Team Spotlight: Ashley Nowicki
“The best recruiters care so much about the people they recruit that they end up being in their lives far longer and far beyond a single job opportunity”
Ashley joined Prime Movers Lab and was handed a long list of internal roles we wanted to fill. She also immediately became a highly sought after resource by our portfolio companies looking to fill senior positions. Over the course of the next several weeks, Mondays would come around and the team would list off our Top Outcomes for 2021 and week after week, we would check off another internal role filled with an outstanding new partner, and week after week we would get updates on the stellar candidates she sourced for our portfolio. I got the opportunity to dig into the person behind these rockstar results and I hope you enjoy this recap as much as I enjoyed our conversation.
Brad: Ashley, you’ve had a very impressive career, could you walk me through the path that led to Prime Movers Lab?
First off, thank you for the kind words. In 2016, I decided I wanted to move from the product side of people to the venture capital side. My thinking was that at some point the very best recruiters want to stop giving people salaries to build things for other people, and start deploying capital to them to bring their own ideas to life.
So I sought out advice from the person whose job I wanted, one of the original Talent Partners at a well respected venture capital firm in the valley, whose phone call I knew everyone would pick up. I asked him how to land a role like his without going back to business school to get an MBA. He told me to go to a highly visible startup in the valley and take it through a highly sought after exit. It took me 18 months but I did just that. During that experience, I met an Executive Coach from Founders Fund who would later go on to introduce me to Prime Movers Lab. The firm sounded too good to be true given its scientific breakthrough and transformational focus but 12 months later, I joined the team.
Sometimes, the best resume we can build is being in the trenches with and seeking direct advice from the people we really respect. People have helped me level up in my career and I’ve done the same for them. The path is always paved with people who have helped us get to where we are and where we are going.
Brad: What does it mean to be an outstanding recruiter?
The best recruiters care so much about the people they recruit that they end up being in their lives far longer and far beyond a single job opportunity. They get invited to candidates weddings, executives’ birthday celebrations, baby showers and more. That is what it takes to compete for the best talent, sincere investment into who people are both at work and outside of it, where you understand and support people on a deeper level even when they don’t ask you to.
Recruiters know how much money you make. Good recruiters have an offer acceptance rate of 80% or above. But exceptional recruiters know that a high profile candidate is leaving their spouse, relocating to London to take their startup to the next level and need to account for additional money for alimony in compensation discussions with angel investors and venture capitalists when fundraising.
Brad: What does diversity mean to you? Why is it important?
Diversity is making room for people who have different thoughts, expertise, experiences and opinions than you do. Making that room also means assuming nothing about a person, leading with an open mind and allowing them to share with you who they are and why they are unique. This is also how we turn diverse teams into resilient products and companies.
The short of why it is important though? Diversity = profitability. According to Harvard Business Review, “companies with above-average total diversity, measured as the average of six dimensions of diversity (migration, industry, career path, gender, education, age), had both 19% points higher innovation revenues and 9% points higher EBIT margins, on average.”
The other important thing to keep in mind is that diversity does not just happen and you will not stumble into a fully representational team. You have to be intentional about it so make sure to prioritize and carve out time for it. From my experience, it takes 10% more time to build a bigger, better, more strategic funnel. Your team will benefit immensely for years to come by taking the extra time so be more mindful about your recruiting and team building approach early on (10 employees or less ideally).
Diversity is not about a lower bar, it’s about a bigger funnel
Brad: You played sports when you were younger, what lessons have you taken from the field into the office?
I played on a nationally competitive softball team, and it taught me that every person is critical. It’s the same professionally. We all have a role to play and my job is to find the right people to fill each spot on the field. You are looking for balance. Sometimes when people think about diversity, they think of skin color or gender identity, often times visual cues. But a balanced team is so much more than that; it’s about having people from different belief systems and people who grew up in different economic circumstances and people from the LGTBQ community, it’s about having people who are welcoming and strong listeners working alongside people who are results driven and focus solely on what the data tells them. It’s multi-dimensional.
Brad: What advice would you give your 20-year-old self?
When I decided that I wanted to move into venture capital, I was employee #1 at an enterprise hiring company, working side by side with the co-founders building a recruitment platform we were proud of. But I didn’t find placing designers at Nike or marketing folks at Apple exciting anymore. I wanted to build companies in a more consequential way and support early stage founders in one of the top three areas that keep them up at night: hiring the most relevant and rewarding talent.
When I called the person who established roles like mine at prominent VC firms decades ago, he told me going to a high profile technology startup in San Francisco, leading their scaling and hiring process through hyper growth, and taking it through an exciting exit was the first step towards moving into venture capital. That this experience was immensely more important than a degree. But he was also honest about it being just one step of many because I had to do it over and over again, in different industries and on different technologies, through different phases of growth.
So to answer your question… I would tell 20 year old me to be patient. To understand that to build a career you are proud of, without burning out, takes time and a diverse set of experiences. With each conversation, each meeting, each introduction, the goal should be to improve yourself and to improve the caliber of people in your inner orbit. The kind of improvement that allows you to operate at the top of your game takes years to perfect. So be patient.
The second thing I would encourage 20 year old me to do is choose problem solving over apology. Sometimes people, especially young women, get into the habit of saying sorry instead of solving the problem. Progress isn’t sprinkled with apologies, it’s rooted in unapologetic decision making, constant learning and thoughtful re-strategization.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.
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