Riviera Partners Adds New Senior Leaders
May 19, 2023 – San Francisco-based Riviera Partners, a recruitment provider specializing in C-level engineering, product, and design leader placements, has appointed Megan Martin as vice president of marketing, and Jeff Crowell and Kara Landon as senior directors of partnerships and business development. Ms. Martin will oversee Riviera’s global marketing strategy and implementation of marketing programs. Mr. Crowell and Ms. Landon will be responsible for expanding channel partnerships with private equity and venture capital clients, helping to accelerate talent-driven growth and portfolio value creation.
Ms. Martin is tasked expanding the global brand presence of the firm. She brings more than two decades of experience, joining Riviera from Accenture, where she supported the growth of Accenture’s credit services business across consulting, operations, and technology, and most recently served as the executive vice president of marketing at Mortgage Cadence, an Accenture company specializing in mortgage technology solutions.
“Megan is an accomplished marketing executive with a track record of driving revenue growth and market share. Her leadership, innovation, and strategic prowess will help continue to grow our business and build our brand awareness globally,” said Will Hunsinger, CEO of Riviera Partners.
Mr. Crowell has more than 15 years of business development and sales experience across B2B tech-enabled market research and consulting services. Prior to joining Riviera, he spent over five years at insight network GLG. Here he helped build and lead the firm’s new business effort in the Bay Area and West Coast before transitioning back to the East Coast, where he scaled the delivery of GLG’s commercial due diligence and value creation solutions to hundreds of private equity, growth equity, and venture capital firms, as well as family offices and hedge funds. Before that, Mr. Crowell worked at Forrester, leading West Coast private equity and venture capital business development. At Forrester, he also partnered with B2B and B2C marketing, customer experience, product design, and technology executive teams at Global 1000, emerging and high-growth technology companies.
Ms. Landon has 10 years of experience in financial services working with private equity sponsors and venture capital firms. She most recently worked as senior vice president, client services for Performance Improvement Partners. In this lower-middle market technology consulting company, Ms. Landon helped deliver diligence solutions and technology transformation projects to PE firms and their portfolio companies. Before that, she served as Efficio’s business development director for North America, helping scale their presence in the region, and prior to that as GLG’s vice president of new business, private equity. In these roles, Ms. Landon provided structure and leadership to nascent or high-growth teams as they embarked on a path of sales excellence while continuing to deepen her client relationships across the private equity market.
“Jeff and Kara are proven relationship-builders across VC and private equity ecosystems,” said Jack Gage, Riviera’s VP of partnerships and business development. “They bring the consultative, long-term orientation that investors have come to expect from Riviera and will expand our dedicated coverage of talent-driven value creation needs within their portfolios.”
Related: Riviera Partners Names Chief Technology Officer
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. Riviera Partners 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.
Riviera Partners Receives Investment from Insight Partners
Riviera Partners has received an investment from global software investor Insight Partners. Privately backed since 2019, this investment allows Rivera Partners to forge additional opportunities for its recruiters and employees to scale into new markets and geographies. Riviera Partners will continue to operate independently. “With thousands of open engineering, product, and design leadership roles across Insight Partners’ portfolio, we know how in-demand top talent is,” said Allyson White, managing director at Insight Partners. “Riviera Partners has established a best-in-class, tech-driven approach to finding the best product and engineering candidates. Hiring is a critical component to a company’s success regardless of their stage, and we recognize that Riviera plays a large role in the health of the software ecosystem. We look forward to working with Riviera Partners as they continue to grow and place top technical leadership that will build the future generational companies.”
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 success rate of over 95 percent.
New Chief People Officer
Riviera Partners named Decio Mendes as its chief people officer. “Mendes’ enthusiasm for people, expertise in organizational development, and ability to instill a positive culture is a key part of Riviera’s growth,” said Mr. Hunsinger. “As we continue to scale, we must nurture a vibrant team environment that will inspire our team to bring out the best in themselves.”
Mr. Mendes joins the organization from FLYN, a corporate development firm that he co-founded, which supports clients in developing breakthrough, innovative HR strategies, leadership development and talent management programs, and employee engagement approaches.
Related: Riviera Partners Acquires Arete Partners, Creates Riviera Ventures
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
