Introduction & Guest Welcome (00:00:00)
Julian introduces the podcast and welcomes Laura Marin, founder of Rare Talent Ventures.

From Accidental Recruiter to Talent Leader (01:47)
Laura shares how she got into recruiting and built her career in high-growth startups.

Scaling Bolt 5X in Two Years (03:20)
Growing Bolt from 43 to 200+ employees and leading hypergrowth hiring.

Rebuilding the Recruiting Engine (06:17)
Creating structure, consistency, and a strong employer brand.

99% Close Rate Strategy (07:59)
How trust, transparency, and deep candidate relationships drove exceptional results.

Hiring Is a Life Decision (11:28)
Why recruiting is about changing someone’s life—not just filling a role.

Breaking Pedigree Bias (16:40)
Moving beyond elite brands to hire high-potential, unconventional talent.

Hire Slow with Structure (22:52)
Why founders must use process and discipline to avoid reactive hiring.

Launching Rare Talent Ventures (24:52)
Laura starts her own firm to help founders build strong teams.

Who She Serves & Differentiation (26:39)
Supporting seed–Series B companies with operator-led recruiting expertise.

Book Recommendation & Closing (30:39)
Let My People Go Surfing and final reflections.

Julian Castelli (00:00.888)
Hello, this is Julian Castelli. I’m the host of the Growth Elevated Leadership Podcast, where each week I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders from the tech industry. Past guests have included CEOs and CXOs of great companies like Workfront, CHG Healthcare, Pathology Watch, InMoment, Canopy, the San Francisco 49ers, and many more. This episode is brought to you by Growth Elevated.

At Growth Elevated, we’re community of tech founders, CEOs, and CXOs who are committed to working together to share best practices and learnings in an effort to help all of us become better leaders. We do that through educational programs like this podcast, as well as our blog, and of course our events. And we just had our ninth annual Ski and Tech Summit in beautiful Park City, Utah.

And so if you like skiing and you like tech and learning about tech and AI and things like that, check us out at growthelevated.com and join us for one of our events in 2026. Today, I am excited to welcome Laura Marin to the podcast. Laura is the former head of talent with 14 years of experience scaling global industry defining startups, including companies like Riskified, Bolt and better.com.

She recently founded a new business called Rare Talent Ventures where she’s the CEO and that’s a bespoke recruiting talent advisory and career coaching firm that helps startups scale by connecting exceptional talent with visionary leaders. And all of the companies that are growing are needing to hire talent. And Laura, today I can’t wait to have you give us some of your wisdom and help us to do that right because it’s so hard to hire the right talent. Isn’t that true?

Laura Frances Merin (01:43.34)
Yes, and the right talent can make or break a company. No two ways about it.

Julian Castelli (01:47.885)
100 % so how do you get into recruiting in the first place?

Laura Frances Merin (01:51.778)
by accident. I was recruited to become a recruiter out of college. I was recruited immediately out of college and I said, absolutely not. What is this? Absolutely not. And then a few years later, a friend tricked me into an interview that I thought was, I was going to a recruiting firm for them to place me. She had set it up for them to interview me. She was in on the whole thing. They designed this whole thing. And by the end of the day, I was like,

Julian Castelli (01:53.628)
yeah?

You were recruited to become a recruiter.

Laura Frances Merin (02:21.046)
Okay yeah, I think I’ll do it. And haven’t looked back since.

Julian Castelli (02:25.677)
And what were the things that made them trick you or why they want you to become a recruiter? What were the skills that they were trying to… Are you a personable person? You can read people well? What are the skills a good recruiter has?

Laura Frances Merin (02:37.708)
I mean, I can talk to a wall. So I think that’s a good one. So I can chat with anybody. it’s recruiting is an opportunity to combine a few of the things I really love, which is helping people being involved in a business and helping make strategic decisions. And no two days are the same. So I get to have that variety. But the outcome is always the same, where I’m helping people and companies advance.

