Introducing our Newest Advisor: Saurabh Gupta, CDO of Kingsley Gate
We are excited to welcome Saurabh Gupta to Nummo as an Advisor.
Saurabh is the Chief Digital Officer of Kingsley Gate, a global executive search firm with 300+ recruiters working across more than 30 countries. He is also a co-founder and CTO of IGNYTE, the platform Kingsley Gate built and now offers to its own clients.
He has spent over twenty years in HR tech and has watched the industry evolve from simple CRMs through PeopleSoft and into full enterprise HCM. Few people have seen as many iterations of this problem as he has, let alone built for them.
Why we asked him
When we started putting our advisory board together, the thing Matt and I emphasized was the diversity of the board. A few days ago we announced that Michael had joined as an Advisor, and we wanted to make sure we could also have a technical leader as part of our advisory board.
Saurabh sits in a unique spot because he runs platform development, change management, and data strategy at Kingsley Gate. In other words, he builds the product and then lives with the consequences of getting people to adopt it. Very few people in this industry carry both of those responsibilities at once, and it gives him a vantage point that neither a pure technologist nor a pure operator can offer. Because of that experience, he has wisdom and knowledge that would help us to continually question the value of what we are creating.
His prior experience of building a firm as well as his current experience of being the CDO means he asks the questions we need to be good at answering, and he asks them about the product, as well as the business.
Why he said yes
Saurabh's belief is that everyone in this industry currently focuses too much on the software and not enough on the people who will use it. What stood out to him about Nummo was how closely our team sits with clients and maps out how they actually work. He realized the value we bring today, as well as where we are headed, and was intrigued by what the future could look like with Nummo leading the charge.
“After twenty years in this space, the mistake I keep seeing is that people build software for features and not for the people using it. The work that actually runs a search, meaning everything that happens between the conversations, is where most of the time and most of the cost sits, and almost nobody has built for it properly. What Nummo is building could be the connective tissue that brings it together.”
What's next?
Saurabh will support Nummo as we think through architecture and integration, with insights into the decisions firms make around whether to build or buy. He will poke holes and ask questions so that we can build the infrastructure and the platform the way the industry will need next.
We are grateful to have him with us, and glad to have a technical expert in the room who will push our thinking and be a strong sounding board. The next few years are going to reshape how search firms operate, and we would rather build toward that future alongside people who have already lived through every version of this industry that came before it.