After hundreds of technical leadership searches and an engineering PhD he occasionally gets to use, Shawn goes beyond pattern-matching to find what a startup actually needs. What drives him is helping founders navigate leadership and org design in an AI era where the old rulebook is obsolete.

As a Partner on Lightspeed’s Executive Talent team, he runs and supports leadership searches for portfolio companies across engineering, product, and research, works with deal teams on team and org questions, and helps founders decide who to hire, when to hire them, and what the role should look like. He also supports Lightspeed’s early-stage investors in getting to know technical talent who may become founders. 

Before Lightspeed, Shawn spent a decade at True Search, where he built the product, engineering, venture, and AI practices and ran North America search. Before that, he spent six years in Tokyo and London building scientific collaborations with top researchers, including Nobel laureates. In his own words, his career throughline is connecting people who are much smarter than he is.

His first exposure to venture was as a founder pitching VCs. The nerve-racking experience gave him lasting empathy for founders. A few years later, at the beginning of his search career, he vividly remembers sitting in Lightspeed’s Menlo Park office, listening to a partner walk through a thesis on the future of networking infrastructure. Fast forward a decade, and when he had an opportunity to join the team, he knew it was something he couldn’t pass up. He joined a team with technical depth and ambition that operates as one, partnering with the best founders, investors and operators during a watershed moment in tech.

Shawn grew up a military brat and has lived all over the world, an experience that helped him realize there are many ways to solve the same problem. The lesson he returns to most? You’re only new once, and being new anywhere is permission to ask questions, unlearn, and relearn.

Outside of work, Shawn spends time with his family, including three young kids (two are twins). He’s a trail and mountain runner with a couple of ultramarathons under his belt and a self-described below-average cyclist.

Movement unlocks his thinking, so if a founder has a tricky problem, his standing offer is a problem-solving walk or hike.