Julian Castelli (02:40.557)
Well, I’m grateful you’re talking to me.

Julian Castelli (03:03.756)
Terrific. So you were part of a recruiting firm and then you got into the startup world. You worked with some great, you know, well-known technology companies in the Bay Area and then you came to Utah here where we met. Let’s talk about your experience with Bolt. What is Bolt? What kind of company is that?

Laura Frances Merin (03:20.112)
Bolt’s evolved. When I joined Bolt back in 2018, it was on a mission to perfect checkout. So bringing one click checkout to e-commerce outside of Amazon. So like e-commerce payments, yeah, for companies who are processing, any company doing business online. And it now has evolved into an everything app, which I’m still catching up on what that means, but they have very exciting partnerships and they continue to grow. But when I was there, we were just focused on

Julian Castelli (03:29.814)
So it’s an e-commerce company. for people who,

Laura Frances Merin (03:49.292)
Check out FreeCommerce.

Julian Castelli (03:51.444)
Okay. so making a streamlining the checkout experience for companies.

Laura Frances Merin (03:57.122)
Yeah, and really helping smaller organizations when I joined, we were really focused on SMBs and mid-market companies, helping them compete in a world of Amazons. And how do you ensure that any…

Julian Castelli (04:09.342)
Right. So the people who aren’t Amazon, how do you have a really good e-commerce experience and get the close rate, right? Because, know, multiple steps, every step, you know, decreases your execution rate by meaningful percentages, right?

Laura Frances Merin (04:24.642)
for sure. yeah, we did everything we could to eliminate friction because friction creates abandoned cars. Yes. Time killed all deals. Yes.

Julian Castelli (04:29.899)
That’s right, friction kills clothes, yeah. Okay, so e-commerce. And this company was based in San Francisco and Salt Lake, is that right?

Laura Frances Merin (04:39.95)
Yes, so when I joined, our headquarters was in San Francisco. We had an office here in Salt Lake City as well, in Utah, beautiful Utah. And I helped open up our Toronto and New York City offices as well. So we had four locations by the time I left.

Julian Castelli (04:54.985)
Got it. And so how large was the business when you started?

Laura Frances Merin (04:57.846)
I was the 43rd person. So we were series A and I was number 43.

Julian Castelli (05:01.643)
Okay, Series A company, 40 people. Were you growing fast?

Laura Frances Merin (05:04.58)
We were growing very quickly. We were certainly trying to go very quickly. We were acquiring money merchants, we didn’t quite have the headcount to execute on our roadmap. And so that’s what I was brought in to do was to streamline our hiring processes, ensure we had a consistent high, high, high talent bar, and could find the best people in Utah and California to bring Bolt to the masses.

Julian Castelli (05:28.651)
So as a recruiter, that’s the perfect mandate. You got a fast growing company and they need people to execute and they need recruiting. So that was great. So just before we go into the story, you started in 2018 with 43 people, you grew fast. I think you told me earlier by 2020, you had how many people?

Laura Frances Merin (05:47.32)
We’re over 200 people. So we grew 5X. was…

Julian Castelli (05:50.763)
Okay, so you five X the business in two, just over two years, is that right? Okay, so that’s one of those crazy growth stories. He went from two offices to four offices and five X the amount of people. Wow, okay, so this is a hyper growth story. They needed people and you were a big part of the solution here. So tell us that story. When you got there, how were they recruiting?

Laura Frances Merin (05:54.338)
Yeah, yes, and doubled the operational effort. Yeah, it was huge.

Laura Frances Merin (06:07.332)
Yes. Yeah.

