Thrive TRM hires serial entrepreneur Lucinda Duncalfe to help the recruiting platform grow
“We are looking for larger quarters,” to house the firm’s expanded staff, somewhere in the Philadelphia area, said Duncalfe, who stepped down as chief executive at Conshohocken-based Monetate last summer.
Thrive TRM, the software-as-a-service recruiting platform set up by Brad Stadler and Joe Riggione, has tapped Lucinda Duncalfe as executive chairman to help in fund-raising and strategic planning as the firm plans a rapid expansion.
“We are looking for larger quarters” to house the firm’s expanded staff somewhere in the Philadelphia area, said Duncalfe, who stepped down as chief executive at Conshohocken-based Monetate last summer.
She plans to join the Thrive staff -- currently 28 people -- on weekly visits and to convene retreats in New York once a month. Duncalfe lives in her native Brooklyn, where she and husband Russell Holt, who works for Gabriel Weinberg’s Paoli-based DuckDuckGo search engine, are raising their kids.
The new job “is not just raising capital,” said Duncalfe. Besides helping Thrive TRM president Reed Flesher, a Drexel grad, pitch to venture capital and private equity investors, she’ll help sort the “tremendous number of strategic options” for growing the firm.
Flesher says the firm’s clients, including several of the 50 most valuable U.S. tech companies and some of the largest Philadelphia-area for-profit employers, have placed more than 6,000 managers, professionals, and board members using Thrive since its launch in 2015. The business tends to recur as clients need new bosses and professionals, he said.
Thrive’s co-founders, Stadler and Riggione, also started the Haddonfield-based national executive search firm True Search, which is more of a traditional search company with 10 offices around the world.
Thrive, a spin-off, says its software speeds up recruiting by allowing clients’ bosses and hiring team members to rapidly share and update materials. Duncalfe said she learned about the system and its forward display and collaboration as a user, when seeking her own replacement and other key staff at Monetate.
Thrive TRM, with staff also in San Francisco and Austin, says it has been used by more than 60 executive-search firms, such as Boston-based Polachi and Tampa-based WilsonHCG, and 30 tech investor firms, including Boston-based Battery Ventures, to build leadership and engineering teams at their client and portfolio companies.
Over the last 20 years, Duncalfe, a Penn grad, has held top jobs at Philadelphia-area tech ventures ClickEquations, TurnTide, and Destiny Software, as well as the corner office at Monetate. She has also backed vegetarian-delivery and sex-improvement ventures, among other start-ups.
Duncalfe remains a director of Monetate and also serves on the board of WireSecure, a large-fund-transfer fraud-protection company.