Terra Talent helps climate and hard-tech founders recruit critical teams, build an employer story exceptional people believe in, and drive a high-performance culture through scale.
Critical search and earned talent advisory for ambitious technical companies building things that have never been built before.
From first critical hires to scaling hard-tech companies. See the full portfolio and client list
The problem
Ordinary recruiting breaks down when the role is unprecedented, the company is still becoming known and the right candidate is not applying.
The hardest hires are rarely obvious. The stakes are high, the talent market is tight, and a small number of people can materially change what a company is able to build. This is where Terra works best.
Services
The work starts with critical search. For a small number of founders, it grows into a long-term talent advisory partnership that is earned, not sold.
01
Executive and difficult individual hires
For companies with a single role that changes the trajectory of the business, where the obvious candidate pool does not contain anyone who has done it before.
OutcomeA world-class hire with clear evidence of exceptional ability, found in a market you had not thought to search.
Explore our services, Critical Search02
Ongoing talent counsel from zero to one, one to ten, ten to a hundred
For founders and investors Terra already works with, whose next problem is bigger than one role: hiring strategy, team design, compensation, an origin team for a company being built from scratch, or the team that takes a first-of-a-kind machine into a first-of-a-kind factory.
OutcomeA talent system your company actually runs, designed by the people who filled your hardest seat, and built to grow enterprise value at every stage.
Explore our services, Talent AdvisoryAdvisory
Every Terra relationship starts with critical search: one genuinely difficult position, sharply scoped, ending in a world-class hire with clear evidence of exceptional ability. Where both sides decide to grow the relationship beyond the search, the work deepens into a long-term advisory partnership, with Terra in the recruiting meetings and decades of experience across the most category-defining companies of our time behind your team. Talent is the most direct lever on enterprise value a founder holds. That is what the partnership is for, and it is not for sale. It is earned through the search.
Discuss an advisory challengeCapabilities may include
Selected work
Terra works on confidential searches for companies at a stage where hiring plans are commercially sensitive. Publishing the detail takes a conversation with each client first, and those conversations are happening now.
Until they are published, we would rather show you nothing than show you something vague. If you want to understand how Terra works on a search like yours, ask and we will talk you through a comparable engagement directly.
Discuss a critical hire
How Terra works
Five stages, run with the same discipline on every search.
Scope the real role
The hardest searches are usually first-of-a-kind roles, where the combination of skills has rarely sat in one person before. We do not match to a job description. We start from the business problem and the product problem, and work out from first principles who actually solves them.
Map the market
A written view of where the talent genuinely sits, mapped from the first principles of the problem rather than from job titles, including the adjacent industries most companies never think to look in.
Reach the right people
Direct, researched, individual outreach. The strongest candidates will almost never apply. They are already happy on their current project, and it is our job, together, to convince them to do something new.
Evaluate for context
What someone did at a company with three thousand engineers tells you very little about what they will do with eleven. We evaluate for evidence of exceptional ability and for the capacity to thrive in a startup, against a rubric built over twenty years inside the most intense ones.
Close and support the hire
With the top few percent of any market, finding the person is rarely the hardest part. Getting them across the line almost always is. Offer strategy, equity framing, a process that tells your story as well as it tests theirs, and the first ninety days.
Sectors
Nuclear fission and fusion, geothermal, hydrogen and long-duration storage. Generation technologies being built at scale for the first time in decades.
Explore our sectorsDirect air capture, mineralization, low-carbon cement and steel, and the industrial processes being rebuilt from the chemistry up.
Explore our sectorsAdvanced materials, additive and precision manufacturing, and the hard problem of turning a working prototype into a repeatable product.
Explore our sectorsLaunch, satellites, electric and hydrogen aviation, robotics, and the systems companies operating at the edge of what is currently possible.
Explore our sectorsHome and industrial electrification, grid software and hardware, transmission, and the physical infrastructure the energy transition runs on.
Explore our sectorsCopper, lithium, rare earths and the extraction, processing and refining capacity the energy transition cannot run without.
Explore our sectors
Founder
Dolly Singh built talent organizations at SpaceX and Oculus, where the roles had no precedent and the people capable of filling them were rare, sceptical and already employed.
That is the same problem climate and hard-tech founders now face. Terra exists to apply what she learned there to companies where a small number of hires decide whether the technology ever leaves the lab.
Read Dolly’s storyOne extraordinary person can change a company.
The right collection of people can change what is possible.
Resources
Written out of work Terra does inside live engagements, and useful whether or not you ever hire us.
For founders and hiring executives
Most reference calls are a formality run at the end of a process, with the candidate supplying the names and the questions inviting a positive answer. This is how to run one that actually tells you something.
Read the guideFor candidates and founders
Equity is often the least understood part of a startup offer, and the part most likely to damage trust when it is explained badly. This guide explains what you are actually being offered, which numbers matter, and what to ask before you accept it.
Read the guideFor founders and hiring executives
The right stack at eight people is not a smaller version of the right stack at eighty. Buy the capability you need now, keep the number of systems low, and make sure you can take your data with you when you leave.
Read the guide
For candidates
If you are an operator, engineer, leader or specialist exploring climate and hard-tech opportunities, join Terra’s network. We come to you when a role genuinely fits, not every time one opens.
Join the network
Let’s talk about the role, the market and what great could look like. The first conversation is diagnostic, not a pitch.
Start a confidential conversation