Laura Frances Merin (06:17.214)
I will say, I want to say this very candidly, is that it was very well intentioned, but recruiting had been structured by operators, not by recruiters. And so what this looked like was a bit of a disparate stochastic approach with…

inconsistent processes across the company. There were agencies we were working with, there were RPOs, which are embedded recruiting teams. We were working with a team of think it was like 13 people in the Philippines doing sourcing, but there wasn’t a consistent cohesive narrative around who are we as an employer? What will people get out of joining Bolt? Why should they join Bolt? Who are we trying to hire? Like really like what makes a great Bolter? And

We didn’t have the internal infrastructure set up of even every interview should look the same. How are we evaluating people? How are we controlling for unconscious biases? Essentially, I came in, assessed where we were, what was working, what wasn’t, and I was very lucky and very fortunate I had the support of a boss who was like, hey, I did this the best I could.

please help. And so it was, you know, there definitely was a, it was a process and took a little bit of time, but we got to a point where we had a very fast, fine-tuned machine and helped us scale 5X in two years.

Julian Castelli (07:45.192)
Yeah, you must have be able to grow. Yeah. Five X in two years, hiring hundreds of people. How many people did you hire personally in that journey?

Laura Frances Merin (07:49.252)
Yes.

I personally hired 113 full-time employees while managing a team of six people. And I had a 99 % close rate with a 100 % close rate for all technical talent. I’m very proud of that. Yeah.

Julian Castelli (07:59.88)
Wow.

Julian Castelli (08:06.439)
Wow. What’s a typical close rate for a technology company recruiting, you think?

Laura Frances Merin (08:11.948)
It’s gonna be low 70s.

Julian Castelli (08:15.177)
Okay, so 99 % is pretty awesome.

Laura Frances Merin (08:18.84)
Yeah, yeah, it was, I definitely perfected my approach to candidate experience in clothing and over the years, I definitely.

Julian Castelli (08:29.802)
So what was your secret weapon? How did you close 99 % of these candidates? And you worked so hard to find them, right? Is that a big deal when you’re recruiting? mean, you don’t really hear about that as most people aren’t used to being on that side. it’s finding the right person is what people think. But is the close rate a big part of that? And is that something that is unusual to have high of a close rate? if so, what was your secret?

Laura Frances Merin (08:34.712)
Yes. Yes.

Laura Frances Merin (08:42.531)
Mm-hmm.

Laura Frances Merin (08:51.524)
Oh, absolutely. mean, on my epitaph, I want my epitaph to be good. It’s it’s not big of a deal. And I think that, you know, people think about, okay, we want a certain pedigree or we want, we think we want these certain skills, but the actual recruitment process is you are…

Julian Castelli (08:55.955)
Hahaha

Laura Frances Merin (09:12.982)
refining the idea of what makes a great employee, what makes a great candidate, makes a great employee. And it’s a very delicate balance because you are, in many ways, you’re just an information broker. You’re sharing information with candidates, hey, you should want to work here. You’re sharing information with hiring teams, hey, you should want to hire this person. And it’s a very interesting dance because you’re essentially dating multiple people and you have to, you know, it’s…

Julian Castelli (09:39.43)
Yeah, you’re a matchmaker, right?

Laura Frances Merin (09:40.836)
You’re a watchmaker. the way that I found to really, the way that I found to be the most effective was I developed a process that is best described as being a professional creep, where I would get to really know my candidate. Yes, a professional creep, where I really want, it entails being really close to,

Julian Castelli (09:57.041)
A professional creep?

What does that entail?

Laura Frances Merin (10:08.386)
Redefining boundaries and not not in a bad way, but like, you know, I asked candidates Hey, can I text you not just I’m gonna email you? Can I text you so we get into texting conversations? I’ve said it’s playlists They’ve asked for pictures of my dog before and it’s it’s building an authentic relationship where they can tell I’m invested in them and they’re invested in me and I’m I’m a proxy for the company and I am somebody who they learn to trust and

Julian Castelli (10:18.312)
Mm-hmm.

Laura Frances Merin (10:36.288)
in the ideal relationship is you have. Yeah.

Julian Castelli (10:37.906)
So you’re able to build trust as a company recruiter. That’s a big deal. I’ve been called by lots of recruiters and I can see, you know, there’s some that are just very transactional and then there are others that you actually, you have to learn to trust, particularly if you’re leaving a job to take another job. You you really have to believe these people and have some credibility in them.

