Welcome Our New Talent Partner, Leslie Kurkjian Crowe
By Ajay Agarwal and Enrique Salem
Talent is unquestionably the critical ingredient in a growing company.
At BCV we invest at the earliest stages of company formation, and over the course of two decades we’ve actively partnered with hundreds of founders to build businesses that define industries and generate tremendous enterprise value. Though the course of company building is never linear, at every point along the way people matter, and a company’s success ultimately hinges on its ability to effectively leverage talent from startup to scaleup. As tech innovation only hastens and the rate of startups being born every day increases, never before has the need for great talent been more critical.
That’s why today we’re incredibly excited to welcome Leslie Kurkjian Crowe as our new Talent Partner. A veteran of three high-growth tech companies and a proven people leader, Leslie will play an essential role in expanding and capitalizing on our talent network while also collaborating closely with founders and leaders across our portfolio to successfully scale their teams and organizations. She joins a team of operating partners that works faithfully alongside our portfolio companies to provide strategic counsel to executive teams, help them optimize operations and ultimately fuel growth.
Leslie has spent her career in Silicon Valley dedicated to building talent and culture at companies during periods of hypergrowth. She joins us with an impressive track record from MuleSoft, Dropbox and most recently TripActions, where she partnered closely with the founders and CEOs to scale the organization and build culture. At MuleSoft, as a member of the executive team, she helped lead the company through a successful IPO and a subsequent acquisition by Salesforce.
Leslie’s extensive experience has afforded her an intimate understanding of the challenges — especially related to people and culture — that founders and leadership teams face when scaling, and we knew this would be a valuable asset to any entrepreneur in our orbit. Moreover, she’s built a network of senior tech executives and operators that’s as vast as it is deep, and we’re confident this will unlock a whole new world of talent to drive the success of our companies from early to growth stage and across verticals.
As we got to know Leslie, we also learned more about her values — her passion for operating, her commitment to being in service and her belief in people as instruments for positive impact. While she’s driven and hungry to win, she’s a full team player, a true partner to her colleagues and executives and someone with a high degree of integrity. She welcomes a challenge and isn’t afraid to face the ambiguity (and sometimes disorder!) that inevitably comes with building a company, whether it’s figuring out how to hire faster, transitioning a leadership team or creating a new organizational function.
A strategist, a talent magnet, a challenger and a creative thinker, we can’t wait to work with Leslie!
