Steven BartelCo Founder

United States - San Francisco, California

My name is Steve, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Gem (www.gem.com). Gem is a Talent Engagement Platform that enables talent acquisition teams to find, engage, and nurture top talent. It works alongside LinkedIn and other places that you source, while integrating with Gmail, Outlook, and your ATS.

I started my journey as an early engineer at Dropbox, and quickly started leading a number of engineering teams. My top priority was always recruiting, so that's where I spent most of my time — sourcing, owning the end-to-end process for hundreds of candidates, M&A, launching our referrals program, designing + giving tech talks, campus recruiting, etc.

Back then, we were at the start of a paradigm shift in recruiting: companies were going out and looking for top talent rather than waiting for talent to come to them. I experienced the power of this new approach first-hand as Dropbox scaled from 25 → 1500 employees over the next few years.

Along with this new strategy came a new need: recruiting teams didn’t have a single source of truth to track and manage all the work that happens before candidates apply, which quickly became the most important part of the hiring funnel (up to 80% of recruiting now happens prior to a candidate applying for a role!). This meant that companies didn’t have a place to track and manage the vast majority of their work in recruiting. That’s why we started Gem.

At this point, it’s been just over 4 years, and we’re excited to work with 1000+ incredible enterprise customers, including Cisco, Pinterest, Slack, Stripe, Snap, Lyft, Indeed, Square, McDonald's, Twilio, Coinbase, and more... We’re also fortunate to have the support of amazing investors — YC, Accel, Greylock, ICONIQ, Meritech, and Sapphire.