Launching into the world's largest market has always presented both an enormous opportunity and an existential risk for even the best European tech companies. AI has now raised the stakes.

In the AI era, categories are being defined and won in months, not years. The fastest-growing tech companies the world has ever seen are being built today, and are attracting capital and talent at an unprecedented rate.

The US is where the majority of spend is concentrated, and where many of the highest-growth companies are based. It represents over 54% of global software revenue and roughly two-thirds of global enterprise AI spending. So, the company that wins the US early is well positioned to capture this opportunity and become a market leader. At the same time, AI-native US startups no longer wait to come to Europe; they're selling to European customers from day one. The cost of hesitation before expansion has therefore never been higher.

But expanding to the US need not come at the expense of building in Europe, where the quality of entrepreneurs, innovation and talent is higher than ever before. AI-native startups are founded at the same rate as in the US, and Europe competes head-to-head for quality of AI talent. US expansion, then, is about enabling European startups to reach their full potential on the world stage.

Cracking the US is what separates a local player from a global leader – but winning there is not easy. Get it right, and you have the chance to become a category defining company. Get it wrong, and it can take down your business. As we explore in this playbook, a key part of any company's US success is the talent strategy that underpins its expansion.

At Dawn, we have supported more than 50 leading European technology companies through US expansions, acting as a strategic advisor and hands-on partner. To share our learnings and insights with European entrepreneurs, we're publishing US Launchpad: a strategic expansion and hiring playbook compiled by our Director of Talent, Avalon Lee-Bacon, and our US-based Talent and Network Lead, Bridget Snow, with input from Dawn's investors and the founders we've backed. We outline the “why”of US expansion, the fundamentals to consider ahead of making the leap, and share top tips and lessons learned from some of Europe's biggest B2B technology success stories.

We know that creating a US expansion plan that will set you up for success is no easy feat.

In this section, we explore the 10 Key Principles we’ve found to generally underpin a winning US expansion, including the hiring strategies that will take you from “land” to “expand” stateside. We’ve focussed on the “who” – from the founding team to those critical first hires in-market – because we know that behind every successful US expansion story is a strategic talent strategy.

Today, many of the historic assumptions around growth, scaling and hiring are being rewritten in real time, much of it driven by AI-native companies and the adoption of AI. The same is true of the rules of US expansion. Broadly, we see companies fall into two distinct paradigms: Build Global From Day One vs. Capture Europe First.

If you're in a fast-forming category where the race is global from day one – as is often the case for product-led, developer-focused or AI-native businesses – speed is the strategy, and waiting to perfect Europe risks ceding the market. By contrast, if you're selling into regulated industries or traditional enterprises who value referenceability, having built a solid foundation and proven PMF fit in Europe before arriving in the US with strong logos often helps unlock the market. As we’ll explore, there is no one path to US success, and some startups may sit somewhere in the middle.

Paradigm one: The market sets your timing, and you build global from day one

In certain technology categories such as AI-native businesses, the race is global from day one. The US can quickly become the centre of gravity, and early leaders there can build a durable advantage. In this context, the question shifts from “are we ready?” to “can we afford not to?”

Runware, the AI infrastructure and compute company that owns the full stack, took this approach.

Ioana Hreninciuc and Flaviu Radulescu founded Runware in 2023, and Dawn led the company's $50 million Series A in 2025. Runware has powered billions of creations for hundreds of millions of end-users worldwide, and already has very sizeable revenue and significant enterprise customers across the US, EMEA and Asia.

The company intentionally built for the US from day one, an approach Ioana recommends to founders building certain types of AI companies today. She explains: “AI is not really localised, it's global from the beginning – and a lot of the money for AI is in the US, which means a lot of the winners are there. Realistically, we never thought of Runware as a European business. We always thought [of ourselves] as competing at a global level. We have to work with the best clients and partners in the world. And where do you meet all these people? In Silicon Valley.”

This approach is not just a phenomenon of today. A decade ago, Dataiku approached US expansion in a very similar way.

Dataiku is the Platform for AI Success, giving organisations control over their AI talent, processes, and technologies to unleash the creation of analytics, models, and agents. Founded in Paris in 2013 and now headquartered in New York, the company's successful expansion into the US was central to its growth trajectory, powering it to unicorn status and well beyond.

Dataiku moved decisively when expanding, because the category was accelerating and the cost of waiting was rising. As Florian puts it: “I think it's right to go to the US as soon as possible. It's a race. If you're just focused on Europe you are losing the race.”

Paradigm two: Your traction sets your timing, and you capture Europe first

For certain companies selling into the enterprise – especially in regulated industries, where buyers move on references and customer proofpoints – the question is less whether to expand than when you've earned the right to do it. A couple of US “pull signals” stood out from two unicorn scaleups Dawn has backed.

Signal one: early US revenue with enterprise logos

Founded in 2008, Collibra enables enterprises around the world to unify their governance for data and AI. The company employs over 1,000 people, counts many Fortune 500 companies among its 700+ enterprise customers, and has raised more than $250m at a multi-billion dollar valuation. Collibra is now led from global headquarters in New York, supported by hubs across the US and Europe.

The company began closing US enterprise customers through founder-led sales well before formally launching. Its co-founder and CEO, Felix van de Maele, travelled back and forth, sponsoring industry events and stacking meetings around them. By the time they committed to the market, they had already built meaningful traction, including around $1 million in US revenue and a growing base of enterprise logos. At that point, the question was no longer “will this work?”, but “how do we scale what is already working?”

As Felix puts it: “Just going to the US isn't magically going to make things work. You should be able to prove traction and interest, and have customers before you make the move. Once you have a lot of proof points, then it's time to make a very intentional decision to start scaling in the US. Have a real plan of how you want to approach it across capital, go-to-market, product, team – and be very intentional about what the goals are.”

Signal two: an anchor client willing to back you in-market

In some cases, the pull comes from a single, decisive relationship. AI-driven Decision Intelligence pioneer and double unicorn Quantexa's expansion was anchored around landing a US customer who would not just buy the product, but actively advocate for it – including presenting it to regulators and backing it publicly. The US is now a dominant source of revenue for Quantexa, and the company has major outposts in New York, Boston, Charlotte and Washington DC.

As Quantexa's CEO and co-founder, Vishal Marria, explains: “Our strategy was… wouldn't it be nice if we could get an anchor [client] early on who was aligned to the North Star of what we were driving to here at Quantexa? Having a local client saying: 'I've backed Quantexa. I've presented it to the regulator and we are going all in'… was fundamental to our success.”

Securing this kind of anchor client can materially de-risk expansion. It provides immediate credibility, referenceability, and a foundation for building a local presence. Quantexa’s experience shows how one strong design partner can unlock an entire region.

As you think about your paradigm, a useful diagnostic is how much your product-market fit will need local adjustment. The more it's shaped by local nuance (for example, in regulated sectors like Financial Services or Healthcare, where the buyer, the compliance regime and the proof points may differ market to market), the more there is to gain from proving and hardening PMF at home before you move. The more globally consistent your PMF (universal buyer and use case, limited localisation), the less reason there is to wait, and the stronger the case for building global from the outset. Of course, this is not a hard and fast rule: a company facing real local nuance and selling into complex enterprises may still build globally from day one, or go early, if the category is forming too fast not to.

Here are 10 Key Principles to consider when designing your US launch.

If you drop down the headings below, you’ll find actionable advice and insights covering the right time to attempt a US expansion, what to be aware of beforehand, where to land, and who to hire as you get started on your US growth journey. Depending on your paradigm, or where you sit along the spectrum, some key principles will feel more or less relevant to your business.

Ioana Hreninciuc is the co-founder of Runware, the infrastructure and compute company that owns the full stack. Runware’s platform enables apps with millions of users to plug in and run any AI model through a single unified API, backed by custom AI-native infrastructure designed to make inference faster, cheaper and more efficient. It saves development teams time, cuts customer costs, and reduces administrative burdens.

Ioana founded Runware in 2023 alongside Flaviu Radulescu, and Dawn led the company’s $50M Series A in 2025. Runware has powered billions of creations for hundreds of millions of end-users worldwide, and already has very sizable revenue and significant enterprise customers across the US, EMEA and Asia. The company is tapping an exploding AI inference market expected to be worth $68bn by 2028, and has scaled at an exceptional pace. Runware has an established presence in London and San Francisco, as well as a lean, remote-first team spanning multiple continents.

Here, Ioana shares her experiences of what it really takes to compete in the US as an AI-native company. She explores why it’s vital to establish a presence in Silicon Valley early on, and what that really means for the founding team. Ioana also shares insights on how to attract a world-class team in the ‘AI talent wars’, and how to leverage investors, customers and partners to create momentum in the US.

1. “AI is not localised, its global from the beginning”: Build for the US from the start

Ioana believes AI-native companies need to think about international expansion from first principles, as Runware has done. Given the dominance of the US – and Silicon Valley in particular – for AI building and adoption, she believes it makes sense for AI startups to target the US from the very beginning.

She says: “AI is not really localised, it's global from the beginning – and a lot of the money for AI is in the US, which means a lot of the winners are there.

“Realistically, we never thought of Runware as a European business. We always thought [of ourselves] as competing at a global level. We have to work with the best clients and partners in the world. And where do you meet all these people? In Silicon Valley.”

The idea that the US is not a destination but a starting point has shaped Runware’s journey since inception.

As Ioana puts it: “As a founder, you just have to accept it and live with this reality, which means [Silicon Valley] is where you have to be, that’s where you have to sell, that’s where you have to partner.”

2. “It is not easy, but you have to do it to compete”: What it takes to embed in the US market from the beginning

Ioana is deeply realistic about the intensity of US expansion for founding teams simultaneously running a global business. She shared how she and Flaviu worked 15/16 hour days, followed by business dinners, while establishing their presence in Silicon Valley. As Ioana acknowledges, this “is really hard.”

She explains: “We were scaling our business at a crazy pace… I worked multiple days from 3am until 6pm and then went to a business dinner. This is not easy.

“Especially when you're setting up, it’s like you're at the Olympics. There is no time for anything else, and you have to be prepared for what this means. And it's really hard… But if you're not going to be all in, why are you there? You have to be in it to compete.”

3. “We wanted to be building alongside these major success stories”: Founder-led sales are critical to early US traction

Ioana and Flaviu committed to a founder-led sales strategy in the early days. Ioana says this helped Runware win US customers – notably including other ambitious founders of scaling companies – early on.

Ioana believes the approach worked because the founders were able to build trust with their customers 1:1, showing that they genuinely understood their speed and ambition – as they felt it too.

“We were very involved with these founders. We wanted to be building alongside these major success stories,” Ioana says. “These founders are as locked in as you are. They’re building a global business. You are [too]. And it’s like: “‘Hey, let’s do this together. I’m going to support your growth. I’m going to be here for you. I’m going to allow you to do business’.”

4. “The hardest thing is to kickstart it”: Invest in the US flywheel

Ioana shared another top tip with founders: make sure you land and immediately start tapping the Bay Area’s flywheel of warm introductions between investors, founders and clients. Why? Because once you’ve honed this, it accelerates everything.

For example, Runware's largest client came through an investor introduction. After hearing about the company, they began working together within a week.

Ioana explains: “When you're in the US, you're going to start off the cycle of introductions where investors will introduce you to clients, clients will introduce you to investors. And the moment you become the hot company, it's very easy to be pre-qualified when you walk into a room. But the hardest thing is to kick-start this. So, the moment you go to the US, you want your investors to already be talking you up, speaking to their network. Those are weeks you could otherwise be spending selling.”

5. Hiring in the US requires serious interview diligence – alongside support from investors and advisors

Ioana recommends that founders embark on US hiring armed with a structured interview process, and ready to personally invest significant time meeting candidates. This is, in part, due to the fact that US talent – especially sales candidates – are “excellent at interviewing, because the culture is very friendly and transactional.” This means founders need to “do due diligence with every person and really evaluate them well.”

Runware’s interview process includes multiple 1:1 assessment stages with cross-functional internal stakeholders, as well as a structured case study round where a candidate’s skills are put to the test live through an exercise or presentation. Alongside this rigorous process, Ioana shares how she and Flaviu “relied a lot on our investors, on advisors, to make sure that we were getting an extra lens to evaluate people with.”

She explains: “You have to find the right people who want to be on the journey with you. There's a very hot race for talent. So, if you don't want to pay millions per person, and you also want somebody who is willing to do a lot of hands-on work – they're going to send their own emails, they're going to do their own decks – you're looking for a very particular type of person… You have to accept that very few people will hit the bar, so you need a lot of support. For us, actually, the Dawn talent team was invaluable.”

Dawn helped Ioana and Flaviu scan the market, pre-qualify candidates, and narrow the field so they could spend time with potential hires who were “genuinely relevant.”This had a material impact on the speed of the process.

6. Be present in the US, and ready to hard-sell your company to talent with multiple offers on the table

Ioana and Flaviu are very regularly on the ground in the Bay Area, and this is imperative to enable time in person with customers, investors, and also talent. Ioana shares, “There’s a ‘presence factor’ to being in the US… Candidates need to know that you’re going to be there selling the business, that you’re not just a distant presence, you’re going to be working with them. Candidates need this to believe that you’re in it to win it.”

