Services
Terra sells two things, because they are the two things that work. Critical Search, for the single hire that changes what a company can build. And Talent Advisory, the ongoing counsel clients earn through the work, from hiring strategy to origin teams. Every engagement starts with a search done properly; everything else follows from it.
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 Advisory
01
Executive and difficult individual hires
A retained search for one role, run on direct outreach and a written map of the market rather than a database query.
Most of the strongest candidates in these markets are not looking, have never heard of the company, and will only take the call if the first conversation is technically credible. That is the work.
Week one
A scoping session, then a written role definition and market map. If the role cannot be filled as written, you hear it now rather than in month four.
Weeks two to four
Outreach begins. You get a weekly written update covering who has been approached, who is engaged, and what the market is telling us about the role.
Shortlist
A small number of candidates, each with a written assessment against the scorecard and a clear statement of the risk in hiring them.
Offer and close
Terra runs the offer conversation with you, including equity framing, and stays involved through the first ninety days.
02
Ongoing talent counsel from zero to one, one to ten, ten to a hundred
Not sold from a shelf. Advisory begins where a search proves the partnership: the layer above any single hire, covering how roles are defined, how decisions get made, how people are levelled and paid, and how the company explains itself to talent it has not met yet.
Zero to one, one to ten and ten to a hundred are different companies with different problems, in the way a toddler, a teenager and an adult are. Terra has built teams through every one of those phases, most of them around physical hardware: a factory, a production line, a product that has to be made a million times correctly. Building the first one is hard. Building the plant that makes it at scale is almost always harder, and it is the part that changes the world.
Human capital is the most valuable asset class a company holds. Capital is a commodity; the people you can attract and keep are not. Advisory exists to make talent the lever that moves your enterprise value, in ways you and your investors can measure: the strength of the team, the product that ships, the market it reaches.
A role that has not converted in five months usually cannot be filled as written. A team that keeps losing candidates at offer stage usually has a compensation philosophy it has never articulated.
Diagnostic
A review of the full process from first contact to offer, including the recent declines. This usually locates the problem in week one.
Design
Frameworks written and agreed with your leadership team, not delivered as a deck.
Adoption
Hiring manager training so the system is used. A framework nobody runs is worth nothing.
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.
Fit
Pre-seed through growth, with particular strength at seed and Series A where founding and early leadership teams are still forming.
Technical founders bringing in their first commercial leader, or first-time CEOs hiring a VP who has done it at scale.
New categories, hybrid disciplines and jobs that have not existed long enough to have an obvious talent pool.
Platform and talent teams who need judgment on hiring quality across several companies at once.
Questions
Contingency firms are paid to submit résumés quickly and are structurally rewarded for volume. Terra works on retained engagements, which means the work starts with defining the role properly and mapping the market before anyone is approached. On critical hires, that difference is the whole job.
Because the advice is only as good as the shared context behind it. Advisory begins where a search proves the partnership: once Terra has filled a hard seat with you, it already knows your team, your bar and your market, and the counsel that follows is grounded rather than generic. That is why it is earned, not sold.
The centre of gravity is climate and hard technology: advanced energy, industrial decarbonization, manufacturing and materials, aerospace and electrification. Terra takes on adjacent deep-tech work where the problem has the same shape, meaning unusual roles, small talent markets and high consequence.
It depends far more on the rarity of the profile than on the seniority of the title. Terra gives a realistic view at the outset, including where the market is thin and what would need to be traded to move faster.
Frequently. Terra is often brought in for the two or three searches an internal team cannot run in parallel.
Talk to us anyway. Some of the most useful conversations happen before there is a budget for search, and they cost nothing. When the time comes, the work starts with the search.
Advisory
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
Let’s talk about the role, the market and what great could look like. The first conversation is diagnostic, not a pitch.
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