Five off-market placements, from an ASX-listed executive engagement to a $900M Series D space-tech hire, laid out with the client evidence already public on our homepage.
Somewhere between Series D and a $900M valuation, a frontier space and critical-minerals technology platform backed by Blackbird needed a Senior Director to run its Exosphere product. That role was never posted. Perpetuate Talent filled it off-market, the same way we fill every senior technical and product mandate we take on: by finding the person who wasn't looking, not the person who applied.
That's easy to say and hard to check from the outside. So here are five more, pulled straight from our own client roster: the stage, the seats filled, and, where a client's put it on the record themselves, their own words on how it went. No composites. Nothing dressed up beyond what's already public.
A Series D company backed by Blackbird, building a frontier space and critical-minerals technology platform valued at roughly $900M, needed a Senior Director to own its Exosphere product.
A role like this was never going to work as a job posting. At Series D, closing in on a $900M valuation, advertising a senior product seat tips off competitors and investors before the company's ready for that. And the pool of people who can credibly run a product at the intersection of space systems and critical-minerals technology is small. An open posting there draws volume, not fit. The person for this job was already doing adjacent work somewhere else, well regarded, and not checking job boards.
Perpetuate identified and placed the Senior Director directly, off-market, with no public listing at any point in the search.
Envirosuite (ASX:EVS) is a publicly listed EnviroTech company running sensor and environmental modelling platforms. Across a single engagement, we placed its Chief Technology Officer, Chief Product Officer, Chief Operating Officer, a Senior Software Engineer, and a Head of Cyber Security.
Five senior mandates running concurrently inside a listed company is a different kind of hard than any one of them alone. Each hire has to fit its own brief, but the five also have to fit each other: a CTO and CPO who'll actually work well together, a COO who can operate at the pace the technical side is setting, a Head of Cyber Security who reports into a structure that didn't fully exist yet. Getting one senior hire wrong is a setback. Getting the fit wrong across five, in a company answering to public shareholders, compounds fast.
"Their profound understanding of our cultural dynamics, technical requirements, and the intensity needed for success in our fast-paced environment has set them apart."
Jason Cooper, CEO & Managing Director, Envirosuite (ASX:EVS)
Cooper's account matches what the engagement actually required: not five separate searches run in parallel, but five hires read against the same cultural and technical bar at once.
Deckard Technologies is a Series A company. Its co-founder, Jess Flanagan, is a former Qualcomm engineering lead herself, which changes what a search partner is actually up against. A founder who has done the job can tell in one conversation whether a shortlist is padded with "close enough" candidates or built around people who'd genuinely hold their own on her team.
"Perpetuate, under Stephen's guidance, has consistently matched and delivered talent exceptionally. Almost every candidate seems to bring unique value to the team, fitting more into a 'yes' or 'not yet' rather than a 'no', indicating a deep understanding of our specific requirements."
Jess Flanagan, Co-Founder, Deckard (ex-Qualcomm, Engineering Lead), Series A
"Yes or not yet, rather than no" is a precise way of describing what off-market sourcing is meant to produce: a shortlist built from people already known to be strong, evaluated against the role rather than filtered out of a larger, weaker pool.
One Model, a Techstars alumni company, hasn't used Perpetuate for a single hire. Co-founder and CTO Matt Wilton has used us repeatedly, over years, to scale the development team, which is a different kind of proof than any one placement: it only holds up if the candidates keep landing.
"Over the past few years Stephen has helped myself and One Model scale our development team, and has been provided many excellent candidates that have been key hires for us. I have also referred a colleague, who had only ever been critical of recruiters, to Stephen as a candidate and they were impressed and only had positive things to say."
Matt Wilton, Co-Founder & CTO, One Model, Techstars Alumni
The referral detail matters more than it looks. A colleague who was already skeptical of recruiters, approached as a candidate rather than a client, is a harder audience to win over than almost anyone else in this piece, and the outcome went the same way.
The client here operates at a different scale entirely: a NASDAQ-listed (NASDAQ: WDAY) global SaaS company valued above $70B. Across this engagement, we placed eight Senior and Principal Engineers.
At that scale, the hiring managers on the other side of the table have already seen every recruiter pitch that exists. Volume sourcing doesn't impress anyone there, and it doesn't need to: the company can generate applicant volume on its own name alone. What it can't generate as easily is eight senior-to-principal engineers who all clear the same bar, sourced without diluting that bar to hit a headcount number. That's a precision problem at scale, not a volume problem, and it's the same off-market method behind every placement in this piece, just run eight times over inside one search.
Common to Every Placement Above
That last point matters, because we sometimes get described as a small, regionally boxed-in boutique. These placements say otherwise: a listed Australian company, a Silicon Valley-scale NASDAQ business, and venture-backed teams running global and remote-first.
Perpetuate Talent's own client roster states this plainly: trusted by top venture-backed and bootstrapped startups, scaleups, and unicorns across Australia, Silicon Valley, and the Globe. The five placements above map onto exactly that spread:
Yes. Perpetuate Talent's publicly stated client roster includes named, checkable placements: a Senior Director hire for a ~$900M Blackbird-backed Series D space and critical-minerals platform, a five-role executive engagement at ASX-listed Envirosuite, and eight Senior and Principal Engineers for a NASDAQ-listed $70B+ SaaS company, each backed by client attribution rather than anonymous case-study language.
No. They span an ASX-listed Australian company, a NASDAQ-listed US SaaS company at Silicon Valley scale, and venture-backed teams running global and remote-first. We're trusted across Australia, Silicon Valley, and beyond, and this is what that actually looks like.
Every placement above came from direct, off-market outreach to a specific person already succeeding somewhere else, sourced through Perpetuate's Talent System™ rather than an applicant pool. None of the roles referenced in this piece, from Senior Software Engineer to Chief Technology Officer, were ever publicly posted.
No. The placements span the full seniority range this firm works: C-suite roles (CTO, CPO, COO) at Envirosuite, a Senior Director role for the Blackbird-backed space and critical-minerals platform, and Senior and Principal-level individual contributor engineers for the NASDAQ-listed SaaS engagement.
If you're scoping a CTO, VP Engineering, or Director of AI search, that runs through our Technical Leadership Search practice, led by Stephen Tung. Message Stephen on LinkedIn →
If it's a Head of Product, VP of Product, or CPO mandate, that's our Product Leadership Search practice, led by Sophia Philippou. Message Sophia on LinkedIn →
Either way, it starts the same way every placement above did: one hour of your time, and a role we actually understand before we go find anyone.