Laura Frances Merin (10:58.76)
Julie, no, you touched upon something that is one of my core maxims and we can, I this conversation for a second podcast, but what has informed my approach to hiring? And I’ve shared this with every hiring team of mine and it definitely shapes the candidate experience is you’re not just hiring a person to solve a problem, which is why you open a role, you make a hire because there’s a problem that can’t be solved with your current team. However, fundamentally,

Julian Castelli (11:27.144)
Mm-hmm.

Laura Frances Merin (11:28.696)
doing is you’re asking someone to change their entire life to make your equity worth something and to bring your life. Huge risk. mean, people are leaving their 401ks, they’re leaving their commutes, they’re leaving, they understand the politics where they work, they have the dress code, they know their commute, whatever it is, right? There are so many things. They know their vesting schedule, whatever it is.

Julian Castelli (11:33.958)
Right. Taking a big risk.

Julian Castelli (11:48.836)
into a world of unknown.

Laura Frances Merin (11:50.628)
world of unknown and so by showing up as my authentic, very friendly self and I’m able to build that trust with my candidates, they know, maybe this is part of my East Coast charm, my lack of filter, is they know they’re gonna get the truth from me and my hiring partners also know that they’re gonna get the truth from me and so as a result by becoming deeply embedded in the lives of my candidates and my hiring partners, it’s…

Julian Castelli (12:06.343)
Yeah.

Laura Frances Merin (12:17.484)
It’s how I’ve achieved this 99 % close rate because if we reach a moment in time where there’s, I can tell there’s a reservation from the hiring manager of, hey, we really need somebody who knows Python, right? We’ll put it on Python. Somebody who knows Python. Or somebody who speaks Japanese. And that really, can’t, you can’t, that’s must have for the job. Then I need to say to the candidate, hey, I’m really sorry, we’re pivoting in the role.

Julian Castelli (12:37.978)
that really you can’t.

Laura Frances Merin (12:46.756)
and having an authentic and honest and awkward at times conversation and they have my trust. The way that this also shows up in how I build trust with my candidates and how it’s gotten to this 99 % close rate is if I notice hesitation on their end, I do everything I can to get to the root of it, to understand, okay, why has your communication pattern changed? Are you responding more slowly because you’re busy or because I’m no longer a priority because this role is no longer a priority? And I’m not gonna bring somebody all the way to the end of the interview process just to say I

Julian Castelli (12:53.799)
Yeah. Yeah.

Laura Frances Merin (13:16.71)
I’m only going to move you forward in the process if I really believe that this is a mutual fit. And so I think that having that…

the ability to have built that trust with all parties in the hiring process, that they trust me when I say someone should or should not continue the process. Everybody wins, and then I guess end up with this epitaph-worthy 99 % close rate.

Julian Castelli (13:38.916)
Yeah. So, you know, it’s like, it’s like a sales funnel, right? Like you’re, you’re, you’re knowing when to cut people out of the funnel if the, if it’s going be wasting time and you can, you can really increase your close rate by qualifying, by getting good information, by getting close to the customer’s problem. You know, I’m speaking sales, but it’s very similar to recruiting, I’m sure.

Laura Frances Merin (13:41.73)
Yes.

Laura Frances Merin (13:57.964)
a million percent. One of the very first things I was taught in recruiting is that recruiting is the only time where the product can return itself. It’s the only time. You’re not gonna buy a license to Microsoft and Microsoft’s gonna be like, actually, no, we really don’t wanna work with you anymore. It’s the only time that this thing is gonna say, I don’t wanna be in this process anymore. And so it really is, it’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s fun.

Julian Castelli (14:28.25)
Yeah. So, so you, you sound like it was a very distributed, international, outsourced recruiting dynamic. Now Bolt was growing fast. So you were having commercial success and so you changed it to an in-house team. You built an in-house team, but what were some of the challenges that you, you faced and some of the, you know, maybe cultural or, or, thematic changes that you, that you had to, you had to deal with to build a successful recruiting arm that could five X the business in two years.

