Maddy Nguyen

Hold up, you need to know about Maddy Nguyen – this girl is the real deal in the startup world. She’s a YC S21 alum, which already puts her in the big leagues, but what’s cooler is her story. She’s been around the block in some of the hottest consumer tech companies, Instacart, Snapchat, Uber, Facebook, you name it. Started her career in recruiting at Riviera Partners, then jumped into the in-house game at Instacart, Snapchat, Uber. Basically, she’s been deep in the trenches of building teams and scaling tech giants, and she’s crushed it every step.

What’s crazy is her process shows she’s all about innovation and pushing boundaries. She’s not here to just work at top companies, she’s about changing the game. That’s why she co-founded Talentdrop, this Y Combinator-backed startup, which focuses on reinventing hiring. Think about it: she’s took her years of talent experience and used it to make hiring smarter, faster, more human. Talentdrop raised over 2 million bucks, which is no joke, and got into YC, meaning investors saw her vision and believed in her. That’s some serious cred.

Now, she’s not just a founder, she’s also leading talent ops at Turn/River, a private equity firm, where she’s shaping how they find and keep top talent. Basically, she’s the person who knows how to attract the best people and build high-performance teams. That’s her superpower.

She’s from the SF Bay Area, and you can tell she’s all about the hustle, the grind, and figuring out how to do things better. She’s got a classics degree from Georgetown (yeah, she was on the Women’s Golf Team, no less), and a JD from Washington U. So, she’s got brains, grit, and a competitive edge.

Bottom line? Maddy’s story is about someone who started in recruiting, learned what it takes to build teams at the biggest tech companies, then took all that knowledge to start her own thing. She’s not just interested in tech; she’s about making hiring more human, more fast, more original. She’s the type of person who sees what’s broken, in HR, in startups, and then goes out and fixes it. No Cap, she’s a big change.