Steve is one of Silicon Valley’s hottest properties when it comes to people, talent and culture. As Founder of Cadigan Talent Ventures LLC, a Silicon Valley-based talent strategies advisory firm, Steve helps organizations worldwide develop winning talent solutions. His specialties include assisting high growth companies with change management, acquisition integration, converting culture into a competitive advantage, leading and scaling in hyper-growth, assisting organizations through IPO transitions and providing actionable steps for retaining and attracting the very best technical talent to elevate business performance.
A highly sought after speaker and advisor, Steve’s international footprint recently included a keynote discussion at the Harvard Business Review Summit in Leon, Mexico, hosting a large global event at Google, a Keynote at Instituto de Empresa’s Annual Alumni Meeting in Madrid and various other private sector events in the U.S., Canada, Spain, and Colombia. Since founding his firm, he has also delivered conferences at Stanford University, The Ivey School of Business in Shanghai, IESE in Barcelona and the University of Sydney. Steve also advises fast-growth tech companies like Twitter, Google, Cadence, GoPro as well as some large global companies such as CapitalOne, The BBC, and Deloitte. Steve is frequently sought out as a talent expert on global TV and has been a regular guest on Bloomberg West and CNBC. He is also a regular contributor to Inc.com with his column Talent Hacking. He has been interviewed by Forbes, Bloomberg Business, SF Chronicle, Human Resource Executive Magazine, HR Magazine, Quartz, The Channel Company’s IT Best of Breed, Spain’s Expansion and El Pais, Colombia’s El Tiempo and Portafolio, and Mexico’s CNNExpansión, among others.
Prior to launching his own firm, Steve served as VP Talent at LinkedIn from 2009 through 2012, taking the company from a private firm of 400 employees, through an IPO and into the powerhouse that it is recognized as today with over 7,000 employees. The groundbreaking work Steve did at LinkedIn as the executive responsible for culture, leadership, talent and organizational development is widely seen as the textbook example of how a company can leverage its culture to scale profitably in record time. Steve’s work in building LinkedIn’s culture led Stanford University to build a case study about it and today, it is taught to their business students.
Steve holds a BA in History from Wesleyan University and an MA in HROD from the University of San Francisco. Steve is a “Mentor-in-Residence” at Index Ventures where he advises portfolio companies on best practices for a range of HR-related topics from the tactics of compensation and stock plans, talent solutions, and benefits to strategic issues of managing for hyper-growth and next generation leadership.