Laura Frances Merin (14:43.62)
class.

Laura Frances Merin (14:58.254)
For sure. So there were a couple issues that we had to navigate as a team. The first was moving beyond, we had to understand quantity versus quality. And because the Recruit function had been built, again, I had a wonderful boss and the operator I worked with, they were incredible. They just were not recruited. They were like, how do we maximize our output? Because it’s a numbers game, because it is a lot like sales. It’s a numbers game, we’ll just do outbound.

Julian Castelli (15:13.198)
Okay.

Laura Frances Merin (15:27.012)
as we’re building a nascent employer brand, because we’re series A. Encouraging the team to take a step back and say, what do we want to be known for? We want people to understand how phenomenal our team is, that craftsmanship in every single function is paramount and is a top priority for us. That needs to show up in how we present ourselves to candidates. So instead of…

booting out thousands of messages per month, which I remember in my second or third interview, they told me the number and I was like, whoa, this is, I was like, yeah, we sent like 5,000 messages last week and I was like, my God, my God. This is gonna be so much to clean up. it’s like, okay, like let’s really, let’s look at.

Julian Castelli (16:04.549)
Spam.

Laura Frances Merin (16:13.88)
Conversion rates does not just look at top of funnel. Let’s look at conversion rates Let’s look at how do we build the strong employer brand? So that was one thing was really shifting the To an abundance mindset of if we do this the right way quality is going to trump quantity another another thing we needed to overcome was confirmation bias and a lot of

Laura Frances Merin (16:40.792)
these what I consider almost tropes in startup land of you need to only hire from certain schools or you only need to hire out of certain companies. You don’t want, it’s too much of a risk to your business. These are people who’ve been able to attend or contribute to these organizations, institutions. They’ve already been vetted. They’re phenomenal. They’re the best there is. Let’s rely on that infrastructure to save us time and build the best company. But

Julian Castelli (17:08.762)
So they’re looking for the brand versus the person.

Laura Frances Merin (17:11.724)
Yes, yes. getting, I was new to Silicon Valley when I joined Bold. I’d moved from New York to San Francisco to build the company. And it was wild because I hadn’t seen this before. In the Northeast, there are a lot of different schools, a lot of different companies, know, they’re a regional school. Like, there was not this emphasis on you only hire out of two schools, whereas I got to San Francisco and it was suddenly Stanford and Berkeley or bust. And so…

really being able to understand why that had become the culture for our entire industry and working with the founders and working with the leadership team, the hiring managers to say, let’s take a step back and look at what we really need, the kind of person who can really get this done, and then let’s find ways to surface that talent from unexpected, schools, unexpected industries, whatever it is, because they’re,

There are multiple benefits to doing it that way. Number one, not as many people are trying to fish in the same pond. So that’s always good, right? So you’re not competing as much. The war on talent is a real thing. And so, okay, so if we’re gonna try to recruit out of schools or companies that these are up and coming, we’re not gonna have such competition.

Julian Castelli (18:21.806)
Sure.

Julian Castelli (18:32.318)
Do you have any examples of like, you know, a non-traditional background where you hired just a star and you were able to prove your point?

Laura Frances Merin (18:40.708)
Pete Jones, Pete Jones will always have a piece in my heart. He was somebody I, my, this was one of the wild, hiring him, he’s still a dear friend, hiring him was one of the highlights of my career.

The day that I decided we were going to hire him is one of the most chaotic days of my life. It was wild. So Pete had a more unusual background. Pete had been really early into blockchain, which and crypto, which the founders of Bolt had the Bolt actually had a tie back to crypto in the very first iteration. So there was that tie in. But Pete had been a semi-professional baseball player. He had his own wine label. Pete had he had some sales background. He had worked at a

Julian Castelli (19:20.174)
Huh. Wow.

