The people behind technical progress

Dolly Singh spent more than twenty years building talent organizations inside companies attempting things most people thought were not possible. Her work spans aerospace, consumer technology, finance and software, including roles associated with SpaceX, Oculus VR, Citadel and ServiceTitan.

What those companies had in common was not a sector. It was a particular kind of difficulty: the work had not been done before, the roles had no clean precedent, and the people capable of doing them were rare, sceptical and already employed. Recruiting in that environment is a different discipline from recruiting into a known job at a known company, and it is the discipline Dolly has spent her career practising.

The California wildfires turned that experience toward climate. Terra Talent was founded to point it at the companies working on decarbonization and industrial technology, where the same pattern holds and the stakes are considerably higher.

Dolly also serves as an advisor and investor to companies working across advanced energy, carbon removal and advanced manufacturing, which means she sees the same hiring problems from the board side as well as the search side.

Jesse works with seed and Series A founders on the key engineering and leadership hires that shape what a young company can build.

His work spans carbon removal, advanced energy, electrification and advanced manufacturing, including engagements with Heirloom, SPAN, Antora, Seurat, Fourth Power, Terraform Industries, Geoship and Aether Bio. That range matters in practice: the person who can industrialize a novel process is usually found in an adjacent industry rather than a competitor, and knowing which one is most of the job.

Lauren is a technical recruiter and talent partner who has spent her career helping ambitious companies find the people who can build what comes next.

Her route in was unconventional. After graduating from the University of Georgia she moved to her mother’s hometown of Bogota, Colombia, to teach English with the nonprofit Heart for Change, and noticed that applicants needed more help navigating admissions than the organization could give. She built the resources herself, created a role where none existed, and became the organization’s first admissions hire and, in practice, its first recruiter.

In San Francisco she moved into technology recruiting at Insight Data Science, helping PhDs and researchers transition into data science and engineering. She worked alongside early teams at Stitch Fix, Astronomer, Zocdoc and Livongo, building a talent community whose members have since gone on to leadership roles at companies including Meta, Apple, Netflix, Anthropic and Ōura.

In-house recruiting taught her which part of the work she valued most: owning the entire relationship with a candidate, from the first conversation to the moment they accept a role that changes their career. At Verana Health that work also served a mission she cared about, using clinical data to improve outcomes for rare diseases. She later founded her own recruiting business across health and emerging technology before moving into agency search to go deeper on founders and highly specialized roles.

The common thread has never changed: Lauren is most energized close to the edge of what is being built. She loves working with founders, scientists, engineers and unconventional candidates solving difficult problems, particularly when the technology can materially better the world.

Before Terra, Rory built communications functions and advised executives inside regulated and technical organizations, where what a company says is measured against what it does.

He works at the point where hiring and communications meet: what a company tells the market about itself, and whether the people it is trying to recruit believe it.