Meet the Team: Nico, Head of People & Culture — It’s not about knowing what to do but about knowing what NOT to do.
Meet Nico Blier-Silvestri who has joined the team at Dreamcraft to build our P&C value add platform. Nico ended up in the Danish startup ecosystem by “accident”, fast forward 10 years and he has had impactful roles in some of the most successful Danish startups. Here, you can read more about Nico’s journey from HR leader to founder and how he plans on using his knowledge to support Dreamcraft's portfolio.
Growing up in Paris, Nico and his 3 younger sisters were raised by a single mum. It all meant that Nico learned early to be part of a team and that the greater good is more important than personal gain. This had a big impact on his vision as an HR leader later on in his career.
After studying Marketing & Management in France and Canada, Nico set his foot out in the world and spent a few years in Amsterdam, Bangalore and Dublin. There, he started working on operations at scale while managing international teams and later, entered the world of headhunting.
“I always felt the need to go and test myself outside of France as soon as possible. My early years in the Netherlands and India brought me an insane amount of knowledge both on the operational side at HP and CPM and on the management side as my teams were extremely diverse in terms of background.”
From there, Nico’s interest in People and Culture grew. He spent 5 solid years headhunting in the finance industry in Ireland and France
“The best way to learn Recruitment in my opinion. The pace, the hunting to find the right profiles, stakeholder management on both the candidate and the hiring manager makes it a tough learning curve but extremely rewarding”
But something was missing.
“Headhunting is fun but you rarely get to see the results of your work on a day-to-day basis. You find great talent, plug them in great places, and then you move on and I felt that was frustrating. I wanted a bigger impact”
Nico then decided to move into internal recruitment first at Yahoo and then at Informatica.
“ I was an enterprise guy, suit up every morning, work on your specific projects, being a small piece of a big machine”
In 2012 Nico moved to Copenhagen as a “love refugee”.
“None of the big companies were so keen on hiring someone in recruitment/HR that could not speak Danish. One company was, one that I never had heard of before: Trustpilot”
And so Nico’s journey in the Danish startup ecosystem started. At Trustpilot, Falcon, Unity and Peakon he learned about hypergrowth. Working on the entire talent lifecycle from building recruitment strategies to onboarding and retention programs.
“I feel truly privileged to have been part of all those journeys, the amount of learning by doing has been insane! The amount of failure, rebound and restart is what has made those last 10 years invaluable I believe”
Nico founded Platypus.io in 2019, an HR-tech platform allowing organizations to collect real-time data on their culture, the results of 15 years of experience in HR and a lot of painkillers (that he was taking to manage the pain of a knee surgery) and grew it alongside his co-founder from his basement to an office with 25 people.
In September he decided to join Dreamcraft VC as their first ever Head of People and Culture.
“I think nothing prepares you for becoming a founder and although I have had a fair amount of experience in early startups there were so many things I was not aware of. I really want to support early-stage founders on P&C, very much on a personal level, as a sounding board. After all, I have been on both sides of the equation and I know for a fact that everything is about people.”
It is not only at work that Nico enjoys building things. At home you can find him building a treehouse for his 2 kids, spending time cooking or creating massive empires while playing Civilisation 6!
Nico is as well very active in supporting the growth of Copenhagen Wolves, the LGBT+ rugby club in Copenhagen on the pitch as a player.
At Dreamcraft, Nico will be building our organization internally in everything People and Culture related while externally both supporting our current portfolio and being part of the investment process.
If you wish to get in touch with Nico, you can connect with him on LinkedIn.
Meet more of the Dreamcraft team here:
