signals performance issues or missing quotas in sales roles.

2. Misalignment with company stage

Someone who's only worked at large enterprises may struggle in an early-stage startup environment. Look for relevant experience.

3. Lack of preparation

Did they research your company? Do they have thoughtful questions? Preparation shows genuine interest and initiative.

4. Rudeness or poor communication

How candidates treat everyone in the process, from recruiters to interviewers, is telling. Rudeness is a major red flag.

5. Misalignment with mission/values

Can they articulate why they want to join your company specifically? Passionate, aligned candidates will stand out.

What other red flags do you look for when hiring? Share your thoughts in the comments!

🤝 Need hiring help? DM me or check out 𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗦𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗥 in my bio to learn more.

Forget signing bonuses - here's how we got 95% of candidates to say "Yes"

Simple: We celebrated the job offer (don't sleep on this).

It's the final push that cements a candidate's decision to join your startup.

3 ways to do it right:

1. Personal emails from the interview team

Have everyone who interviewed the candidate send a quick note saying how excited they are. Shows the candidate is already part of the team.

2. Virtual meet & greet

Set up a casual video call for the candidate to meet more of the team. Builds excitement and connection before day 1.

3. Personalized welcome package

Send company swag, a handwritten note, or small gift to their home. Makes them feel valued from the start.

The goal? Create so much excitement that backing out becomes unthinkable.

Remember: Your job isn't done when they accept the offer. Keep the momentum going until their first day.

What creative ways have you celebrated new hires? Share yours below!
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👉 Need help with hiring? Let's chat! DM me or check out 𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗦𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗥 in my bio to learn more.

You started your business chasing a spark — freedom, creativity, or simply the thought: I don’t need a boss. Then growth happened. Suddenly, you’re the boss of everything — every decision, every detail, every euro.

What once felt exciting now feels heavy. Delivery’s messy. The team’s working hard, but progress feels stuck. And that quiet thought creeps in: Shouldn’t this be easier by now?

It can be. That’s where I come in.

👋 I’m Mary Alice, a Fractional COO & Transformation Partner helping globally remote, founder-led businesses scale sustainably — without burning out their teams or drowning in corporate nonsense. I bring clarity, accountability, and calm momentum to operations so founders can get back to leading, creating, and living.

But that’s just one part of what I do.

I’m also a coach to emerging fractional leaders, guiding them through Future Fractional — an 8-week group coaching experience designed to help talented operators build purpose-driven, flexible careers on their own terms.

And each week, I write Ops & Other Opinions — a newsletter blending spicy takes, sharp tools, and deeply human advice on building better businesses.

Across all of it, my work is about helping people build what lasts — businesses, systems, and careers that support real lives, not consume them.

✨ Predictable revenue. Repeatable delivery. Profitable sanity.
Teams that are aligned, accountable, and actually enjoying the ride.
Less grind. More life.

Outside of work, I’m a serial reader (50+ fiction books a year), avid baker, and unapologetic foodie — I even moved to France sight unseen. If I’m not fixing operations, I’m probably planning my next adventure or trying to perfect my carrot cake recipe (ha, who am I kidding, it’s already perfect). 🥕

👉 If you’re ready to make work feel lighter — whether that means scaling your business or designing your next career chapter — let’s connect.

Mary Duff

I've been quietly trying to retire an identity I've carried my whole life: hard worker.

It's the thing people have said about me since I was a kid. It's what got me a full ride to a Divison 1 university on a basketball scholarship. It's the thing I put on every resume, led with in every interview, wore like a badge. It's also the thing that kept me tethered to my own dysfunctional business thinking if I just worked harder things would work out. 

And I'm done with it.

Not because I've gotten lazy. But because I've realized that "hard worker" — as an identity — has been costing me money, joy, and an embarrassing amount of unnecessary suffering.

Here's what it actually looks like from the inside:

The work comes easy. (I've been doing this for fifteen plus years. It SHOULD come easy.) And instead of thinking great, I'm good at this — I think: am I charging too much for something that doesn't feel hard? Did I do enough? Should I have taken longer?

I literally manufacture friction. Add steps that don't need to exist. Stay at my desk past the point of usefulness. Because easy work feels like cheating.

This is insane behavior. And I know I'm not the only one doing it.

We've been so thoroughly conditioned to equate struggle with value that we don't recognize our own competence when we're living inside it. We call it luck. We wave our hands in nonchalance and say, "Oh, this incredible talent I have? NO BIG DEAL." And we find ways to discount it.