Laura Frances Merin (19:25.306)
a payments company a couple years prior, but it was just, I just saw something on his resume and I saw something in him of he’s really entrepreneurial. He has grit that doesn’t show up as like, I went to Stanford or like, I was one of the first 10 employees at Stripe. It was, he knew who he was, he understood his goals, he worked toward them relentlessly, absolutely relentless. And so Pete was, just, and he had this presence to him that

Julian Castelli (19:53.033)
Yeah.

Laura Frances Merin (19:55.036)
I knew if I was this enraptured, I’m interviewing 16 people a day, if he’s sticking out to me, he’s going to stick out to our merchants. He’s going to stick out to our customers and not we need a salesperson. Pete came on site one day and I had been piloting a new way of interviewing people where I wanted to … There’s a Peter Thiel approach. It’s in zero to one of these interview questions. You ask somebody, know

essentially what’s an overrated concept or what’s a belief that is too many people have. We’ll copy and paste in a different version. say it after. We’ll cut this part out. I wanted to have my own take on how do we get a sense of how someone really thinks and how are they going to be persuasive, especially in a sales role. It was…

Julian Castelli (20:36.643)
I wanted to see.

Julian Castelli (20:48.618)
Mm-hmm

Laura Frances Merin (20:49.826)
wild conversation that turned into, but it was fun. And every time I created an obstacle, he overcame it in a persuasive, wonderful way. And I just was like, wow, if this guy is this, he’s not relying on anyone’s ideas but his own.

Julian Castelli (21:03.232)
He’s overcoming objections. That’s good. Yeah.

Laura Frances Merin (21:05.151)
overcoming objections, but he’s doing it from first principles. I, Julian, I kid you not, I was like, stay in this room. I went into another conference room. Our CEO was meeting with outside counsel. I pulled the CEO out of that interview and I said, do you need to with him right now? Because we need to give him an offer today. Today. I’m not letting anyone else hire him. And Pete wound up being one of the very top salespeople.

Julian Castelli (21:23.04)
Nice.

Laura Frances Merin (21:29.686)
He is, and he just continues to be, this maverick, heart of gold, killer salesperson. And if we had only stuck to, they need to have come out of these companies and these industries, we never would have gotten him. And yeah, we’re all better for having worked together.

Julian Castelli (21:47.414)
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, a lot of, a lot of first time founders really don’t know how to hire. And so they kind of rely on these benchmarks, which are great benchmarks, right? There’s reason people pay a lot of money to go to Stanford or Berkeley and, and it’s great, but, you know, look, let’s face it, there’s a bell curve in every population, including the population of people from those schools. And, and it’s a very small part of the population. So, you know, being able to, to, to, to expand and actually have the confidence.

that you can make that right hire and find the right person. I think most CEOs don’t have that confidence. I think they have this anxiety. Now there’s a saying that says, know, fire fast and hire slow. I find that CEOs do the opposite. I think they, because they lack the confidence that they can hire really well and crush it, they fire really slow and keep people because they don’t have the confidence they can upgrade. And then they hire fast, you know, using these kinds of shortcuts that you’re talking about.

because they just want to get that person say, okay, that person’s from startup, you know, brand name, ABCD, you name it, right? Is that consistent with what you see?

Laura Frances Merin (22:52.132)
Oh, a million percent. And it, I think, comes down to do you have an abundance mindset? Do you have conviction in what you’re building? Do you have conviction in your own judgment? Don’t outsource to other people. Hire the best person who knows exactly

Julian Castelli (23:03.137)
Mm-hmm.

Or to the brands, you’re outsourcing to the brands or the archetypes. Yeah.

