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About Terra

The people behind technical progress

Terra Talent is the origin-team and critical-hire partner for climate and hard-tech founders building things that have never been built before.

Point of view

Talent is not a support function here. It is the strategy.

The technologies that matter most this decade are difficult, capital-intensive and unforgiving of a mediocre team. A carbon removal plant, a fusion device, a new cement chemistry. None of these are built by an org chart. They are built by a specific and often small group of people who chose to work on them.

Which means a company can have the better science and still lose to the company that hired the person who knows how to industrialize it.

Terra exists for that problem. Not to fill requisitions, but to help founders assemble the handful of people who determine whether the science becomes a company.

A baobab tree in late afternoon light, seen past flowering branches in the foreground.

Origins

How Terra started

Terra Talent was founded by Dolly Singh after the California wildfires made the abstraction of climate risk concrete.

The pattern she had seen repeatedly, at SpaceX, at Oculus, at Citadel, was that improbable things get done by unusually well-assembled groups of people, and that assembling them is a craft rather than a process. Terra was built to point two decades of that craft at companies working on decarbonization and industrial technology.

Why this work matters

Climate and hard-tech companies are competing for a talent pool that has spent twenty years being recruited by software. The people who can commission a plant, qualify a material or take a reactor through licensing are scarce, and they are not reachable by the methods that work elsewhere.

Every hire Terra places into these companies is a small transfer of capability from where it was to where it is needed. Over enough hires, that adds up to something.

What we believe

What we believe about exceptional teams

  1. Small groups decide the outcome

    The difference between a company that ships and one that does not is usually a handful of people, hired early, who set a standard everyone else works to.

  2. The best people are not applying

    In these markets the strongest candidates are employed, unbothered and hard to reach. Any process that relies on inbound is selecting from the wrong population.

  3. Judgment over volume

    A shortlist of four people we can defend is worth more than forty we cannot. We would rather present fewer candidates and be right about them.

  4. Honest market feedback, early

    If a role cannot be filled as written, we say so in week one rather than month four. That conversation is often the most valuable part of the engagement.

  5. Candidates are not inventory

    People trust us with decisions that affect their families. That obligation does not disappear because a client is paying the fee.

  6. Mission is a real filter

    We work with companies whose success would matter. It makes the candidate conversation honest, which is also why it works.

Team

A small team, deliberately

Terra is built to stay senior. The person who scopes your search is the person who runs it.

Dolly Singh

Founder

Dolly works directly with founders on the hires that decide whether the science becomes a company.

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.

  • Built and led talent functions inside SpaceX, Oculus VR, Citadel and ServiceTitan
  • Advisor and investor across advanced energy, carbon removal and advanced manufacturing
  • Founded Terra Talent to apply that pattern recognition to climate and hard tech
  • Executive search
  • Origin team design
  • Founder advisory
  • Compensation and equity
Dolly Singh on LinkedIn

Jesse Gurney

Partner

Jesse runs the engineering and leadership searches that set the direction of an early-stage company.

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.

  • Engineering and leadership searches across carbon removal, advanced energy and manufacturing
  • Works with seed and Series A founders on formative hires
  • Technical leadership search
  • Early-stage hiring
  • Market mapping

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