Small on purpose.

Light overhead — less layers — more attention.

— WHY / 01

Small on purpose means something specific

Light overhead isn’t a discount pitch. It means what you pay buys search hours instead of a bench and an office.

The person who takes your intake is the person who calls the candidate, preps them for your panel, and works the offer.

The idea is to run efficiently and key-in on people who can move your whole company.

What selectivity actually costs me

I take a small number of searches at a time. That’s the tradeoff for working this way, and it’s why I work retained rather than racing two other firms to the same three candidates.

It also means I turn work down. If your role isn’t one I can do well, I’d rather say so in the first call than take the retainer and find out in month three.

— WHY / 02

Credentials surface candidates. Judgment places the right ones.

A resume tells you where someone has been. It won’t tell you how they behave when perception disagrees with reality two weeks before a demo, or whether they’ll flag the slip while there’s still time to fix it.

I assess the behavior — against what success actually looks like in your company, defined before sourcing starts.

Beyond-Credentials Vetting™

What breaks, stalls, or quietly fails if this role isn’t filled in the next 30–90 days? Key signals will arise. This is how I find them.

— WHY / NO

When I’m not your best call

You need thirty résumés by Friday. Volume isn’t what this is.

You want three firms racing each other. I’ll do contingency when it genuinely fits. It isn’t how I do my best work.

You want to hand it off and stop thinking about it. I’ll ask for your time, and I’ll tell you things about your role and your process you may not enjoy hearing.

One hire that has to be right? That’s the work.

— ABOUT / CHRIS ESCOBAR

I was a cultural anthropologist at nine — well, not really, unless you count my dissecting television commercials.

My mom and I used to pick apart TV commercials and to always ask why and what the heck is going on: The impossibly calm mother mopping mud off a spotless kitchen floor. The aftershave that promised membership in a club. I could see the machinery before I had a word for it, and I studied advertising partly to confirm my curiosity.

The (anthropologist) filter never switched off. It turns out to be useful equipment for this work. And I’m still learning each week.

An operator’s perspective on what leaders actually need

Marketing & brand, then project and program management, then Chief of Staff roles embedded inside technology organizations.

Marketing & Program work teaches you how to get people to deliver without burning them down. Chief of Staff work teaches you what a leader actually needs once they’re in the seat — which is rarely what the job description said.

That’s the seat I’ve sat in, which is why I’m assessing for it rather than guessing at it.

Where the judgment gets applied

40% — Hiring and building tech teams

40% — Managing technical product teams

20% — Marketing, branding and startups

Roughly where my background sits. Not a placement statistic.

The bar I’m chasing

At PayPal, my VP and I set out to build a product organization from scratch to support our regional teams. We ended up standing up three of them.

People still tell me it was the best work of their careers. That’s the bar. Not a filled req — a team that holds through failures and triumphs and that people are still talking about years later.

Don’t take my word for the last part.

These are people I built with, not clients I invoiced. Client references available on request.

Why robotics

Because it’s where I want to contribute, and because this industry rewards the people I’m best at finding. I find introverted geniuses and plug them into what’s next.

Every search starts with the same question I asked in those jobs: what makes the most effective team here? Then I go find the people who make that true.