Laura Frances Merin (23:10.23)
Exactly. Sorry, that’s what I by saying like outsourcing. Yeah, they’re saying like, okay, well so-and-so has seen success in this or I’m hearing from a mentor or someone, you know, one of our investors that we should be hiring out of this company. Ultimately, founders, this is your dream. This is your vision that you’re bringing to life. The culture comes from you. Only you are building this company. trust yourself enough to say, I know what …

we need here and I’m going to hire that person and the there’s an anxiety of I just need to get somebody in that seat I need to get this done I need to show investors that we’re higher fast yeah and then you need to hire

Julian Castelli (23:47.713)
I wanna hire fast, cause I’m anxious. And you gotta hire slow. And you have to be deliberate, you have to have a process.

Laura Frances Merin (23:56.568)
so deliberate, being process driven is very underestimated. I personally have found that structure creates freedom. And when you have a really clean process and you have a structured approach to assessing talent, that’s when you notice the spikes. That’s when you create the framework to say, this person is truly exceptional.

Julian Castelli (24:17.749)
Yeah, because you have consistency and everyone’s using the same benchmarks, right? You can see the spikes because you’re measuring things, right?

Laura Frances Merin (24:24.164)
Yes, and when you know yourself, you know your company well enough. Yes, I’d be happy to come back. Yes.

Julian Castelli (24:26.485)
We could have a whole other podcast on that, know, the specifics of hiring processes, because I, I, create, give a lot of my company’s scorecards and they’re like, this is amazing. It’s so much easier now. I’m like, yes, it is. Let’s be data driven. Right. Well, Laura, let’s, let’s talk about your new venture. Now you, you had experience at Bolt. You had experience at Riskified. You experienced at better.com. So you’ve, you’ve helped a lot of founders and, companies create innovation and exciting tech companies.

Laura Frances Merin (24:39.416)
God bless a rubric.

Julian Castelli (24:52.661)
But now you’re starting your own. Last year you started at Rare Talent Ventures. Tell us a little bit about Rare Talent Ventures and why you started it.

Laura Frances Merin (24:59.81)
Yeah, so Rare Talent Ventures is to me the inevitable outcome of having spent over a decade scaling industry-defining companies and being able to perfect and hone my craft in intense, amazing, wild, wild companies working with some of the smartest, most creative people in the world. But ultimately what it came down to is

for well over a decade, was building someone else’s dream. I, Grace, I did some of the best work of my life and I’m so grateful for it. But I wanted to find a way to build my own dream while also doing the work that I love to do and that I felt really confident I could do better than almost anybody else in the world, which I think all founders were a bit delusional. We all think we can do it better than anyone else. So I’ll just own that up front. And I, I…

Julian Castelli (25:30.986)
Mm-hmm.

Laura Frances Merin (25:56.48)
I wanted every company to be able to build the right team and I wanted them to have the right infrastructure. And I realized that there was a world where I could work really hard and continue to scale these outstanding companies, but to do so while building my own dream. yeah, so that’s how it all came together and it also was an opportunity for me to…

accomplish a goal and a dream I’d had for over seven years, which was to move to Park City full time. And so by building Rare Talent Ventures, I created that freedom in my life and that space to finally call Park City home.

Julian Castelli (26:33.685)
Welcome to Park City. What kind of companies does Rare Talent serve?

Laura Frances Merin (26:39.492)
Yeah, so I work with primarily seed stage through series B companies. I work with founders who are looking for structure. They’re either looking for somebody who’s going to help them through a talent advisory capacity where I come in and build their infrastructure, create scorecards with them, teach their team how to interview, teach them how to plan their headcount, or for one-off hiring practices and one-off needs where they say, hey. Yes.

Julian Castelli (27:04.49)
So you’ll help them develop the hiring talent internally as well as doing outsource searches.

Laura Frances Merin (27:14.028)
Yes, and it’s such a small world. One of the ways I was connected to Growth Elevated is because I launched in with Vannan. I actually helped her years ago, helped her refine some of her in-house recruiting processes. Yes, so it’s a small world. And now I mean, just had an incredible exit. you know, I guess there’s some proof there. But most importantly, I get to work with founders who know they want to build an incredible team and they’re just not sure exactly how to do it. So they come to me either for the advisory work or and or one off hire.