“Especially in the Bay Area, people have a lot of options, so they need to believe you will make them money. They need to believe your equity is going to be valuable. And getting in early can be an advantage – everyone in the Bay Area gets that. So the story you're selling to employees is exactly like the story you're selling to investors. They’re going to be looking for the same concrete things from you… They’re going to be looking at your actual growth, and they’re going to be looking at what they want to do in their roles.”

Some candidates may consider a European-founded AI company a riskier option than a later-stage US brand. But Ioana says the right candidates will still choose to join you, if they believe in the upside and the role gives them the chance to do meaningful work building a once-in-a-lifetime business from the ground up.

7. Be prepared for higher salaries than you’d see in Europe - and don’t lower your bar on talent

US talent typically brings in higher salaries than their European counterparts, and Sales talent is likely to be amongst some of your most expensive hires. As this is a reality of the market, Ioana recommends remaining competitive on compensation, while setting clear performance metrics. If talent fails to perform, move on.

“When it comes to salespeople, you have to be very diligent in hiring, but also fire very quickly. They’re just going to be expensive, but they need to pay for themselves [through performance]”, she says. This does not mean that talent can thrive unsupported; alongside being highly present as a leader and manager, Ioana also advocates for strong onboarding, to set new hires up for success.

8. Yes, the US is expensive - but you can’t let that put you off being present in the market

Ioana has observed that European founders often over-index on the cost of them being present in the market – from flights and hotels to workspace and living expenses. Ioana advised strongly against falling into this trap.

“Something I notice with European founders is they’re very concerned about the cost of themselves being [in the US],” she says. “And I just want to be as clear as possible: this is completely immaterial.

“Do not worry about the hotel, the flights… Just find yourself a great place to work and be prepared to be working 16 to 20 hour days… If you do that, the snowball will accelerate.”

That said, Ioana urged founders to try to remain clear-eyed about how well their US expansion is going. If you realise you don’t have product-market-fit, no amount of presence and spend will solve the problem.

“If [commercial momentum] doesn’t happen, then I’m sorry, you just don’t have it.”

9. “There is an incredible amount of talent in Europe”: Invest in keeping your European - and global - presence strong as you build in the US

Runware built a distributed, remote-first model from the start, a setup that gave the company 24/7 client coverage with a team of just 15-20 people in the early days. Now, their team is global and includes strong capability in the US, but remains intentionally lean. The company initially indexed heavily on product and engineering talent, with the founders themselves driving the sales motion and working with customers. After achieving remarkable early success through product-led growth and founder-led sales, they are now scaling their GTM team post Series A, and have made several consequential hires in the US to accelerate their growth.

Looking ahead, Ioana envisions having a key team in the US – primarily based in the Bay Area – with a significant amount of the team remaining globally distributed. She anticipates continuing to invest in engineering and operational depth in Europe, while the US team leads on the American market. Ioana believes this setup will help drive the best balance of results and cost considerations, and allow them to take advantage of the exceptionally strong AI and engineering talent Europe has to offer.

The Runware founders are both strong advocates for the exceptional quality of talent in Europe, and Ioana emphatically pushes back on the perception that European employees work less hard than their American counterparts.

Ioana says: "If you get the right people in Europe, they work extremely hard – it's the same in the US. You can overpay for mediocre people in the US, and you can overpay for mediocre people in Europe. There is an incredible amount of talent in Europe and people who want the startup success story. And it's frankly easier to find those people in Europe, and usually the ambition is already aligned."

Felix Van de Maele co-founded Collibra as a spin-off from the University of Brussels in 2008, and it quickly became a global company, going from strength to strength ever since.

Collibra, which enables enterprises around the world to unify their governance for data and AI, raised a Series G in November 2021 at a $5.25bn valuation. The company employs over 1,000 people, and counts many Fortune 500 companies among its 700+ enterprise customers. Collibra is now led from global headquarters in New York, supported by hubs across the US and Europe.

In the wake of the financial crisis, financial institutions were required to abide by strict new requirements. Felix and his co-founders were well positioned to help them do so; finding product-market-fit in Europe before testing the waters with US clients in 2012 and 2013. Dawn invested in Felix and Collibra in 2015 as they were shifting their headquarters from Brussels to the US, and we have consistently been struck by the agility and dexterity the company has demonstrated while scaling.

A decade on from Collibra’s US launch, Felix sat down with Dawn’s Director of Talent, Avalon Lee-Bacon, to share his reflections on what made Collibra’s expansion so successful, what he would have done differently, and his top tips for founders looking to make the move today.

It’s not an easy journey, but it’s worth it

Felix says he found the first couple of years in the US really hard, and that new challenges have arisen as Collibra has scaled. But, he is 100% sure the prize is worth the effort.

“It’s the biggest software market in the world. And so if you look at scaled companies, even the ones that start in Europe like us, 60-70% of your revenue is probably going to be US,” he says. “You cannot have a leading software company without winning the US market.”

So how to go about it?

“Presence creates opportunity”: Start by flying over to land early customers – and then be very intentional when the time comes to launch formally

Felix’s first piece of advice to founders looking to scale into the US is to spend time in the market gaining crucial early logos before attempting a formal launch. Then, when the time is right, to be very intentional about your approach.

Before Collibra opened its New York office, Felix spent years travelling back and forth, sponsoring industry events and stacking meetings around them. That approach allowed Collibra to confirm product-market-fit and secure early enterprise customers.

He says: “Just going to the US isn’t magically going to make things work. You should be able to prove traction and interest, and have customers before you make the move… Jump on an aeroplane and visit some customers – do that first and see how far that gets you.”

Felix reflects: “You have to meet people in person. If you’re there, you can meet the next day versus having to schedule a meeting… We’re big believers in the idea that presence creates opportunity.”

This worked well for Collibra, and the team secured around ten enterprise customers and $1 million in revenue using this approach before deciding to invest strategically in their official US launch.

Felix says: “Once you have a lot of proof points, then it’s time to make a very intentional decision to start scaling in the US. Have a real plan of how you want to approach it across capital, go-to-market, product, team – and be very intentional about what the goals are.”

“Bring one or two founders full-time to build the culture and the deep customer understanding you need': Relocate as you evolve product-market fit

Several Collibra founders relocated to New York to personally drive the build out of its US operations. Felix’s co-founder Stan Christiaens, who led on GTM, moved to New York as soon as Collibra found early US traction. Felix initially remained in Europe, where product and engineering were based, before hiring a trusted Europe-based product leader and joining Stan.

Felix believes founder relocation is “really critical”, as having a founder on the ground makes it easier to do the “constant iteration” required to succeed in the US. He says: “you have to bring one or two founders full-time to really build the culture and the deep customer understanding you need to continue evolving product-market fit.”

He found that “you have to stay so close to your customers, understand what works, what doesn’t work, what resonates.” He says: “You’re still continuously kind of evolving that product-market fit. And that might be a little different in the US than it is in Europe… If you just hire a sales team with a sales leader and say: ‘okay, go and figure it out’, my personal belief is that the risk of failure is really high.” Felix believes that having founder leadership of GTM worked so well because in the beginning “selling is more art than science”, and then when the time comes to grow, they were able to “educate the team on what it takes to actually sell successfully.”

While some startups crack the US without a founder relocating, Felix favours moving over commuting. He reflects: “Even if you try to travel [to-and-from the US], it’s not the same. You don’t have the culture, you don’t have the intensity.”

“Follow your customers”: Choose a hub that’s near your core customer base

Felix puts some of Collibra’s early US success down to structuring the launch around its core customer base: banking clients, most of whom were based in New York. It proved to be a good decision – both in terms of customer connectivity and time-zone alignment for team cohesion between Collibra’s European and US offices.

While New York may seem an obvious base today, Felix explains: “When we moved, Boston was bigger than New York [for enterprise software]. New York was not a tech hub... But we followed our customers… as the core of our DNA and our culture.”

Felix says that, looking back, he is “happy we made that decision” to be based in New York, as he finds that “New York-Europe is so much easier than Europe-San Francisco.”He values the smaller time difference between Europe and the East Coast, and the shorter flights between Collibra’s US HQ and its European offices.

“Raise enough capital to do US expansion well”: Operating in the US is expensive, so it’s important to have a partner-investor on board

Felix stresses the benefit in waiting until you have enough funding to effectively execute a US expansion.

“It’s important to raise enough capital to be able to do it well, because it becomes expensive,” he says. “For us it was a bit of a shock. I remember in the beginning it was the cheapest Airbnbs, cockroaches on the floor, just trying to make it work. So I think that once you make that commitment to move, you need to have a great investor-partner that can help you… That’s why we raised our Series B together with Dawn and it was super helpful, because having sufficient capital to be able to do it well matters.”

Securing well-known investors is also particularly crucial when it comes to attracting top US talent in the early days, Felix says. “Having that credibility through partners matters a whole lot.”

“Be thoughtful about the core of the company”: Bring people with you, and bring in new talent – and be sure to value them equally

Felix recommends founders hone a clear talent strategy before making any US hires.

He says: “It’s about being really thoughtful and intentional about how you think about the core of the company. Is that going to be 50-50 [Europe-US]? Is it really about moving people to the US? For us, the decision-making really moved to New York, and that’s a cultural aspect that you definitely have to manage.”

Based on his own experiences, Felix recommends that founders simultaneously make US hires and relocate in-house European talent to their new US hub.

Felix reflects: “It’s really important that you’re able to bring people that have been with you on that journey. They have so much deep domain knowledge and cultural values [of the company]. I think, with hindsight, that I underestimated and undervalued that real DNA, that domain expertise, that experience of the founding team… The more you can bring them with you and equally value that new talent that you’re bringing in, the better.”

Invest in hiring a People or Talent leader early on in your US expansion journey

Felix cautions that many of Collibra’s early US hires did not prove to be the right fit because the founders weren’t used to interviewing and hiring in the US context. To prevent this happening, he recommended founders invest in hiring a People leader early on.

Felix says: “Hiring in the US is very different. I thought everyone was amazing. So, of the first ten hires, I don’t think any of them really worked out… You’ve got to learn to calibrate differently. That’s why having somebody on the people and recruiting side that knows that market is super, super important… I would always recommend, if you’re scaling in the US, hiring an HR [Lead] or Chief People Officer relatively quickly.”

Consider hiring US based execs who also bring experience of working internationally

Perhaps surprisingly, Felix shared that Collibra’s most successful US based senior hires were not execs who had only ever worked with US based companies. Instead, the people who performed best long-term were those with experience working in both Europe and the US.

He says he has found that senior talent who bring with them experience of working across different countries can be a huge help in running a global business.

Pace yourself with the number of senior execs you hire – and prioritise builders with a bias for action

As well as relocating founders, in the early days, Collibra deployed a model that saw hiring of US-based sales talent led by Collibra’s Head of Sales, who had also relocated from Belgium. Meanwhile, the engineering team remained based in Europe. The approach proved very successful. Felix says: “It’s a good combination, and you can build from there.”

Felix also cautions against over-hiring at leadership level, and against hiring too senior too soon. He says: “Pace yourself in hiring too many senior execs from the get-go. It’s such a different environment. You want builders… it’s so, so important, to have that bias for action, to get things done… If senior execs haven’t worked in this [type of] environment, they don’t know what not having the support system is really like… it can go wrong quite easily.”

Vishal Marria, CEO & co-founder at AI-driven decision intelligence pioneer and double unicorn Quantexa, sat down with Dawn’s co-founder, General Partner and Quantexa board member Norman Fiore, to share his reflections on what made Quantexa’s US expansion so successful.

Today, the US drives 40–50% of Quantexa's business, and Vishal expects the US market to remain a dominant source of revenue. Quantexa now has major outposts in New York, Boston, Charlotte and Washington DC, but its HQ and operational centre has always been the UK.

Here, we share just some of Vishal’s insights and expert advice for European founders looking to make the leap into the US.

1. You’ve got to be all-in to go to the US - and don’t underestimate the financial backing you’ll need to succeed

Quantexa's US expansion was never in doubt; the question was when. Vishal was intentional about finding the right time, because he recognised that launching without the right backing and plan in place can be an existential risk for a business. 

As Vishal puts it: “Going to the US, you have to be all in. You can’t be half in. You’ve got to get your strategy right. You’ve got to get your financial backing and your financial investments right. You’ve got to get your product market fit right. It’s not a simple step, and it will eat you up if you get it wrong. And the distraction it causes if you get these very important things wrong could take down the business.”

Quantexa made the move in 2017, opening its New York office on the back of a $3.3M Series A. The raise was critical. As Vishal reflects: “You can't underestimate the financial backing that is required to go into the US… We couldn't have done what we've done in the US if we didn't have the financial backing we had with our partners, our investors”.

2. Build your market entry talent strategy like a "SWAT team" - combining culture carriers from your HQ with key new hires

Quantexa recruited “a SWAT team” to ensure their expansion went as smoothly as possible – “a mixture between people we took out from the UK and new people we brought on to the team in the US”, Vishal says.Quantexa recruited a senior technical architect in the UK who relocated to New York. The company also hired a US sales leader based in New York, alongside a pre-sales solution engineer, who worked hand in hand with the sales lead to move Quantexa into the US.

Vishal says: “I think that setup has been a big part of our success. It’s not just about taking the knowledge, it’s also about taking the culture.”

Vishal knows this approach works across contexts when expanding. He says: “I've used that SWAT team recipe to scale 18 countries now.” Given Quantexa’s product and GTM motion, for them this meant “You need a salesperson, ideally someone with a lot of experience who's not learning on the job, who understands sales cycles for enterprises. You need a senior technical architect persona who can go toe to toe with architects in the bank or the government… and you need pre-sales solution engineers because they’re really important from a technical architecture perspective… These are the people that are probably going to become your ‘super leaders’ in the future - the people that can do the RFPs, do the demos, take the client on this journey and are super technical and very business savvy.”

While Vishal did not personally relocate, building this strong SWAT team was not a replacement for founder presence in the market. As Vishal says: “I spent a tremendous amount of my personal time in the US.”

3. Get your product market fit right for the US, and expect to adapt the way you go to market — a “cookie cutter exercise” won’t work

Vishal believes that a key factor in Quantexa’s US success was getting product market fit right for the US, and adapting their GTM approach.He explains: “You need to have a very focused product to market fit for the clientele that you are selling to in the market you are selling to. One of the biggest aspects of going to the US was ensuring we had the right product and market fit.”

This does not necessarily translate directly from your European PMF. As Vishal puts it: “I’ve seen many times when founders or CEOs have taken a product and market fit from Asia or the Middle East or Europe, and have literally said: ‘this is the product and market’”.

He warns that this never works for the US. He says: “It isn’t as simple as, ‘what's working in Europe? Lets just take it’. We would have failed if we tried to do a cookie cutter exercise. We had to change the way we went to market with the products and capabilities we had, and work out which ones would stick better, faster in the US.”

This is just another reason why founder presence is so important in the early days. As Vishal observes: “The founder-based selling and the intimacy you build with the client is so important.”

4. Have a customer bring you to the US… but don’t overly focus on one client at the start — you need to keep multiple prospects alive to hedge risk

Vishal advises founders that it is ideal if you can be brought into the US by a customer, and to really succeed, one local hero client can be instrumental. 

He explains: “Our strategy at the beginning with the US was: ‘wouldn't it be nice if a client could bring us to the US? Wouldn't it be nice if we could get an anchor early on who was aligned to the North Star of what I was driving to at Quantexa?’”

He found that: “You do need a local client saying, ‘I've backed Quantexa, I've presented it to the regulator and we are going all in’ - having a local bank saying that was fundamental to our success.”

However, Vishal also stressed that it’s important to keep “several plates spinning” in the early stages of expansion - or you risk losing everything if one sponsor moves on. He shared an example of how Quantexa fixated too heavily on one client early in its US journey. 

“I think we got too laser-focused on one or two clients at the start. And it’s a game of odds. You want a few plates spinning because some are going to drop, not because of you. Priorities change,” Vishal says. “For all the right reasons, we’d put all bets on this one opportunity… In our case the regulation changed with that bank and our sponsor moved on… That was a lesson learned. So when we went into Japan or Singapore or any other new territories, we kept many bids open.”

5. “You’ve got to look at the US market as multiple customer segments”

Vishal explains that it’s helpful to approach the US from the perspective of different customer segments, rather than splitting purely regionally, or seeing the US as one homogenous market. 

He says: “You've got to look at it from the different customer segments. For example, with banks you've got the super tier ones, the tier two segments - and that's a market in its own right. Then you've got the mid-size - they buy differently and want different types of products. They have different budget cycles… So that’s been our experience: get the product market fit, and then make sure you don’t look at a sector as one segment. You’ve got to look at it as multiple segments.” 

6. Try launching community evangelism or engagement programmes to help cement your customer loyalty in the US

Vishal shared that Quantexa launched the “Quantexa Technology Academy” to great effect.

He explains: “A lot of our clients in the US want to learn and enable themselves on the Quantexa platform. So we kicked off the Quantexa Technology Academy, allowing our clients and partners - and Quantexans - to certify themselves on our platform. This allows them to, after certification, deploy Quantexa on their own in their own environment. And now we have more certified people outside of Quantexa than inside Quantexa, which is amazing.”

This type of embedding and evangelism can really make a difference as you build a brand and reputation in the US.

7. You don’t need to relocate your Tech & Product teams to the US, but build with a global mindset

The UK remains a key market for Quantexa, with Vishal highlighting the “tremendous open market” and “great innovation when it comes down to data and AI”. He likewise credits a supportive regulator in the Financial Conduct Authority and the reality that “from a banking perspective, the UK has Canary Wharf, the City of London, and some of the biggest thinking executives when it comes down to data”.

The UK also remains the heart of Quantexa’s Technology and Product capability, but it has been designed to have an international reach. As Vishal puts it: “Our product management function happens to be here in the UK but it's truly global”. The combination of this world class team paired with regional VPs and subject matter experts with their ear to the ground reporting back on market trends, innovation and customer feedback across EMEA, the US, and APAC has proved highly effective for Quantexa.

8. Culture really is king: Ensure you maintain culture as you scale into the US

Vishal credits several factors with helping Quantexa maintain culture across geographies as the company has scaled. 

Key elements include monthly town halls led by Vishal as CEO. In these, he opens and closes each meeting, and does a live Q&A with his 800-strong team. Vishal says that while It’s not always easy to fit into a busy schedule, it’s important. 

He reflects: “The culture piece is never done. You've got to keep working - just like with any relationship… We invested and we got it right and we continue to invest in it. I’ve done monthly town halls for the last six years… and it's a connection between me and my people. Anyone can ask a question… that openness is a key component to the culture.” 

Another is making sure that he is on the ground frequently in the US as CEO. He says: “For the last couple of years, one week out of every three or four, I've been in the US - and I plan to continue doing that; I'm in my New York office or in the Boston office or I’m going out to DC.”

Vishal also consistently emphasises that people and culture have been the backbone to Quantexa’s success. As he says: “Fundamentally it always comes back to people. Its people in my organisation, my partners, my investors, my clients, it always comes down to people. People buy from people. People work with people. People invest in people.”

Dataiku is the Platform for AI Success, giving organisations control over their AI talent, processes, and technologies to unleash the creation of analytics, models, and agents. Dataiku serves over 700 enterprise customers and integrates with all clouds, data platforms, AI services and legacy systems. With governance by design and no-, low-, and full-code capabilities, it enables global businesses to confidently build and manage differentiated AI that drives measurable value.

Although Dataiku was founded in Paris in 2013, it is now headquartered in New York. The company’s successful expansion into the US from 2016 was central to its growth trajectory, and powered it to unicorn status in 2020.

Dawn General Partner Evgenia Plotnikova recently sat down with Dataiku’s co-founder and CEO, Florian Douetteau. Florian has led the company since its inception and spearheaded Dataiku’s US expansion, including the relocation of its HQ to New York in 2017, and the closure in 2022 of a $200 million Series F round led by US HQ’d investor Wellington Management that valued Dataiku at $3.7 billion. Today, alongside retaining its strong core in Europe and opening hubs in Asia, many of the key executives at Dataiku, including the Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief People Officer, are based in the US, and the business has over 1200 employees around the world.

Evgenia first met Florian in Paris in 2016 and led Dawn’s investment in Dataiku’s Series C funding round, before participating in every round since. In this piece, we share insights from their conversation, including why the US market is so critical, how to approach expansion as a European scale-up, how to create a winning talent acquisition strategy, and what it means to successfully sell AI in the US.

There are three clear reasons to go to the US, and they compound

The US isn't just a bigger market, Florian says, it's a fundamentally different kind of market that shapes your company in ways Europe simply can't.

He views the US as offering three important compounding factors: customers, ecosystem, and ability to scale. As Florian explains: “First, in the US you can get the type of early adopters that will drive your roadmap and innovation in the right way, thinking ahead a bit of the market. Second, you can build more partnerships and exist within an ecosystem of larger organisations that will actually influence your space... And, last but not least, the US is a big software market: it is for most organisations two thirds to even 80% of their business, and so it's the place where – especially if you focus on Fortune 500 companies – you can multiply the number of million-plus contracts.”

Practically, Florian has found that the US market is particularly compelling because you can both build faster motions with Director level buyers, and achieve more high value enterprise contracts.

He explains: “You can have a faster motion at both ends of the spectrum… you have a more discretionary budget being given to professionals at the Director level to invest in innovation…. [and] because of the depth of the US market in terms of large organisations, it's actually easier to scale million-plus contracts.”

It’s a race: Once you know what problem you’re solving, go!

Florian argues that if you want to really win the market, you have to enter the US early in your growth journey.

He says: “I think it's right to go to the US as soon as possible. In our case, we actually started to engage in the US just a year – or even nine months – after our product was ready, and potentially we could have done that a bit sooner.

“If you’re operating in a new field and have found a business problem that’s universal, it’s very likely that at least 100 people had the same idea at the same time. Probably 20 to 30 of them are in the Bay area with easy access to capital and a friend from Stanford or OpenAI ready to join them… [So] If you’re just focused on building in Europe, you are losing the race.”

When Dataiku entered the US, it had US-based competitors of roughly the same size building similar products. A decade on, Dataiku is five to ten times bigger. Florian is confident that if Dataiku had stayed only European, those competitors – who at the time had faster customer feedback loops, easier access to capital, and closer proximity to early adopters – would have outgrown them and then moved into European markets with more money and momentum. He advises: “The only way to compensate for that is to go first in the US. Because the people winning the US market will come for you.”

Florian also believes that being a Europe-born startup that then moves into the US market offers significant structural advantages – and Dataiku has proven this to be the case.

Alongside access to a depth of world-class engineering and AI talent at competitive cost, building a team and early PMF in Europe means companies gain access to large, complex traditional enterprises. This gives startups the opportunity to gain a more in-depth understanding of non-digital-first industries early on. This mattered for Dataiku because they were building for large banks, manufacturers and Fortune 500 companies, where AI adoption has to work inside real organisational constraints. Florian advised founders not to underestimate these advantages, and to use them as a source of confidence for their US launch.

Cracking the US takes founder presence – and people who know your company

As CEO, Florian has also been highly present in the US. “I have been to the US 80 times, at least – which means that every other week I'm on a plane,” he shares. “As a founder, if you operate as a global company, you have to become accustomed to every terminal of every airport and actually have your own life there.”

Dataiku also benefited from relocating team members who deeply understood the company, which helped the new US team absorb context faster. Florian says: “What you want to bring is people that understand the company and can help people to operate… you benefit from sending a few people across the ocean by accelerating this transfer of information.” He flagged that this can also be an opportunity for top talent, to grow and operate at even greater scale.

However you build your organisation as you expand internationally, Florian stressed that the vital element for founders is to “operate as a distributed, moving team” across geographies.

In a noisy AI market, show concrete value fast – and invest in customer relationships

Florian emphasised how today, in a crowded AI market, it is more important than ever to demonstrate tangible solutions quickly to new US customers. He advises approaching stakeholders with “concrete product tied to business value very early on, because they see AI everywhere”.

“There are too many vendors that claim ‘AI magic’, and there is too much of a discrepancy between ‘AI magic’ and what enterprise actually realise in terms of value,” he explains. “You need to show them concrete things – not just AI slop, but actual demo, actual product, and connect that to very concrete business problems”.

This value demonstration needs to happen fast. Florian says customers need to “be able to consume that [messaging] in 1 or 2 minutes in every conversation”.

A physical presence in the US also strengthens your GTM motion, since in-person connectivity with customers matters more now than ever. “If you're a buyer of software today and you sit in any large organisation, thanks to AI, you can get hundreds of personalised emails every day,” he says. “[Using] social events as a way to engage with customers is important on both sides… [you need] the ability to meet, and experience the value proposition face to face”.

Make sure you choose where you land carefully

Like every European tech company opening a US hub, Dataiku had to carefully consider where to land. Florian says: “We were really debating between NYC and San Francisco. We knew we would be travelling a lot between teams in Europe and the US, so thought it would make more sense to go East Coast rather than West Coast - and NYC was where we had most of our US customers.”

This approach has worked well, as having a smaller time difference between teams and being close to its US customer base helped Dataiku find its feet in the early days. Now, at their current stage of growth - and given the importance of Silicon Valley for AI companies - they also have a significant presence on the West Coast and key executives such as their Chief Marketing Officer and Chief People Officer are based in San Francisco.

If you’re a founder struggling to choose a location, Florian recommends starting pragmatically. Ask: which is the place where I can hire the best first five or six people who can understand the company, work closely together, and become productive quickly?

“Recruiting is the best use of a founder’s time”: It's crucial to make hiring top talent a no.1 priority

Dataiku put hiring top US talent at the centre of their expansion plans, and it paid off. As Florian says: “I think recruiting is actually the best use of time for founders initially.”

Florian shared that he and his co-founders conducted all the first interviews for US hires until Dataiku reached 50 US employees. This is a winning strategy companies often miss, because the significant time commitment it entails can seem like a drain on resources. However, in reality investing in ensuring you’re landing the strongest early hires is the best use of time, as it makes things significantly more efficient going forward. As Florian explains: “If you believe in hiring people smarter than you, you are giving yourself time back [in the long run].

“When you’re small, the ability to get someone good one month faster will help expedite the growth of the company.”

When it comes to choosing the first hires, and building your early US team, Florian believes “there is no golden rule” for the right approach.

He says: “What matters is actually to understand what would be any type of roadblock from the perspective of a customer in terms of finding value in the platform you're selling… Your first US customers want to be reassured by the fact that they will be supported locally.”

Florian also recommended looking beyond your landing hub for the best talent. Dataiku made key hires in NY, but looked across the US from early on. It now has hundreds of team members spread across its key US markets, with offices in San Francisco, Denver, Raleigh and Washington alongside the NY HQ.

Designing a rigorous interview process pays off: focus on selling as much as buying, and hire for ‘founder mentality’ over ‘mercenary mentality’

Dataiku’s founders recognised early on that hiring talent in the US is a different proposition to Europe, and reaped the rewards of investing in building rigorous hiring processes.

Florian shared a few tips for how to build your own process: 

1. Land in the US ready to sell yourself and your company to candidates. He says: “You have to sell the story of the company, sell the story of yourself, early on. If you’re not selling the company and yourself [candidates could think] then you might not have a good product.”

2. Sales talent can excel at “selling themselves”. To ensure they calibrated for this, the Dataiku team added case studies and exercises into their hiring processes to most accurately assess candidates' abilities and fit for the company. Florian recommends taking this approach, which we explore in more depth in Section 7, including covering how to think about this in today’s environment where every candidate has Claude or OpenAI at their fingertips.

3. Florian’s top tip for interviewing is to start by reframing what you are looking to discover. He explains that European founders often walk in asking: Is this person a good salesperson?, but believes this is the wrong starting point. He says: "Your first question should be: why would this person join my company? Because if this person is joining for the wrong reasons, that's probably why they wouldn't be successful."

He found that when Dataiku got the 'why' right – meaning that it attracted people who genuinely believed in the mission and saw Dataiku’s product as unique – the rest followed naturally.

4. Florian also cautioned founding teams to avoid hiring anyone with a “mercenary mentality”. He explains: “In the US, you want to keep hiring people with a founder mentality, as opposed to a mercenary mentality…. They need to be very interested in the problem [you’re solving] and that's why they are coming for interview.”

5. Finally, Florian flagged a nuance specific to the US hiring market that European founders often miss: in the US, it's common for candidates to have changed jobs every three to four years. He says that understanding the pattern, and asking why someone made each move, is a far more useful signal than frequency of change alone. For him, a candidate moving every two years is a flag. But leaving a role every three-to-four years with a good story? That's just the US market.

Tap your VC’s contacts and wider networks to make your company a known entity among top US talent

As Florian says, the biggest challenge for a European software company looking to secure the best US talent - both at employee and Board level - is that your brand is largely unknown when you arrive stateside.

Florian saw this first hand at the start of Dataiku’s US journey, and advises founders to leverage their VCs for introductions to their wider US networks. Dawn has also found this to be an incredibly valuable approach for founders looking to gain access to the best talent in the market, and so we do this proactively for our portfolio companies.

Florian says: “A good chunk of the talent you need early on are very specific experts that bring experience that isn’t typically on the market. A lot are board members, advisors, etc, who could potentially be enticed to get back into an operational role. You aren’t going to engage this talent because they’re hearing from a recruitment firm - it will be because they’re interested in the product and they want to build something great. That is where the VC network comes into play.”

‘It’s the only way to engage people fast enough’ - invest in building cultural connectivity between Europe and the US

Once you’ve made your first key hires for your US hub, Florian stressed that it’s important to invest in maintaining your company culture across continents.

For Dataiku, this involved flying new US hires over to the company’s Paris HQ for onboarding and their first few weeks on the job. The intensive process was a significant investment - both financially and logistically - however, Florian believes this approach was crucial in enabling Dataiku to translate its culture into its US hub, and to its long-term US success. He says: “Establishing these foundations was expensive. But when you’re in full-fledged recruiting mode, when you are hiring massively month on month at scale, I think it’s the only way to engage people fast enough.”

Dataiku’s founders also put hiring talent that was “fundamentally mission-driven” front and centre in their talent acquisition strategy, which helped build a values-aligned, high-performing team who were in it for the long run.

“What matters is not to think about your company culture as a fixed point,” Florian says. “In the US, you want to keep hiring people who are fundamentally [mission-driven]... You don’t want them to come to your company because you raised a Series A, Series B, or because of your valuation… For the first 20 or 30 people, you want them to come because they believe in the mission… they understand that your product and value proposition is unique.”

How to build your landing team

The right archetype and level of “first hire”, and the best structure of your market entry pod, are questions that come up time and again.

Factors to take into account when building your initial landing team will include how significant a portion of your overall business you aim for the US market to ultimately be, whether a founder and/or other team members from Europe are relocating, the makeup and seniority of these “culture carriers”, how much revenue you already have both globally and in the US, the overall stage and maturity of the business, as well as the GTM motion, the industry being sold into, and the buyer.

Most often, European HQ’ed companies will have product and engineering teams already established in Europe, and tend to center their landing teams in the US around go-to-market. This does not mean, however, that technical skillsets are not important. Sales and Solutions Engineers are often critical to earn those marquee US customers, and increasingly, Forward Deployed Engineers and Developer Relations talent may also be hired on the ground.

While there is no “one size fits all” approach to a US expansion hiring strategy, there are two primary models we generally see working well:

1. The founder relocating, and building a team to support a founder-led sales motion – until the business is ready to hire a sales leader in the US slightly later down the line. Founder presence can be make or break in the early days of US expansion, and founder-led selling is often fundamental in understanding the US market and getting critical early traction.

Alongside the founder, we’ve found that building a lean team of ICs or “player-coaches” works well – ideally a combination of top performing team members relocating from Europe, who act as culture carriers, and new hires. We see this model be particularly effective when the US is likely to become a startup's largest market, and therefore the founder’s natural home base for the next phase of the journey.

This model is also effective where there is discovery required around adapting PMF to the US, or when the focus is on securing early landmark US logos, or where a startup's global brand reputation is less established and founder to buyer conversations are invaluable for credibility. Instead of hiring a VP Sales from the get go, it can be effective for a founder to lead the GTM strategy and execution, supported by key pre and post sales hires such as account executives, solutions engineering and customer success, until there is enough momentum and proven PMF in the US to hire a leader.

At this moment, a VP or Head Of Sales is well placed to work alongside the founder on scaling the GTM playbook, building repeatable processes, and driving execution excellence. It is worth noting that, unless a Sales leader from Europe is part of the landing pod, the assumption here is that the founder will be acting in a Head of Sales capacity, which means dedicating significant time to coaching, ramping and enabling the team around them. Unsupported junior team members, especially new hires, are rarely set up to be successful – and so if a founder isn’t able to play this role, a “player manager” could be worth bringing on board early.

2. A Sales leader hired early on in the US expansion journey, alongside a core GTM team. A founder may also still relocate in this model, and the market-entry team should ideally combine relocated European team members and new talent. We find this scenario works best in a few specific situations. It may be for practical reasons, such as that the founder is not able to relocate, or the founding team all skew technical rather than commercial. It could be due to the stage and scale of the business – for example, where the overall revenue is already significant, or where strong US logos have been won from Europe, which can help provide the proof points to justify and attract a senior hire from day one. It could be down to the PMF having been proven to be more transferable from Europe. It also may be a result of execution necessity, where the competitive urgency and demand from the US is so high that there is no time to lose, and investing heavily in senior GTM talent is crucial to keeping up with the market opportunity and the scale you wish to attain. In this model, as we explore below, we encourage founders to be very thoughtful about the archetype of leader they are bringing onboard, and index on builders who are comfortable being extremely hands-on in the early days.

There is therefore no universal blueprint for a first hire or your first market-entry landing pod. However, there are 4 key principles that we’ve observed to be relevant in many cases.

The four key principles of a US landing strategy

1. Commit fully to a US expansion, and be as present as is practical

As we touch on earlier in our playbook, we have found that nothing accelerates US expansion quite like the founder's presence. However, while many founders may choose to relocate, we appreciate this isn’t always possible, and may not be the best long term strategy for every startup. Rather than observing a hard and fast rule around founder relocation, we believe the most important thing is for a founder or founding team to commit fully to US expansion, and be as present as is practical in the US during the crucial phases of opening and establishing the market. For example, for Collibra and Dataiku, this meant one or more founders relocating, whereas for Quantexa, this meant relocating culture carriers alongside significant time spent in-market by the CEO from the moment of launch, right up until today. Runware’s founders, similarly, invest heavily in being present in the US; as co-founder Ioana Hreninciuc says: “If you're not going to be all in, why are you there? You have to be in it to compete.”

2. Don’t hire one person and treat them as an island

While lean teams can be highly effective, hiring one Account Executive and expecting them to figure out the US market is, in many cases, setting them up to fail. Alongside support from the founding team, a market as complex as the US will require dedicated support both on the ground and from the European HQ – for example, across pre-sales, marketing and customer success. It is also important to remember that top talent, as they evaluate new opportunities, will be focused on who they will report to and have the opportunity to learn from, whether that's a founder or a sales leader. 

3. Don’t make the mistake of hiring too senior, too soon

Given how significant a market opportunity the US is, why not just hire a CRO or VP Sales from day one in every case? We have observed that many companies make the mistake of hiring this role too early. Felix Van de Maele, CEO and Co-founder at Collibra, recommends: “Pace yourself in hiring too many senior execs from the get-go. It’s such a different environment. You want builders… it’s so, so important, to have that bias for action, to get things done… If senior execs haven’t worked in this [type of] environment, they don’t know what not having the support system is really like… it can go wrong quite easily.”

Not only might a senior sales leader not be hands-on enough to do an early build, or bring the experience of operating in an environment where US PMF is still being iterated, you also may not be able to hire the strongest leadership talent at this early stage in a US expansion journey. The leader you will be able to attract with the initial evidence that the market is there to be won – a few major US logos, reps already beating quotas, and a healthy pipeline – will be very different to the person you could have attracted to join you without these proof points.

Where it does make sense to start with a leadership hire in the US, we encourage founders to think carefully around archetype and levelling, and to assess for operators who are hands-on, bring a builder mentality, thrive within ambiguity, and are comfortable being very “in the weeds.” Often, this means someone who is comfortable selling themselves for a period of time, before or alongside building out a team. This is a classic “player-coach” profile, and can be a Head of or VP Sales. As Dawn Partner, Dan Chaplin, says: “Sometimes it may make sense to bring sales leadership into the fold earlier to lead the growth of the team. This person acts almost as a GM for the region, but – crucially,– they will still need to be very hands-on with closing early deals, and work extremely closely with the founding team.”

4. Prioritise builders with stage-appropriate start-up experience

It is not only the level of experience founders should watch out for, but where the experience has come from. As Dawn General Partner Evgenia Plotnikova says: “The majority of founders I have worked with can face the temptation to lean into a brand and senior experience. It can be flattering to have someone who has spent 20 years at a large tech company like Microsoft want to come and work for your startup. But don’t be fooled by what appears like an early win… these aren’t always the right people for your company.”

The entrepreneurial mindset that resonates best at an early stage is often best tested through prior experience in similarly-staged startups, which is a principle that applies to all hires you are bringing onboard early in your journey.

As Bridget says: “If you’re hiring for a startup, you likely need someone with startup experience. They need to understand what they are signing up for: high-impact work with limited resources. The key is they’re excited about working within these constraints, and are joining to roll up their sleeves and build.”

There is therefore a lot of nuance to answering the question “who shall I hire first”, and it's a decision to be tailored around the specifics of the startup and their founding team. That's why Dawn has invested in building out a Talent Platform to support these key decisions along a US expansion journey, working hand in hand with our founding teams at this critical juncture.

So, once you have designed your market entry team, how best to go about hiring the talent you need?The US talent market is unique, and landing top candidates is highly competitive. This necessitates a proactive and strategic approach from European companies as they look to expand.As Florian, co-founder and CEO of Dataiku, emphasises, hiring should be a founder’s number one job when landing in the US. He found that “recruiting is actually the best use of time for founders initially” as “the ability to get someone good one month faster will help expedite the growth of the company.” Committing fully to building a world class early team in the US, Florian and his co-founders conducted every first interview for US hires until Dataiku reached 50 US employees - and this really paid off.

So where to start? We recommend doing these three things early on in a search process…

Following Dataiku’s example, we suggest that founders adopt a “Chief Hiring Officer mindset” to give them the best chance of securing top talent, and that starts well before the first interview. Doing these three things upfront will set your search up for success, and reduce the risk of a miss-hire.

1. Scope and define the role clearly: When drafting your job descriptions and building your assessment scorecard, let go of the idea of hiring “unicorn” candidates (which rarely exist), and instead define what actual success looks like for this specific role.

Ask yourself, what capabilities are you targeting, what skills are you prioritising, and what experiences are your must-haves? What are the highest priority deliverables for this person in the first 30/60/90/360 days? What are the gaps and strengths of your current team, and how might that alter the scope of this role? Then with all of this in mind, how will you assess candidates against this criteria throughout your interview process? Having the answers to these questions will help scope the search for the highest potential candidate fit, as well as prepare you to run a well-structured and efficient hiring process. As Bridget explains: “Spend time up front scoping the role against your immediate business priorities. That initial investment pays off - you’ll hire who you actually need, and in the meantime run a far more efficient process.”

2. Align internally: Then, make sure key decision-makers are all on the same page about the role, hiring priorities and expectations, and are ready to tell this story to candidates in a consistent way. Leverage an assessment scorecard, and thread the assessment criteria throughout your interview process. Each interview should have a key focus that links directly to your scorecard, and the interviewers should come prepared with questions to test those criteria.

3. Do early candidate calibration: Once you think you know what you are looking for, it’s then important to test your hypothesis. Honing in quickly on what good looks like will mean you can run a more efficient process, and meet the most relevant people (your ‘bullseye’ candidates). The clarity this brings will also deliver a better candidate experience. Even if you have done a lot of work upfront to define the requirements, as we recommend, there may still be things you need to test live - this is especially the case with senior hiring, or in generalist roles. As Bridget says: “Hiring can be very experimental, especially when you are making a certain hire for the first time in a new geography. That's why early in a process, we recommend founders have conversations with different archetypes of candidates, testing areas such as seniority, “spike” or industry experience, in order to hone in on ‘wow, that's the exact type of experience we need’.”

And you don’t need to go it alone… it helps to take advantage of value-add support from your Investors

Having strong VC partners at your side can make a huge difference in US hiring success. A well-networked investor can open their rolodex to you – not to mention that having the support and investment from top-tier VC’s will help you build credibility in a new market.

That's why we’ve built a Talent team dedicated to working hand-in-hand with our founders as they expand into the US market. We act as talent advisors, leverage our networks, and proactively target high-quality talent, running end-to-end hiring processes for our portfolio companies. As Avalon explains: “Acting as a strategic hiring partner, we help founders get to the right candidates, and get there faster, allowing them to spend their time convincing, assessing and then closing world-class talent.”

The differences to compensation and benefits in the US from a startup's home market can trip up many founders. It is beneficial to think about this before launching a search in the US, so you can move quickly and decisively when the time comes to hire.

Compensation

Two of the easiest mistakes to make when entering the US market are either underpricing roles - and losing candidates to competitors as a result - or overpricing relative to stage, burning capital unnecessarily. The answer to both is often the same: ground your compensation decisions in reliable market data, and make a deliberate choice as a business about where you want to land on the scale.

For example, recent statistics show that average US tech salaries can average as much as 40% higher than many European markets for comparable roles. As such, it is important to do the research and align on your compensation bands before you go into the market, to ensure you are prepared and avoid surprises.

Benefits

In the US, there are certain benefits that are non-negotiable, even for smaller companies. One of these is health insurance. While there are a range of plans and different costs depending on what level of support you want to give your employees, you will need to offer an employer-sponsored health insurance plan of some sort. Another very important factor in benefits for the US is an employer-sponsored 401K (retirement) plan. Some companies will match 401K contributions for employees. Matching is less common at earlier stage companies, but sponsoring is a must. 

If you’re starting out creating your comp and benefits strategy, please see the piece at the end of US Launchpad which we co-authored with global law firm Wilson Sonsini - it contains some quick-hit checklists.

It's not a case of one size fits all in the US, and the market moves quickly… Advice from Talent leads who have executed strategies on the ground

Richard Stern, Head of Talent at Quantexa, has been on this journey. He says: “Each US market/state should be treated independently. While it’s important to maintain a global compensation philosophy, such as how you benchmark, which sectors you compare against, and your target compensation percentile, the US requires additional nuance. Costs vary significantly between states, and hiring in the US is expensive, particularly when factoring in benefits (healthcare, 401K etc). This makes a well-defined location strategy critical. Consider where you want your footprint to be, as choosing a high-cost state early on and committing to it, albeit close to your customers, can substantially increase your overall costs. My suggestion to anyone hiring in the US for the first time is to map out the following:

• Location & Market Strategy
• Compliance & Legal
• Comp and Benefits
• HR/People/Talent Infrastructure

Collibra has taken an equally thoughtful approach. Brandon Barrett, their Global Head of Recruiting, recommends staying closely aligned with market trends as you build your compensation plan for the US. He advises:

• Utilise market data from reliable sources, such as Radford, to ensure you are aligned with current market standards.
• Leverage hiring data like acceptance rates, comp-related rejection reasons, and time to fill to identify what markets may need a compensation review. He has found that using your hiring and attrition data in this way, as a leading indicator that compensation may need adjusting, has been critical to staying ahead of market changes.

Assessing and hiring talent, especially in the early growth stages of a business and as you are entering a new market, is both an art and a science - and a skillset that can take years to hone. At Dawn, alongside our own in-house expertise, we’re lucky to work with leaders with extensive experience and notable success in recruiting exceptional early-stage teams who know how to win in the US.

In this piece, Avalon and Bridget from Dawn’s Talent platform join executives from our portfolio to share valuable learnings from their hiring wins and misses. They share advice on some of the most critical topics, from recruiting early sales talent in the US to how to distinguish between a skilled interviewee and a candidate who will actually excel in a role.

Here, we feature insights from:

• Lynne Oldham, Chief People Officer at Dataiku
• Richard Stern, Head of Talent at Quantexa
• Brandon Barrett, Global Head of Recruiting at Collibra
• Ann Watson, Chief People Officer, and Greg Russell, VP Talent Acquisition at Cover Genius
• Emoke Starr, Global Head of People & Talent at Lokalise
• Amanda DiLorenzo, Senior Director People & Culture at quantilope
• James Richardson, Head of Talent Acquisition at inforcer

Hire stage appropriately: stay focused on what will drive success

We have already covered the importance of stage-appropriate hiring for those first few critical roles, but this principle remains true as you build and scale your US teams.

Amanda is Senior Director of People and Culture at quantilope, and has been with the company since mid 2021. quantilope has seen significant growth in the US during this period, and Amanda works closely with the founding team and US-based CRO. Alongside getting hiring cadence right - ie: not hiring too fast or too slow - Amanda reflected that one of her most successful strategies has been to source and recruit talent from similar stage companies. She reflects: “It is so much more efficient to onboard talent from companies at a similar stage, which is necessary in a startup environment that’s moving very quickly.”

Amanda cautions that it can be a mistake to hire from large, corporate environments, at least at the beginning of your growth journey when entrepreneurship, speed and agility are so critical. She says: “When talent has no or limited startup experience, sometimes their industry knowledge isn't enough… Talent coming from a corporate background is used to having certain resources that may not be available at your company. This misalignment can pan out badly.”

Richard Stern, the Head of Talent at Quantexa, has helped the company scale the US into a very significant region. Quantexa now has an 800+ strong team spread across 16 global offices - including New York, Boston, Charlotte, and DC.

He recommends taking the time to think about the profile you’re looking for and where you’re likely to hire them from. “Someone who has been a huge success working somewhere, with unlimited budgets, headcount, technology, and a household brand name behind them, may not achieve the same success as the first person on the ground in a start-up.”Alongside targeting experience at an appropriate stage, Amanda tests the competencies and essential attributes that distinguish startup talent throughout the interview process, She says: “You need to ask questions that show how talent will work with ambiguity - which is an integral part of being in an early-stage startup - and if their professional and personal goals align with the business strategy.”

Brandon Barrett, Global Head of Recruiting at Collibra, agrees. He says: “We are always hiring for scrappiness and resourcefulness. Early hires must be comfortable building systems from scratch, solving problems without clear SOPs, being curious, and wearing multiple hats.”

Lynne Oldham, Chief People Officer at Dataiku, approaches this by deliberately looking for candidates who are "allergic to process" in the right way. By this, she means talent who resist bureaucracy for its own sake, but are capable of building scalable structure when a business needs it. She says: "The risk with early hires is that you get people who can't operate without process, or people who are so resistant to structure that they become a blocker as you grow. You want the ones who know when to write the playbook and when to throw it out."

‘Don't sugarcoat the challenges or lack of resources in your company to sell the candidate’

Amanda has found success through creating transparency and clear expectation settings with potential hires. This includes challenges the business has faced and the reality of available resources and support within an early-stage business. “Don't sugarcoat the resources or challenges in your company to sell the candidate, it doesn’t work,” she advises. “Be honest, and you will have a better chance of finding the right candidate. It never works to over-promise or oversell your company.”

Avalon has found the same. She says: “While if you want to hire the top 1% of talent it is absolutely critical to allocate significant time to telling the story of your business during an interview process to build candidate conviction every step of the way, this should not come at the expense of realism and transparency around where you are at in the journey, and the level of sophistication and infrastructure candidates should expect to walk into.” As Lynne puts it, "You have to be honest about where you are and what you're offering"

Don’t let your talent strategy stay static: ‘The type of talent you need at early-stage is often very different to the people you need as you scale’

Quantexa’s Richard has learned from experience that the type of talent you need at early-stage is often very different to the people you need later on.

He explains: “Your business needs shift dramatically as you move from early-stage to scale. Early-stage hires usually thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments, building from scratch, wearing multiple hats, and getting things done with minimal process (and support). As you grow, priorities change. Suddenly, you need people who can bring structure, innovation, manage systems, lead bigger teams, and create consistency. Some of your early hires will make that leap, however not everyone will want to, nor might they be capable. The thing to remember is that's okay, as when they first joined they signed up for a different kind of role”.

Avalon finds that this applies at the leadership level as much as elsewhere. She says: “The archetype of sales leader who will take you from $1-10m ARR is likely to be quite different to the person who will take you from $10-50m. Of course, talent can scale and grow with your business, and it is amazing to see examples of this, but often it will be necessary to bring on board different leaders for different phases of the journey. The good news for talent is that the skillset they have built doing a certain growth stint is incredibly valuable in the market, and will set them up for success in their next role.”

When European tech companies launch into the US, they are often an unknown or little known entity. It’s worth being realistic from the outset that the perfect candidate is unlikely to be aware of you, or directly apply for a role, and this means founders need to work hard to get in front of the most in-demand talent.

Bridget Snow, Dawn’s US Talent & Network Lead, says: “Hiring top-tier talent requires doing the work to get on their radar. As a founder, that means being actively involved in outreach and present throughout the entire hiring journey. The best candidates are watching closely - the way you show up in interviews tells them how you’ll show up as their manager. When they see you’re genuinely excited and bought in, that energy is contagious. The best people will rise to meet it."

Balance ‘selling’ and ‘assessing’

First and foremost, founders should dedicate significant time in each conversation to ‘sell’ as much as ‘buy’. It is imperative to build candidate conviction as much as assess, especially in the early rounds of a process. As Bridget says: “Be ready to sell the opportunity during the first conversation with a candidate to get them interested and excited. Candidates will be evaluating the business just as much as the company will be evaluating the candidate for the role.” 

Florian Douetteau, the co-founder and CEO of Dataiku, has experienced the importance of this. He says “you have to sell the story of the company, sell the story of yourself, early on… if you’re not selling the company and yourself [candidates could think] that you might not have a good product”.

Ioana Hreninciuc, co-founder of Runware, agrees. She says: “The story you're selling to employees is exactly like the story you're selling to investors. They’re going to be looking for the same concrete things from you… They’re going to be looking at your actual growth, and they’re going to be looking at what they want to do in their roles.”
So remember, the candidate is interviewing you just as much as you are interviewing them, and if you want to hire top talent who will likely have many other compelling opportunities to consider, it is vital to keep them engaged and excited throughout the process. As a founder, you’re the best placed to do this.

Be prepared and be real: articulate the opportunity ahead, but remain transparent about where you are at

We recommend founders start off the first conversation by conveying a honed message on the company’s vision, the market opportunity, why the role will be exciting, and what resource they are putting behind the US market.

Then, remain receptive to any “assessing” questions from the candidates, however direct they may be. Expect candidates to ask about your level of backing and your investors, have detailed role-specific questions such as the expectations for the first 30, 60, 90, and 365 days, and cover practical details such as the compensation and benefits. If you don’t have clear answers, be aware that talent may perceive the company as not fully understanding what it takes to hire and retain talent in the US- which has an impact not only on them, but also any hires they might want to bring in once onboard.

As we covered earlier in this playbook, it is equally important to remain fully transparent about the stage and maturity of your business. Candidates need to be able to make an informed decision to join a company at an early-stage. For example, you’re setting an AE up to fail if they think they’re walking into an environment with extensive sales enablement, a well honed lead-gen engine, and a fully staffed pre-and-post sales team, if in fact that is all still to be built.

As Avalon Lee-Bacon, Director of Talent at Dawn says: “We talk a lot about people making an active choice to go into a business at that stage, because startups are not for everyone. And very early stage startups, whether it's early stage overall or early in their US journey, are certainly not for everyone.”

Strike the right balance between rigour and efficiency in your interview process

US hiring processes should be kept as efficient as possible, whilst not trading-off on rigour. Therefore, it’s essential to be intentional in designing your process.

While founders have to be thorough, over-interviewing can be a risk. If a process has too many rounds, candidates may need to withdraw due to the timing on other offers, or even lose interest if they don’t feel there is momentum around decision making. Top talent won’t be around for long, and founders should make sure their interview process bridges the gap between understanding everything you need to know about a candidate and being mindful of time, to not lose out on an exceptional hire.

Create a honed interview process, then “rinse and repeat”.

In our experience, a strong process typically includes four to five rounds, including an exercise. It is also worth noting that you, as the founder and hiring manager, should be checking in with the candidate throughout to ensure they are prepared and engaged.

Here is our suggested interview framework:

• First round: Founder CEO
• Second and third round: Key execs (ie: other co-founders, VP Sales, VP Marketing, VP Finance, VP Product - or close external, role specific advisors)
• Fourth round: Presentation / case study / whiteboarding workshop
• Fifth round: final 'close' conversation with Founder CEO, plus a board member interview for executive / key roles

As you put this into practice, here are our 5 top tips:

1. Be intentional and structured - each interviewer should have a clear role in assessing the candidate. We recommend building and leveraging an assessment scorecard to do this, which helps ensure you are assessing against the criteria that matter most for the role, and will also be useful in making an objective, data driven decision at the end of a process.
2. Don't overlook an exercise — and in the AI era, make it live and interactive. It is critical to see how candidates work “in action” rather than only in structured interviews, which can be easy to rehearse for. In today’s AI era, it is more important than ever to assign exercises that are delivered live, and require some back-and-forth, as you can assume any take-home exercise or presentation will be created with AI assistance. These working sessions are also important in allowing you to test how you will work together, communicate, and bounce ideas off each other. We sometimes recommend bringing in external advisors at this stage, for role-specific expertise, especially if the founding / leadership team is lighter here or has not hired this role before. When drafting these exercises, it's important to get the balance right between depth and prep-time, as it can be inappropriate to expect a candidate in a busy day job to spend too many hours building materials, and you want to avoid asking for work that will get delegated to AI. For leadership hires, it's useful to provide the candidate with as much context or data as is appropriate to ground the task in reality. For certain hires, such as a CFO, it might be necessary to share confidential financial data, which can be done under an NDA.
3. Make sure candidates are getting what they need out of the interview process. It’s important to make sure candidates get the answers they need about you and your company during the interview process, too. For example, would they like to see a demo of the product? Would they like to meet a peer they will work closely alongside? Do they need to spend more time with the founding team?
   
   Alongside the strength of the technology, candidate decisions often come down to very human motivators. They ask themselves: Are these founders I believe in? Do we share a similar vision for what great looks like? Is this a team I want to work incredibly hard with every day? Will I be invested in to succeed and grow? The more exposure a hire has to the founders and the team, the more alignment will be built ahead of them joining. And the more senior the role, the more important this is.
   
4. For leadership hires, such as the first Head of Sales or Head of Marketing, it's effective to leverage board members toward the end of the process. Board members provide an external perspective on how the candidate matches up to what the business truly needs. They can also be very effective in telling top talent why they are so excited about the company, and the impact that individual could have on its trajectory. We have found that candidates often welcome the opportunity to hear a board member’s “outside-in” view on why an investor is excited about the business, why they chose to invest, and to learn more about future plans for the company.
5. Don’t overlook a thorough referencing process. It is crucial to reference your finalist candidate with leaders, peers and reports they’ve previously worked alongside. Through this process, you will glean important information about their key strengths, where they will likely need support, and how your team can best partner with them and set them up for success in a new role.

And remember… while hiring is often urgent and it can feel critical to get someone onboarded as soon as possible, it is often worth the wait to hire the absolute best person you can.

From your first sales hire to the leaders you need at scale: tried and tested interview questions and frameworks for US hiring, from Dawn's Talent team and portfolio executives

Assessing talent is a tricky thing to get right, particularly in a new geography. Talent acquisition is one of the hardest parts of US expansion - and one of the highest stakes. The right hire compounds; the wrong one costs time, capital, and momentum. Here, we share the Dawn Talent team's tried-and-tested questions and frameworks, alongside advice from People and Talent leaders across our portfolio.

We start with sales, because it's often the first commercial hire founders make in the US, and one that can be most prone to expensive miss-hires. Sales talent is notoriously skilled at interviewing, which means founders need a sharper assessment toolkit than they often realise. We then broaden out into how to assess across roles, covering startup attributes, leadership capability, and the all important cultural fit.

We feature insights from:

• Lynne Oldham, Chief People Officer at Dataiku
• Richard Stern, Head of Talent at Quantexa
• Brandon Barrett, Global Head of Recruiting at Collibra
• Ann Watson, SVP People, and Greg Russell, Talent Acquisition Leader at Cover Genius
• Emoke Starr, Global Head of People & Talent at Lokalise
• Amanda DiLorenzo, Senior Director People & Culture at quantilope
• James Richardson, Head of Talent Acquisition at inforcer

6a: How to get your US sales hires right, according to the experts

Top tips for assessing Sales Talent

So, how should companies evaluate strong sales talent? What skills and experience are critical to test for when interviewing? And what questions do you ask to assess this?

Watch out for salespeople who are great at selling themselves… Instead, assess practically using these steps

A recurrent theme is to watch out for candidates who can ‘talk the talk’ without numbers to back it up. Sales talent is notoriously strong at interviewing, and as Dan Chaplin, a Partner on the Dawn team, says, “it can be hard for European founders to sort out who's selling themselves well versus who can sell your product”.

It is therefore extra important to look for evidence to support claims. Avalon finds: “If sales talent can’t speak precisely about quota attainment, it's a flag. More broadly, we look for GTM talent who talk in terms of data, metrics and the contribution of their activity to revenue growth.”

Bridget agrees, saying, “In an ideal world, every hire would be a top performer who never once missed quota. In reality, product issues, market misalignment, and company restructures happen, meaning that in some years, a strong salesperson may not have attainment at or above 100%. So alongside overall strong quota attainment throughout their career, what we look for is whether a candidate can benchmark their attainment against peers, and show what they learned or how they demonstrated resilience through tough market conditions. You want constructive sellers who understand their environment.”

Emoke, Global Head of People & Talent at Lokalise, has seen this play out. She says: “I look for clarity of thought, ownership, and a natural ability to read their audience. If I feel like I am being sold to, I lose interest quickly. I want people who understand their own decision-making pattern, and who can build credibility with both US customers and a European HQ.”

So, how to assess this practically? Our experts suggest testing interviewees’ sales craft live and in action, not just trusting the pitch:

• See how they react when you do a mock sales call and test them with tough customer questions
  Role-play a discovery or closing call. Watch for how they listen, handle objections, and adapt in real time — not just whether they sound polished. Be wary if a candidate freezes, over-pitches, or can't think on their feet under light pressure.
• Ask them to map a deal from scratch
  Give them a target account and ask them to walk you through how they'd approach it - from initial research and stakeholder mapping to outreach and closing strategy. This separates candidates who have internalised a repeatable process from those who've been carried by a strong brand or warm inbound pipeline.
• Test their objection handling skills
  Mid-way through the process, introduce a moment of constructive challenge. Push back on a claim they've made about a deal, ask them to defend a number, or present a sceptical buyer persona who isn't convinced by their pitch. You're not trying to catch them out, but you are watching how they hold their position, reframe the conversation, and move toward a resolution. Strong sales talent will negotiate with you naturally, without aggression or capitulation. 
• If they’ll be doing it on the job, have them run you through a mock demo.
  Once they have enough knowledge of your product, ask them to demo it to a fictional buyer persona. This tests their ability to get up to speed quickly, translate technical complexity into business value, and tailor a narrative to an audience — all skills they'll need on day one with a US customer not familiar with your company.
• Observe how they prepare, and how they communicate between interviews
  Preparation can be an indicator of performance. How thoughtful have they been about the product, positioning in the market and the competition? This is not about homework, it is about natural commercial acumen and innate curiosity. Their behaviours post interview matter too. Do they send follow up notes to interviewers, and reply promptly to scheduling? How they write, structure their thoughts, and follow up on meetings tells you a lot -— especially relevant for US enterprise sales where async communication and written credibility matter.

And what should you ask during interviews? James Richardson, Head of Talent Acquisition at inforcer, uses targeted competency assessment at every stage. He says: “Competency questions are king when it comes to interviewing because it gives you the evidence, and often people make decisions on gut feel based on people saying the right things. This is particularly true for salespeople… They’re just great interviewers and will tell you what you want to hear until you offer them, and then you realise they can’t do something.”

To help you sift out the strongest sales candidates, here are some of Dawn US Talent and Network Lead Bridget's tried-and-tested interview questions, alongside a few other “must-asks” from Dawn portfolio People and Talent leaders.

1. Sales Excellence & Track Record
Assesses raw commercial performance, quota attainment, and deal quality

• What is your annual or quarterly quota, and how have you performed against that in your past couple of roles?
• What were the ACV, sales cycle length, and key buyer personas of your deals?
• What is a deal you are most proud of, and why?

Bridget explains, “By asking for prior examples of customers and deals, you can get a sense of the size of contracts someone has sold, as well as the industries and personas they have experience selling into”.

2. Deal Execution & Sales Process
Assesses structured thinking, methodology, and ability to run a complex sale

• Walk me through a recent deal from start to finish. How did you engage the account, map key stakeholders, overcome objections, and win the deal?
• Walk me through your current pipeline. How many deals are you working right now, and at what stage are they? What is your win rate over the last 12 months?
• What is your personal sales style and methodology? In what way is it different from your peers?
• How do you differentiate a product in a crowded, noisy marketplace?
• How do you ensure that you deeply understand a customer's needs and pain points before proposing a solution?
• What’s your biggest weakness as a salesperson, and what are you actively looking to improve?

Bridget explains: “The answers to these questions tell you a lot. By asking prospective sales hires to walk me through a recent deal they’ve closed, I can get a better sense of their sales style and approach, tangible examples of deals they’ve worked on, and how they reflect on their career wins and losses.”

3. Builder Mentality, Scrappiness & Entrepreneurial Drive
Assesses self-sufficiency and ability to create from scratch - critical for early-stage US market entry

• How do you approach building a sales pipeline when resources like marketing support, lead generation, or sales enablement are limited?
• When in the sales cycle did you typically enter? In your roles, what percentage of your pipeline came from inbound/warm leads vs. net-new outbound prospecting that you sourced yourself?
• Give me an example of a deal you opened from zero in a market where you had no name recognition. How did you get traction?

As Bridget says: “If your company is expanding into a new market, such as the US, it’s important to dig into how much experience candidates have in developing net new relationships with customers and key go-to-market infrastructure from scratch. This, by nature, requires an entrepreneurial mentality. Candidates who solely rely on inbound leads will not bring the hunter mindset most startups need, especially when expanding into a new market.”

4. Resilience & Grit
Assesses how candidates respond to setbacks, obstacles, and ambiguity

• How do you maintain momentum and keep prospects engaged during a lengthy sales cycle?
• Can you describe a time when a deal was delayed due to hurdles out of your control? How did you move the deal forward?
• Tell me about a deal you lost in the last 12 months that you should have won. What specifically would you do differently, and how have you changed how you work to avoid it again?

5. Stakeholder Management & Relationship Building
Assesses ability to build trust, navigate complex buying groups, and manage customer relationships

• Describe a moment when you had to build trust quickly with someone who operated very differently from you. What did you do?
• Give me an example of a time when you had to manage a challenging customer relationship. What made it challenging, and how did you handle it?

6. AI Fluency and Leverage

• How has the way you use AI changed over the last 6 months – what are you doing now that you weren’t 6 months ago?
• Walk me through one workflow that you’ve rebuilt using AI, and the effects of this change.
• Where have you found AI falls short in your work, and how do you decide when to rely on it versus your own judgment?
• Everyone now has access to the same AI prospecting and research tools. How do you make your outreach and messaging actually land when buyers are flooded with AI-generated noise?

7. Culture Fit, Collaboration & Ways of Working
Assesses ability to work across teams and thrive in a distributed, scaling startup environment

• How do you typically collaborate with pre-sales, product, and customer success throughout the sales cycle?
• Walk me through how you structure your week when your prospects or teammates sit in a different time zone. How do you decide what gets your attention first?

And don’t only take their word for it…Alongside getting as much data from the individual themselves, referencing can play a useful role in helping you understand how a sales person operates, how successful they have been, and how well they may transition to an environment like yours. We therefore recommend founders speak to former managers, peers and direct reports- both their formal references but also with backchannel references from your networks, and/or from the networks of investors and trusted peers. In this way, you’ll not only get insight into a candidate’s performance from an unbiased perspective, but you may also get great insights into how to manage them and drive strong outcomes, should they join your team.

Part 6b: Assessing for startup attributes, leadership, and cultural fit

Sales may be one of the most common early US hires, but it's far from the only one where assessment makes or breaks the outcome. The same rigour applies whether you're hiring a marketing leader, a customer success lead, a solutions engineer, or your first People hire. Below, People and Talent leaders from our portfolio, alongside our own Talent team, share the questions and frameworks they've honed over years of building US teams - covering the most essential startup attributes, every early hire needs, how to test leadership capability, decision-making and accountability, and how to assess for genuine cultural fit.

Wondering where to start? Here are the Quantexa Talent leaders three go-to interview questions 

Richard Stern has helped Quantexa scale into the US and grow to an 800+ strong team spread across 16 global offices, including four in the US (New York, Boston, Charlotte, DC). His deceptively simple go-to interview questions are:

• What would make you stay in your current role?
• If you had a chance to go back to any previous company, which one would it be and why?
• What do you need from us in order to succeed?

Richard says: “These questions often allow candidates to think on the spot, and share more about themselves and their career decisions. The final question also gives you the chance to discover what the candidate wants from you as a company - and start working out whether they will be an ideal fit”. While the questions may seem straightforward, they let Richard test for things that are critical at Quantexa; “We’re always looking for examples of strategic thinking, decision-making under pressure, and how candidates can inspire, grow and develop others.”

What to ask to test for the startup attributes all early stage companies want: builders who find comfort in ambiguity and energy in change

Emoke Starr leads People and Talent at Lokalise, the localisation management platform. She has helped the company scale to over 200 people in a fully-remote setup.

