We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures Fund II has completed an investment in Getro. Getro helps VC firms and other professional communities build referral-based talent networks.

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Background: 

There are about 3,000 VC firms in the U.S., and they’re constantly looking for top tier talent for their portfolio companies. So are roughly 10,000 other professional communities in America. Universities, chambers of commerce, city governments, foundations—they all want the best, most highly recommended people, yet they all face the same problem in finding them. 

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One of the most effective hiring strategies is generating referrals from a network of highly qualified candidates. They come pre-vetted, and they’re equal parts knowledgeable and fired up about the positions they’re pursuing. Unfortunately, given the casual nature of networks and recommendations, this strategy is also one of the hardest to organize and track at scale. On the hiring side, this problem is especially acute for VCs, who may be trying to service numerous different portfolio companies with the informal and inadequate talent network strategies and tools that already exist. On the applicant side, the difficulty of finding the right person during the hiring process who can be your advocate within a company, and getting the proper referrals, keeps people from connecting to the work they find most meaningful.

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Company Specifics:

Getro (formerly known as Monday.vc) uses digital tools to build talent networks that ID open positions, turbocharge referrals, and help talent find the right opportunities within and outside their networks. When VCs, and eventually other professional communities, embed Getro on their website, it aggregates all open positions within their portfolio companies in a single, well-designed jobs board that automatically refreshes as positions open and close. Using this resource, VCs and other professionals can recommend great potential candidates to hiring managers, and candidates can see all available opportunities across the unified network. This makes it easier for talent to find the right, fulfilling home for their energy. 

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In addition to improving the process of filling individual positions, Getro also helps professional communities build out talent networks based on their shared association, dramatically widening the pool of talent, and making it easier to reach the untapped potential of communities and associations traditionally underserved by the VC world. Getro is currently connected to over 12,000 venture backed companies within VC portfolios, and has over 10,000 professionals with profiles within these networks. VC is the current use case, but Getro plans to expand into the huge variety of other talent networks out there like universities, professional organizations, and chambers of commerce. 

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Getro came on our radar during Techstars Boulder 2017, and it’s been a pleasure to watch them bootstrap a successful company focused on VC. We’re excited to invest in them as they expand into new technologies and sectors.

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