Julian Castelli (27:24.601)
nice.

Okay, wonderful.

Laura Frances Merin (27:43.992)
needs for operators.

Julian Castelli (27:47.465)
And what differentiates rare talent? You’re talking earlier about kind the operating experience versus just hiring another recruiting firm full of maybe career recruiters. How do you differentiate from those bigger names?

Laura Frances Merin (28:02.872)
I think that my… What I think makes Rare Talent Ventures and Laura Frances Maron, this entire… I’m going say this again. Sorry, let me take a step back. Thank you for being so patient.

What differentiates Rare Talent Ventures from every other recruiting firm out there is that I have done the roles that I’m hiring for.

I have been ahead of talent, I’ve been ahead of people, I’ve been a chief of staff. I have been the person who had to make tough calls about how do we plan our headcount, how do we assess hard skills versus soft skills, how do we define what is a… I feel like I got a in the wrong track. Sorry, I’m gonna go and try that again. Sorry, I’m like getting my own way. Sorry, I’ll try this again. Sorry, I know, I feel bad. Okay, I’m almost done.

Julian Castelli (28:55.881)
Okay.

Laura Frances Merin (29:02.66)
What differentiates Rare Talent Ventures from any other recruiting company, any other one-off recruiter or RPO is that I have firsthand experience as an operator. I’ve been a head of talent. I’ve been a chief of staff. I’ve been a head of people. I have built companies from the ground up and I bring that operating experience and that obsessive, obsessive dedication to quality.

that I used to build companies that went public. I’m gonna bring that to your organization. we touched upon how I’m a professional creep before. I still cannot extricate myself from these companies. understand that I’m not, like, logically I know I’m not part of this company, but when I’m hiring for you, I think I am. So I’m only gonna hire somebody who I think I would want to work with.

Julian Castelli (29:35.613)
Mm-hmm.

Julian Castelli (29:53.384)
So you get personal with both the clients and the candidates, because you’re a people person and you build connectivity, which is great. And I like the fact that you have the operating experience, so you know what’s critical for these roles, and you can really assess it with a good process, et cetera. I think that’s a skill set that all startups need, and I think that sounds very attractive.

Laura Frances Merin (29:58.242)
Yes, yes, very much so.

Laura Frances Merin (30:03.31)
Yes, yes.

Laura Frances Merin (30:20.515)
Yeah.

Julian Castelli (30:20.87)
Laura, thanks for joining us today. Tell me, tell me if people, I always ask people, if you only have time to listen to one podcast or read one book or one blog, what would you recommend that people listening might want to listen to check out?

Laura Frances Merin (30:39.672)
They should read Let My People Go Surfing by Yvonne Chouinard. Yvonne Chouinard is the founder of Patagonia and that is a company that was built as a love story of him seeing a need in the market and also wanting to build a company that matches ethics. And that is what I am doing here at Rare Talent Ventures where I’m building a company where I stand behind every single thing I do and every single candidate place. And…

Every time I’ve seen another founder say, hey, I read, let my people go surfing. I’ve been like, you know how to build a good culture. So I would say, if you want to build a company that’s true to who you are, yeah.

Julian Castelli (31:15.291)
I love that. I want to check that out. I haven’t read that yet, but it sounds awesome.

Laura Frances Merin (31:20.632)
You’ll love it.

Julian Castelli (31:21.629)
Well, that’s a great one. Laura, where can people find you and where can they find a Rare Talent Ventures?

Laura Frances Merin (31:28.056)
Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn at, you can look up Laura Frances Marin or just linkedin.com slash in slash Laura Frances with an E, so F-R-A-N-C-E-S, or you can find me at raretalent.ventures.

Julian Castelli (31:44.465)
RareTalent.Ventures. Excellent. Well, best of luck with the new startup. And thank you so much for sharing your experience with our community today. Great talking with you. Bye.

Laura Frances Merin (31:52.302)
Thank you so much, Julian. Have a wonderful day. Talk to you soon. Bye.