Emoke finds experiential, open-ended questioning extremely helpful. She says: “There are a few qualities in candidates that I consistently look out for: people who stay effective in ambiguity and find energy in change rather than exhaustion, and people with internal drive and craft ownership. No one can teach you to care. If someone finds meaning, satisfaction, or momentum in the actual work rather than just the outcome, they’ll grow faster and be more resilient. That’s why I usually use open-ended, experiential questions, because they are an effective way to go beyond the surface and give context around how someone thinks, operates, and understands their own impact. These are the questions I recommend asking:

• Tell me about a time when a project or priority changed significantly mid-way. What did you do?
• When you’ve worked in uncertain or shifting environments, what helped you stay grounded and effective?
• What’s a part of your role that you naturally go deep on, even when no one’s asking?
• Can you share something you’ve improved or learned simply because you wanted to?”

When testing a candidate’s ability to thrive in environments with limited foundations and a lot still to be built, Emoke will ask questions such as:

• When you joined your last company, what did you have to build for yourself because it simply did not exist yet?
• Describe a situation where the product or internal readiness could not meet a buyer’s expectations. How did you navigate the gap without losing momentum?
• If you were one of the first hires building a US presence, what would your first 30 days look like in practice, and what would you expect to already have in place versus create yourself?

Similarly, Richard asks any hires looking to join Quantexa questions like:

• What kind of environment do you typically thrive in?
• Can you share examples of “rolling up your sleeves” and balancing “player-coach” responsibilities?
• Tell me about a time when you had to create structure or process from scratch - how did you approach it?

And a favorite of Brandon Barrett, Global Head of Recruiting at Collibra, is:

• Tell me about a new or innovative initiative you implemented in your current role to enhance customer experience, productivity, service, or performance.

Dawn’s Talent team have had thousands of conversations with top candidates, and Bridget, US Talent & Network Lead, has found that these questions really help showcase the strongest startup talent:

• What professional accomplishment are you most proud of, and why?
• What feedback have you received that was hard to hear but ultimately helped you grow?
• How do you prioritise tasks when everything feels urgent and important?
• What does grit mean to you, and how does it show up in your work?
• Tell me about a time you had to work closely with someone very different than you. How did you handle it?
• Describe the most entrepreneurial thing you’ve ever done, inside or outside of work.

Bridget says: “These questions give a bit of insight into not just what a candidate has done and where their experience lies, but who they are. What motivates them, what they are proud of, how they’ve overcome obstacles in their career, how resilient are they? In an early-stage environment, and especially in a new market, grit and hustle are non-negotiables. I will always ask these in addition to the more technical or role specific questions, but I find they give the best insight into the person behind the screen.”

Don’t be afraid to ask questions that push candidates to demonstrate their decision-making and accountability skills

You’re in a new context, and that means you need adaptable people who can pivot - and hold themselves accountable when things go wrong. As Emoke says: “I want to see how candidates handle pushback, tough calls, and underperformance”. She recommends asking:

• Tell me about a time you made a decision your team didn’t agree with.
• When a team is missing targets, how do you approach that?

Ann Watson and Greg Russell lead People and Talent Acquisition respectively at Cover Genius, and are supporting the business during an exciting moment of growth in the US market. In their experience, one question never fails to elicit an answer that tells you a lot about the person sitting in front of you:

• What is your biggest ‘failure’ in your career, and what did you learn from it?They say “when we ask this, we’re looking for candidates to express self awareness and lack of ego. For example, we think it’s great when someone immediately responds with: “oh let me tell you about this screw up.” The response helps us evaluate a candidate’s accountability, feedback reception, and solution implementation skills. It also generally reveals early-stage fit through willingness to absorb/deflect blame and emotional intelligence”.
• Then, a great follow-up question is: What did you learn? or How would you do it differently?

Next up, these are the questions the Dawn and Cover Genius teams have found helpful in assessing leadership capability

Ann and Greg at Cover Genius drill deeply into candidates’ leadership experience, mindset and approach in executive or C-Suite-interviews. In their experience, it’s a red flag when a candidate cannot articulate their management journey. For any managerial-level hire, they start with practical questions:

• How did you upskill to get where you are on your leadership journey?
• Walk me through your resume, but only discuss the leadership or career development journey, rather than specifics about the roles themself.

Ann and Greg say asking this question is highly effective at identifying underdeveloped executives, as well as those who are continuous learners who are looking to develop, and allows candidates to focus on moments of change and growth. 

Avalon, Dawn’s Director of Talent, also looks for reflectiveness, thoughtfulness and self-awareness in leaders, and tries to uncover their strengths, development areas, and management style by asking:

• What is your superpower?
• What is your biggest area of professional development right now, and how are you working on that?
• How would you describe your leadership style? Followed by How would your team describe you? She says: “It is then interesting to see how closely this aligns with what their manager and reports say, if you get to the referencing stage of a process.”

Strong leaders also need to adjust based on the team, the context, and the business phase. Emoke will ask:

• Share an example of when you changed your leadership approach.
• What does good leadership look like in a high-autonomy environment

Beyond ‘vibes’: Structured ways to test culture and values alignment

This is a crucial part of any interview, and our contributors shared some insightful questions and interview approaches that can have a big impact in working out if a candidate will be a values fit for your company.

• Ann and Greg have taken the approach of having a dedicated culture interview with specific value-mapped questions, and recommend this to others startups on a scaling journey. They also ensure that culture interviews are conducted by someone cross-functional to the hire. Ann says: “This approach helps to maintain distance and prevent bias since members of the hiring team might feel pressured to fill the position quickly. By having an external function involved, such as someone from another department, the interviewer can more easily identify issues that internal team members might overlook due to urgent hiring needs.”
• When looking to determine cultural fit, Amanda DiLorenzo, Senior Director People & Culture at quantilope, puts the company’s defined values to use. She says: “We put our values into an acronym: CODE standing for Curious, Open, Doer and Empowered. I typically ask people how these resonate with their personal and professional values and ask a specific question relating to them, i.e: tell me about a time curiosity helped you make a process more effective.”
• Emoke says she always looks to confirm that candidates understand what it means to work across time-zones and culture. She says: “Building a US team requires the ability to be fluent in both cultures - from language, to pace, to extro/introversion expectations from "sales" and so much more. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this so it is a non-negotiable part of our assessment process.”

To help assess for this cultural fit, Emoke has come up with an incredibly open-ended question that elicits interesting results. She says: “I often ask: ‘What is your happy at work?’ and then listen closely. I’m looking for what people speak about with genuine enthusiasm versus what they describe more factually or out of obligation. It tells you a lot about someone and what they value.” Avalon tests this in a similar way, asking “what brings you energy, and what takes energy from you, professionally?”

• Rich has honed a series of questions over the years to ensure Quantexa’s cultural fit interviews hit on the right people. He says: “I always ask: Which one of our core values do you resonate with most, and why? Because I’m looking to work out if they have the determination we require, I ask candidates to describe a situation where they had to work tirelessly to achieve a goal or meet a deadline. I also ask ‘what motivates you to excel in your work?’ to get a sense of their ambition, and ‘what makes you a good team player?’. Then, to look again at the accountability piece, I ask: ‘how do you communicate with your team or colleagues when you’re unable to meet a commitment?”
• When inforcer was building out its US team, James asked specific questions to ascertain whether candidates would be a good cultural fit, and trained hiring managers to do the same. This consistency also helped them remove bias. They asked questions including:

1. What does great culture look like to you?
2. What do you want to avoid from your last role?
3. Where did you have the most fun in your career?
4. What were you doing when you felt most energised?
5. How do you feel about building the plane while flying it?
6. Do you need structure, or do you enjoy autonomy?

• Bridget has found that some more personal experience-focused questions can elicit useful answers here. She says: “The one question I always ask that gets to the heart of personal/cultural fit is: ‘What are the non-negotiable values you live by, and how do they show up at work?’ This allows the opportunity for a candidate to showcase who they are and why they are that way. Maybe they’ll give a personal anecdote about a certain value of theirs and how it developed, which might showcase who the candidate is as a person. It’s important to remember that you are evaluating a candidates’ hard skills for a job but also their cultural fit with your organization, and understanding what is important to them outside of work will have indicators of what is important to them in the office.”

Here, inforcer’s co-founder and CEO, Jamie Daum, and Head of Talent Acquisition, James Richardson, share a practical, operator-led example of how to create a winning US Talent acquisition engine on the ground.

They outline the strategies the inforcer team used when building the company’s US hub in Tampa, Florida, from how to build a referral flywheel and repeatable framework for assessing values, tenacity and coachability, to the steps they took to successfully build culture as the company scaled.

• Invest in spending time in the US up front

Prior to establishing a US office and hiring US-based employees, inforcer’s co-founder and CEO, Jamie Daum and one of his co-founders, William Connor, were regularly flying out to MSP conferences to meet with key customers and build relationships. This resulted in inforcer securing around 50 US customers, establishing product-market fit and building referenceability in the market, before hiring anyone on the ground.

This process required a huge time investment and personal sacrifice, but was essential to setting inforcer up for success in the US.

Jamie said: “The amount of personal sacrifice required in building a business and scaling into the US is immeasurable – founders who don’t love what they do will burn out before they ever gain traction.

“Face-to-face selling across the US is much harder, especially in high-volume, high-transaction businesses. It’s not like the UK where everyone is within driving distance. You need to be there.”

• Commit as a leadership team to US hiring

It was not until after Dawn led inforcer’s Series B that they were able to invest in on-the-ground leadership in the US.

Jamie and VP of Global Sales, Jake Webber-Cadby, both dedicated a significant portion of their time to US hiring and culture-building at the start of the scale-up’s US journey – and continue to prioritise this today. Jamie made sure he was in the US on the ground every 2-3 months, and Jake every 1-2 months. As Jamie says: “If you don't find the right people, those foundations will be shaky from the start.”

James, inforcer’s Head of Talent Acquisition, also relocated with his family to Tampa for a period of time to lead the initial hiring push during a critical growth phase.

This meant that inforcer was able to train the company’s new GTM team and, as James says, “ensure culture remained consistent across regions with rapid growth.” He reflects, “it’s been a real team effort across leadership to ensure the US team have strong support and guidance.”

Jamie said making this commitment was crucial to inforcer’s US success.

“Hiring should be your number one priority, second only to winning your first handful of clients,” he said. “It’s so easy to build technology, harder to build tech that has great PMF, but the hardest thing is to hire the people who can sell.”

Alongside time spent hiring and enabling the US team, Jamie and Jake also continue to spend considerable time in person with US customers, which has been critical to the continued momentum they are seeing in the US market.

• De-risk the first senior US hire

Jamie had a successful career in sales leadership prior to founding his first company. Inforcer is the founder-CEO’s second business, and so he had already learned that delegation is crucial to successfully scaling at a rapid pace. Therefore, when inforcer began building its US presence in Tampa, James and Jamie knew their first hires would be critical

The team decided to treat hiring as a system: de-risk the first senior hires, use industry experience where it matters, then try to move quickly towards structured, values-led assessment.

inforcer’s first Tampa hire was a senior Sales hire, Matt Sullivan, who was a known entity to the team and brought deep market knowledge, local credibility and relevant relationships. Jamie said: “When you’re hiring salespeople, you’re not only hiring the person, you’re essentially buying their book of business.”

James knew that “If you’re going to establish a new local office in a brand new region, strong leadership is the top priority”, but the team recognised that making a major senior hire early in their US journey could be a risk. By bringing on board someone the business trusted, and who they knew was highly regarded in their industry in the US, the risk was significantly mitigated, and they set the region up for success from the start.

• Use industry experience early, then widen the lens to focus on attributes like potential, grit and determination

James cautioned that while looking for industry experience is great for de-risking the first wave of hiring, it should not define your whole US hiring strategy.

Once the inforcer US team had enough knowledge and coaching capacity, James shifted towards hiring for traits, values and potential.

He says: “One of the key learnings we’ve had is that once you’ve got that foundational team, and you’ve got capacity to coach people, then the right traits, the right attributes and the right value alignment become more powerful than experience… We have new AE hires, with less directly relevant experience, who are doing well because they’re showing the right persistence. It’s because they’ve got the grit, the determination to put the hours in.”

• Building culture from day zero: base promotion decisions on your values and hold in-person cross-border meetups

Jamie said that he deliberately prioritised inforcer’s culture-building from day zero.

“We knew what our culture was going to be before we had the name of our company,” he said. “We articulated our values that early, including being proactive, putting the team first, and going above and beyond. I really believe culture comes from the top down. That’s why we promote leaders based on value alignment, not just performance. “Our promise to candidates is: ‘If you want an easy ride, go work at a larger corporation; if work gives you purpose, this is the right place' – and there is immeasurable upside and growth potential if you do buy in.”

As James puts it: “If you don’t have a pre-existing culture, your new hires become the culture.” This is why the inforcer team made sure to reinforce collaboration, hard work and presence in its new Tampa office from the start.

