Shauna Swerland

On What Fuels You, Jonathan Sposato tells Shauna Swerland that an entrepreneur or investor does not have to be great at the thing they back. They do have to be a student of it. He says he would invest in an online fashion company, and has, even if the founder is not particularly fashionable, as long as that person is paying close attention to how customers behave. That attention is what counts. Sposato is speaking as the angel who had announced he would invest only in companies founded by women, and as chairman of PicMonkey and GeekWire.

On What Fuels You, Shauna Swerland asks Jonathan Sposato whether Microsoft is where he met his wife, Heather. He says yes. He had come to Microsoft after a games company, joined the Redmond campus at the end of 1992, and stayed until 2004, twelve years. He remembers the early culture as amazing. Support, marketing, and manufacturing sat in other offices, but the people doing product in Redmond felt like a group of about 1,000 to 1,200 who knew one another. Heather and those twelve years are the same chapter of the story.

Shauna Swerland tells Jonathan Sposato, on What Fuels You, that he is an open book, comfortable being vulnerable and owning who he is. She asks whether that was always true or whether it is Sposato at 51. He says nobody has asked him that. The seeds were there when he was young, because he always felt he did not fit in. He points to Evelyn Waugh and F. Scott Fitzgerald, books they had been discussing, and says any story whose main character is an outsider is the one he recognizes. In The Great Gatsby he is Nick Carraway, not Jay Gatsby.

At the opening of his What Fuels You interview, Jonathan Sposato tells host Shauna Swerland that helping other people is the top answer, and that it took him a while to figure that out. He means genuine help, for people he knows and for total strangers. Swerland says she is not surprised. The same episode introduces him as the entrepreneur who sold two companies to Google, the chairman of PicMonkey and GeekWire, and the investor who said he would back only companies founded by women. Helping people, he says, is the thing that actually drives him.

Shauna Swerland opens What Fuels You by introducing Jonathan Sposato as the first person to sell two companies to Google, and as the Seattle investor who made headlines by announcing he would put money only into companies founded by women. She says he went further in his book Better Together. At the time of the interview he was also chairman of PicMonkey and of GeekWire, a husband, and a father. The stance the episode states is a public rule, not a preference: female-founded companies only. Sposato's own childhood as an outsider is the context Swerland sets before he starts talking.

She would love to be a dancer or in something related to sports or entertainment. She likes to be "front of the house" versus "back of the house" as she is extroverted and loves people.

She admires his mind and his abilities as well as his attitude. Shauna tends to be a Type A personality whereas her husband likes to "stop and smell the roses" which is a good reminder for her.

It takes a village of people to allow Shauna to be a mom and to run her business. She did not realize how satisfying it would be for her to see her kids become self-reliant. She sees it as a gift that she has given them because of her time restrictions and does not want to smother her kids.

On the first episode of What Fuels You, Fuel Talent founder Shauna Swerland says a piece of career advice she did not believe early on was that a CEO or founder must understand every part of the business inside and out. She has since decided that was a false belief. She says women in particular have a hard time delegating, and she includes herself: she is not as good a negotiator as she wants to be. Convincing herself she had to master every function was the idea she had to drop in order to run Fuel Talent from the seat she is actually good at.

Shauna wants people to email in about what they want to hear about. Topics like networking, interviewing, assessing equity, when to walk away, when to negotiate, etc. will all be discussed. She also wants to go deep with others and challenge them.

Shauna started listening to podcasts within the past year and has become obsessed. She has interests in so many areas and wants to be a part of that.

Fuel has added to their business and is not only working with startups, but also larger enterprise clients. The hiring managers within those larger clients are the ones who may not know what Fuel Talent has to offer.

A lot of companies do not take into the consideration the comps, metrics, and systems that must be looked at in each industry. It is tough to partner with companies that have not figured out the pace of their markets. Also, some companies do not have a system for funneling resumes and/or an applicant tracking system that allows for an overall game plan.

Shauna Swerland says Fuel Talent, her Seattle recruiting firm, wants clients who treat the firm as a partner rather than a vendor. They should not score the recruiters by resume volume. She wants companies whose pay is in line with the market and whose story is easy to sell and close, or who can offer candidates something else if the story is thin. The best clients give her team time with hiring managers so the trust is real. Most of them, she says, are Series A and Series B startups, with or without an internal recruiter, and they let Fuel Talent headhunt instead of posting a job and hoping.

She believes that 80% of life is showing up, following through, and executing. She does a lot of "doing" and taking care of others. Shauna is good at picking up on her environment and isn't into the numbers/science side of some recruiting philosophies.

CEOs sometimes don't know themselves well enough. If an assistant isn't strong enough to ask the necessary questions, they might not be the right fit. Onboarding of the assistant with the executive must be taken seriously.

Fuel Talent is a holding company for lots of smaller recruiting firms. They specialize in the technology and marketing sectors along with finance, HR, personal assistants, and household managers.

She collaborated with a few friends. While many names were already taken, she loved the name "fuel" and "what fuels you" came really organically and has become their slogan for nearly everything they do.

Make sure that there is a viable idea. Once confident in that, don't overthink it and go for it. Sometimes you must place yourself around people who are encouraging and motivating and ask the "why not you?" question.