And in doing so, we waste the exact thing we spent years building.

I wrote about all of this — where it comes from, what it's cost me, and what I'm trying to do differently. Full essay here:

Mary Alice Duff

Fractional COO and Transformation Partner | Fractional Coach for anti-burnout, anti-hustle fractional leaders | Designing remote small businesses that feel human without the corporate nonsense | Remote First 🌍

Open article: Hard Work Isn't a Virtue. It's a Story We Were Told. — Mary Alice Duff by maryaliceduff.com

Hard Work Isn't a Virtue. It's a Story We Were Told. — Mary Alice Duff

You know what I think is the coolest, sexiest thing in a small business?



Profit margins.

Healthy. Steady. Predictable. Profit margins.

Not a “we closed a round!!!” announcement. Not a founder photo holding a giant novelty check. Not a whisper about a mystery investor “coming in soon.”
Margins.

Here’s the scoop: 99% of small businesses are not a fit for equity capital. There is no investor pacing outside your door waiting to rescue your pricing strategy. And even if there were? Outside money does not fix a weak model.
If your unit economics don’t work now, cash just buys you a longer runway to the same problem.

And yet — I talk to founders all the time who believe that outside check is the thing that will finally make the stress go away.

Ask me how I know. I used to think that too. 🤦‍♀️ And learned the hard way: more money doesn’t fix bad math. It just delays the reckoning.

If your margins are thin, if your pricing is off, if your costs are bloated, more capital doesn’t magically make the business healthy. It just gives you more room to keep operating something that doesn’t quite work.

That’s why when I step into a business as a fractional COO we start with the math.

Not the branding, the marketing funnel or the hiring plan.

We start with the numbers and a super simple spreadsheet. 

Because if there isn’t enough margin in the model, nothing else is going to save it.

If you’re a founder in the experience space — tours, retreats, education programs — and you’re bringing in money but it’s not doing what it should… if you’re sweating payroll each month, if there’s nothing left to reinvest, if you’re not paying yourself consistently (or at all) — that’s a margin problem.

My DMs are open.
Let’s take a look.

I completely changed my fractional practice in just a few months. Need proof? Let me roast this post from 10 months ago. 👇

"I'm officially open to work — and I could use your help." 🤦‍♀️  You are a senior operations executive with 15 years of experience and you are out here asking people to figure out where you fit. Zero leads. Richly deserved.

"Available for: Fractional COO / Chief of Staff roles." 🙄 Available FOR. I was not pitching a service. I was posting a job alert for myself.

"Strengths & Experiences: Financial forecasting. Fundraising ($5M+ raised)." Ma'am. Nobody is hiring you because you raised $5M once. They are hiring you because their margins are a disaster and they haven't paid themselves in six months and they need someone to walk in, see the whole mess clearly, and fix it. That's the pitch. NOT. THIS.

"Full resume available upon request." I need to lie down. It really said: hello, I have completed the application process, please schedule me for an interview at your earliest convenience. On a fractional COO post. On LinkedIn. In 2025. I am so sorry to this woman (me).

And the design! The lime green header! My name in a big serif font like I was submitting myself for an award! The two-column layout that screamed PLEASE REVIEW MY QUALIFICATIONS!

It was beautiful. It was polished. It was completely, catastrophically about me — and not one word about the overwhelmed founders I actually wanted to help.

This post was perfectly engineered to attract hiring managers. Zero of whom were going to bring on a fractional COO because they saw a pretty infographic on LinkedIn. It performed exactly as designed. Which is to say: spectacularly, historically, not at all.

So what changed?

I stopped waiting to be chosen and started showing up as someone with something to offer. I stopped asking founders to figure out where I fit and started telling them exactly what was broken and what I could do about it. In short, I deleted 'employee mode' and installed something that actually works: the posture of a business owner who knows her value.

Employee mode is literally killing your fractional practice. It nearly killed mine.
It will keep you begging for work, waiting to be chosen, overworked and underpaid — until you decide it stops.

Here's what it looks like in practice, and exactly how to shut it down: https://lnkd.in/dgy8VPTE
________________________________________________________
And if you're ready to do more than just read about it — the very first thing we do inside Future Fractional is uninstall employee mode and get you fully owning your identity as a fractional business owner. Because nothing else works until that part clicks.

Spring cohort kicks off March 23rd. Early bird pricing closes Saturday.

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The Battle

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