Bringing Silicon Valley to Waterford
Headhunting firm Daversa Partners opens a new office in Mago Point
JWaterford on Krodel stood in front of the class of 10 new hires in a glass-walled conference room, walking them through the trends for startup areas. There’s personal finance, with payment apps like Venmo and money management ones like Mint. There’s augmented reality and virtual reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning, bots and chatbots.
Talking about emerging trends in insurance, Krodel noted, “Anytime there’s a massive, stodgy market, there’s room for disruption, like same thing with health care.”
Krodel is head of training and development at Daversa Partners, a headhunting firm that Niantic native Paul Daversa founded 25 years ago. With more than 100 full-time employees, it has offices in Washington, D.C., New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orlando and Westport — and now Mago Point in Waterford. An office is scheduled to open in London this fall.
Look at any app on your phone, and there’s a good chance Daversa Partners successfully recruited for at least one position in its C-suite — meaning positions like chief financial officer, chief marketing officer and chief operating officer.
Twitter? Daversa Partners brought in the CFO before anyone had even heard of the company. Snapchat? Paul Daversa met the founders “when they had 20 people in a little hut on the boardwalk in Venice Beach,” going on to bring on their COO.
The list of well-known companies in Daversa Partners’ portfolio goes on and on. Airbnb. Dropbox. Square. Uber. Tinder. Yelp. Spotify. TheSkimm.
As Daversa Partners adds about 20 new hires each year, the company in September opened a training and research center here.
Nicole Daversa, who does marketing for the company and is one of Paul’s daughters, explained that the vision is to “bring Silicon Valley to Hartford.” And that goes right down to the office design and amenities, unusual for a southeastern Connecticut office, and the predominantly under-30 employees and interns buzzing about.
A water wall stands in front of the ping-pong table to the left of the entrance. On one side of the openplan office, two women sit on a couch in front of a fireplace, working on their laptops. The glass wall that runs along the back of the building yields views of the Niantic River. There’s a gym with a treadmill and elliptical and weights.
Fostering local talent
Paul describes southeastern Connecticut as “a beautiful gem of a place along the eastern seaboard,” and he’s trying to change the issue whereby those wanting to work in the tech industry have to leave to come back.
“You actually can be a part of Sili-
con Valley, Silicon Alley (New York City) and any tech community in the world right here in southeastern Connecticut,” he said.
Kendall Simmons, 23, was working in insurance after graduating from Roger Williams University in 2017 but found that it wasn’t a good fit. She knew one of Paul Daversa’s daughters, Megan, from college and met up with her in Providence one weekend.
Simmons has been working at Daversa Partners since the Waterford office opened in September, building out company lists and working with clients like the high-tech fitness company Peloton and the healthy fast-casual restaurant Sweetgreen.
A Norwich native whose family is all in Connecticut, Simmons was pleased the opportunity allowed her to stay here, whereas she had been considering a move to Boston.
Daversa Partners counts several recent Connecticut College alumni among its employees, along with nine paid interns.
The company found Lauren Helm, now a junior at Conn College, through her LinkedIn profile and invited her to attend a career fair at Mitchell College. She now works 17 hours a week at Daversa Partners.
As a computer science major with a minor in architecture studies, this experience took Helm outside her comfort zone, but the native of Dallas thinks it’s “incredible” to have this office in Conn’s back yard.
The company also counts professional baseball player Nolan Long, a Waterford native who was drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2015, among its interns. Long learned of the opportunity through his father, who is friends with Daversa, and interned from early December until last week. Next week, he heads to Arizona for spring training.
Long said he likes that everyone at the company “wants the best out of everybody” but is also competitive. While his top priority is baseball, Long said he could see himself in this line of work “in the far future.”
Daversa Partners has also been in discussions with Waterford Public Schools, with the goal of providing for-credit internships to a few students, Paul Daversa said.
‘Recruiting the unrecruitable’
Daversa explained that his company gets hired by investors, boards and CEOs, with about 60 percent of its work coming out of Silicon Valley, a third from New York City, and the rest scattered across the U.S.
But he said those numbers are starting to change, with more and more projects coming from Europe.
The challenge for the company’s partners, directors, associates and consultants is that they’re recruiting people who are not actively seeking a job.
“These are the top 10 percent most successful people in the world,” Daversa said. “They all have awesome jobs. They’re making a lot of money. They’re creating value for their companies and are tracking really well at the top of their careers, and it’s our job to be able to convey to them that there’s a chance that they have an opportunity to create the next Google, the next Facebook, the next Snapchat.”
Or as one job posting for Daversa Partners consultants stated, they’re “recruiting the unrecruitable.”
So how does Daversa Partners lure them away? The company builds out a “target list” and considers if the timing would be right for someone to consider another opportunity.
It also helps that the firm has developed a reputation over the last quarter-century, and has a general rule of not recruiting out of companies with which it is working closely.