Riviera Partners Adds Business Development and Executive Recruiting Leaders

February 26, 2021 – Riviera Partners, a recruitment provider specializing in C-level engineering, product and design leader placements, recently added two new members to its team. Jack Gage, previously with GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group), becomes vice president of channel strategy and business development, and Bobby Gormsen, who had been with Frame.io, is the firm’s new director, executive recruiting.

Mr. Gage joins Riviera Partners with over a decade of experience delivering strategy, knowledge and talent solutions to the world’s top institutional investors across public and private markets. At GLG, he built and led the firm’s new business team in the Americas, scaling subscription sales of its expert platform to investors — including over 500 new relationships across venture capital, private equity and hedge funds. Prior to GLG, Mr. Gage delivered strategy and diligence solutions for private equity investors at Magid Advisors, a leading business strategy firm focused on consumer, media and technology markets. “Jack brings a proven track record of establishing strategic partnerships in the private equity and venture capital investment community to our team,” said Will Hunsinger, CEO of Riviera Partners. “His experience forging relationships with channel partners will create long-term value for Riviera, our clients, and their portfolio companies by delivering the best technical talent to the best companies,”

Mr. Gormsen will focus on the East Coast and New York markets. He brings with him 15 years of technology recruiting and leadership experience out of both the Silicon Valley and New York City markets. Most recently, as vice president of talent at Frame.io, Mr. Gormsen built the recruiting function from the ground up and helped scale the company from 15 to 225 people. Previously, he served as global head of recruiting at Etsy during its monumental growth phase and IPO. Through the years, he has held recruiting positions at Jetsetter, LimeWire, Google and Yahoo.

“Bobby’s expertise in recruiting comes at the perfect time to meet increasing demand for technology talent in key East Coast markets like New York, Boston and Washington, D.C.,” said Mr. Hunsinger. “He knows how to build teams in technology-driven companies and functions, and we are all thrilled to have him bring this experience to bear for our clients.”

Growing Search Firm

Riviera Partners is a global recruiting firm specializing in the technology industry. The firm provides clients with optimal placements by combining recruiter interactions and experience with data-driven findings about candidates. The firm has recruited for key executive roles at Pinterest, Postmates, Tinder, Twilio, Uber, Asana, Dropbox, GitHub, DoorDash, Hulu, and partnered with venture-backed concerns, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Benchmark, Accel, Menlo Ventures, KPCB, Greylock and General Catalyst.

Through machine learning algorithms, Riviera Partners identifies specialized, highly-qualified candidates that fit an organization’s needs from 600,000 professionals across tech geographies. Riviera can often provide a short list of candidates in 30 days and has a track record of over 95 percent success rate.

Last fall, Riviera Partners assisted in the recruitment of Jonathan Benassaya as the chief product officer of Life360, a safety and coordination service for families across the globe. Andrew Abramson, Austin Douglas and Michael A. Morell led the assignment. “Jonathan has a true passion for building and nurturing products that delight, touch and improve millions of people’s lives,” said Chris Hulls, CEO and co-founder of Life360. “He’s a disruptor in every sense of the word and I’m confident his experience as such will be key to our goal of disrupting legacy incumbents in the security space as we build the largest safety brand for families.”

Strong Experience

Throughout his 15-plus year career, Mr. Benassaya has worked to build products and drive subscriptions to technology that improve consumers’ lives. Prior to joining Life360, he was on the founding team of companies spanning entertainment, content, fintech and cryptocurrency across the U.S., Europe, and China. These include family storage solution StreamNation, in-game advertiser MagicParty and crypto index fund IronChain Capital in addition to founding Deezer.

Under Mr. Benassaya’s leadership, music streaming service Deezer created and launched the industry’s first “freemium” music model, signed the first licensing deals with the major labels and publishers, and grew membership 50-fold in just three years. He was instrumental in building a category defining company which led to a valuation of more than $1.4 billion today. Mr. Benassaya also served as interim president of peer-to-peer video conferencing platform TangoMe.

Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media