They deliberately set up rituals and operating habits, including:

• A Slack emoji recognition system, which allows employees to publicly celebrate peers who are demonstrating inforcer values in their work. This system is tied to real-life rewards such as vouchers and holidays. As a result, employees at inforcer began associating living the values with rewards.James says: “When someone does a great job, you can hashtag one of our values and share with them the emoji. That’s how we motivate people to talk about our values more often and truly live these values.”
• Holding all-hands meetings to build a sense of communityJames says: “We didn’t initially have good traction with all-hands attendance. Now everybody gathers under the big screens and we do it over the US team’s lunch break so everyone feels involved. We also have nominations for the EMEA and rest of the world regions, so we can recognise two people rather than one. That culture thread is so important to making people feel part of the community.”
• Hold in-person gatherings to help make culture portable as you scale

inforcer’s annual kickoff brought global teams to London, while summer events stayed regional, from a Tampa boat party to a UK rugby club gathering and lawn bowls in Australia. James says: “Those events are so important, especially for the US hires. Once the US has become its own kind of entity, you need to then create time together.”

This was also driven top-down, James explains. “Jamie actively encouraged things like summer parties where all of our European teams came over – and it’s family friendly, so you can bring your kids, your wife, whoever, and it’s just great. We don’t talk about work. People just socialise and it builds the culture.”

• How to put this into practice:

1) Build a culture assessment and competency framework centred on your values

Before James joined, Jamie was doing around 5-7 interviews a day across inforcer’s global hiring. They realised they needed to build recruiting capacity, fast, or face long-term hiring bottlenecks. Jamie placed trust in James quickly, and he built a culture assessment and competency framework, and placed a big emphasis on training managers on how to interview well.

James shared that his process centred on inforcer’s four values: Team First, Be Proactive, Smarter Not Harder, and Effective Use of Resources. Each value was mapped to competency questions and scored evidence. For example, to test Team First, candidates might be asked to describe a disagreement with a colleague they had to overcome. To test Smarter Not Harder, James looked for evidence that candidates had found practical ways to improve a workflow, such as building an AI bot to solve a recurring problem.

This allowed them to assess values at every stage, rather than only in one vague “culture fit” interview. James has found that “competency questions are king when it comes to interviewing because it gives you the evidence, and often people make decisions on gut feel based on people saying the right things. This is particularly true for salespeople and recruiters. They’re just great interviewers and will tell you what you want to hear until you offer them, and then you may realise they can’t do something.”

2) Establish a repeatable interview process and test skills live

inforcer landed on a tight interview process with three main stages: a talent screen, a hiring manager interview, and a case study or role play.

For sales hires, James shared that the discovery-call role play made an enormous difference to their hiring outcomes, as it enabled inforcer to test sales skills live, and observe how candidates asked questions, understood the product, handled a live commercial scenario and responded to feedback.

He says: “It was a simple format: here’s your discovery call, let’s see how you approach it… That has been a real game changer because Sales talent can be incredibly hard to assess without putting them in a scenario.” Sales managers and hiring teams running discovery calls would always give feedback during the role play, regardless of performance. This is because the aim was not just to see whether candidates could sell, but whether they could adapt and get a live example of how coachable that person was. For sales hires, the company prioritises hungry, humble, and coachable as their values, which they tested throughout the interview process. As a result, James says inforcer “quickly moved away from the people that were very transactional and couldn’t grasp the product, to those that just opened with great open questions.”Inforcer are also thorough in their selection. Jamie shared that they “do 20 interviews minimum per open role to make sure [they] get the right person in for the job.”

3) Invest heavily in manager enablement

Once the process was honed, inforcer invested heavily in manager enablement – both for running a strong interview process and for general leadership training. James sat in on manager interviews, listened to how people assessed candidates, created question banks to help remove bias from interview processes, and trained managers to make decisions consistently.

The inforcer team also brought in external coaches to help managers practice Radical Candor, another of inforcer’s team values, and found it was an effective way to encourage two-way conversations. As James reflects: “If you are prepping for scale, make sure you’ve got the capacity to deliver it. We looked at manager enablement quite early on – way before I've seen other companies do it.”

4) Build a referral flywheel

Referrals became another major lever in fueling inforcer’s growth. They raised referral bonuses from £1,000 to £3,000, split between start date and six month tenure. James says that despite this increase, the move was far cheaper than paying recruitment agency fees, and gave employees a clear incentive to recommend strong people.

James also saw referrals as a credibility engine as much as a sourcing channel. Early hires from respected MSP businesses created trust, attracted former colleagues and helped inforcer build momentum in a new market. He says: “If you can pinch a couple from big players and build enough buzz around a product or a team, that can be really powerful.”

However, James also recognised the risk of becoming too “cookie cutter”, so actively made sure to balance referrals with dedicated outbound hiring.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

It’s a famous phrase for a reason.

Positive, cohesive culture is foundational to any company’s long-term success. But maintaining a laser focus on building and scaling a world-class culture can pose a challenge when you’re growing rapidly and launching into new markets. This is especially true when those markets are thousands of miles away and in a different time zone, such as the US. It can be all too easy for a disconnect to emerge between a European HQ and the new US hub.

As Evgenia Plotnikova, General Partner at Dawn, says: “The operational and cultural challenge of scaling across the Atlantic shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s important to stay true to the values of the business, and you need to be intentional about carrying culture. As much as its numbers in the spreadsheet on the outside, these are living, breathing businesses with people at their core.”

So, how can European founders ensure new US outposts feel like natural and essential extensions of their home base, and not like satellites?

Here, we have compiled top tips and advice from founders and operators who have succeeded in translating and scaling culture in multiple geographies, as well as the Dawn team, who draw on their experience supporting billion-dollar companies to expand in the US and beyond.

The number one rule: send culture carriers

Many companies succeed in translating culture through sending the CEO or another co-founder over to the US to build the business from the ground up. Others succeed through sending top talent from their home HQ. Either way, it is a consistent theme from founders and investors that sending culture carriers in person is key.

Dan Chaplin, Partner at Dawn, has supported multiple companies through US expansion. He says: “Send someone who understands your culture deeply and can embed it in the new team. Someone who really is a culture carrier from the European business and is able to tie in what’s worked in Europe to setting up a fledgling organisation in the US. This person needs to be on the ground in the US for 6 - 12 months at least.”

Vishal Marria, CEO and founder at Quantexa, took this approach and relocated key talent from the UK to the US. He says: "I think that's been a big part of our success. It's not just taking the knowledge - how it works and context to the US - it's also taking the culture”.

Felix, CEO and co-founder at Collibra, found the same. He reflects: “It’s really important that you’re able to bring people that have been with you on that journey. They have so much deep domain knowledge and cultural values [of the company]... The more you can bring them with you and equally value that new talent that you’re bringing in, the better.”

As James, Head of Talent at inforcer puts it: “If you don’t have a pre-existing culture, your new hires become the culture.” This is why the inforcer team made sure to reinforce collaboration, hard work and presence in its new Tampa office from the start.

Make sure to hire for cultural fit, not just credentials – and how to do it

When making early US hires, make sure to prioritise values alignment as highly as experience.

During interviews, Dawn’s US Talent & Networks Lead, Bridget Snow, recommends asking personal experience-focused questions to help you work out whether a candidate will be a culture fit for your company. She says: “The one question I always ask that gets to the heart of this is: ‘What are the non-negotiable values you live by, and how do they show up at work?’.” Avalon Lee-Bacon, Dawn’s Director of Talent, also recommends asking candidates open-ended questions that elicit insightful answers, such as: “What brings you energy, and what takes energy from you, professionally?”

Cover Genius is the global insurtech for embedded protection. It is active in over 60 countries and all 50 US States, and protects more than 70 million customers of companies including Uber, Amazon, eBay, Revolut and TikTok. It has over $3.2 billion in gross written sales. A strong culture has supported their rapid growth trajectory. To maintain this, the company has dedicated culture interviews with specific value-mapped questions, ensuring objectivity by having someone from a different team to the hiring manager conduct these. As Ann Watson, Cover Genius’ Chief People Officer, explains: “By having an external function involved… the interviewer can more easily identify issues that internal team members might overlook due to urgent hiring needs.”

Build bonds in person: invest in flying new US hires back to your European HQ

“People learn by example,” says Daniela Raffel, Principal at Dawn. “We've seen exchanges - sending people from the US to Europe and Europe to the US - work really well. You get that cross-pollination of culture from the bottom up.”

Florian Douetteau, co-founder and CEO at Dataiku, says this approach paid dividends for them as they were entering the US market. Dataiku, which launched in Paris in 2013 and has been valued at $3.7 billion, is now headquartered in New York and has bases across the US. As they were establishing and scaling their teams in the US, the company flew new US hires over to the company’s Paris HQ for onboarding and their first few weeks on the job. Although it was a significant investment - both financially and logistically - Florian believes this approach was crucial in enabling Dataiku to translate its culture into the US offices, and impactful in contributing to their long-term US success.

He says: “Establishing these foundations was expensive. But when you’re in full-fledged recruiting mode, when you are hiring massively month on month at scale, I think it’s the only way to engage people fast enough.”

Consider building in-person US hubs early on

It is up to the unique nature of your business whether it makes sense to establish a physical office in the United States. If you have a fully remote culture for your team in Europe, and that has worked as you’ve scaled, it might make sense to keep it that way for the time being. Whereas if you have a strong in-office culture in Europe, it will be difficult to build a comparable culture in the US without building a comparable in-office situation, especially as you consider the need to drive alignment internationally across your team.

In general, we have seen hubs work well for supercharging US expansion and building cohesive, high performing teams. Dan says: “It’s really helpful to start building a hub earlier on in the US journey, if you can. It’s a really hard thing to build a satellite organisation that feels like it’s actually fully connected to your home organisation, and that gets even harder if your team in the US is fully remote and in your home market is not.”

Build culture across timezones by bringing the company together to share news and celebrate wins

"Lead with intentional behaviors that cultivate your culture”, Bridget recommends. As she explains: “In practice, that can mean hosting regular town halls led by the Founder and/or Executive team, publicly celebrating wins, and making time to get together in person.”

Vishal has proven this approach works in practice at Quantexa. He runs monthly town hall meetings with his 800-strong team, finishing with a live Q&A. As he says: “it's a connection between me and my people. Anyone can ask a question - I don't answer them all - but that openness is a key component to the culture.”

Today, the US drives 40–50% of Quantexa's business, alongside thriving teams in APAC and their European HQ. In building this truly global business, Vish has invested heavily in establishing and maintaining a world-class culture. “It’s critical to get culture right,” he says: “And the culture piece is never done. You've got to keep working - just like with any relationship… We invested and we got it right and we continue to invest in it.”

Dawn Partner, Henry Mason, has worked with Quantexa since 2018 and advises founders to double down on Vishal’s approach. He says: “There needs to be a sense of a shared mission which elevates the purpose of the work. Values aren’t meaningful unless they show up in what you do. Where I’ve seen it work best is when the CEO becomes the ‘Chief Repetition Officer’. Anything that reinforces what you stand for and why it matters; for example, it genuinely works when a CEO sends a weekly round up email to the whole company saying: ‘Here's just a reminder. This is what we're all here for, this is what we've done, this is why the journey matters. It’s not just a job you’re turning up for”. The biggest risk you can have is that you end up with cultural drift, where the US organisation feels like a satellite. It’s not close to the product… the founders are absent… and the office is never given the enablement and stature to succeed.”

Bridget says it can also be helpful to embed celebrating “value wins” to build culture across geographies: “Every step counts in a startup and celebrating the wins helps build motivation and energy throughout the entire business. And it’s not just about celebrating key sales closes, but operational advances, or the implementation of new tools to streamline processes, or someone going above and beyond.”

Build rituals and operating habits that make culture visible

James Richardson, Head of Talent Acquisition at inforcer, has had great success with this approach in practice. Inforcer gathers everyone for regular all-hands meetings at lunch times, and has specific recognition nominations for all its satellite offices. Other ways that inforcer makes their culture tangible day-to-day for their employees:

• A Slack emoji recognition system, which allows employees to publicly celebrate peers who are demonstrating inforcer values in their work. This system is tied to real-life rewards such as vouchers and holidays. As a result, employees at inforcer began associating living the values with rewards.James says: “When someone does a great job, you can hashtag one of our values and share with them the emoji. That’s how we motivate people to talk about our values more often and truly live these values.”
• Holding all-hands meetings to build a sense of community. James says: “We didn’t initially have good traction with all-hands attendance. Now everybody gathers under the big screens and we do it over the US team’s lunch break so everyone feels involved. We also have nominations for the EMEA and rest of the world regions, so we can recognise two people rather than one. That culture thread is so important to making people feel part of the community.”
• In-person gatherings to help make culture portable. The annual kickoff brought global teams to London, while summer events stayed regional, from a Tampa boat party to a UK rugby club gathering and lawn bowls in Australia. James says: “Those events are so important, especially for the US hires. Once the US has become its own kind of entity, you need to then create time together.”

This was also driven top-down, James explains. “Jamie [Daum] actively encouraged things like summer parties where all of our European teams came over - and it’s family friendly, so you can bring your kids, your wife, whoever, and it’s just great. We don’t talk about work. People just socialise and it builds the culture.”

Dataiku's approach to their company values is notably mature. Lynne joined the company as Chief People Officer in 2025, having held senior roles at Stash and Zoom.

Lynne explained that she is always deliberate about the difference between having values and using them. For example, after joining, Lynne ran a company-wide survey asking employees what it actually felt like to work at Dataiku, then used that input to refine and sharpen the existing values. "I wanted them to reflect reality, not aspiration," she says. Dataiku then worked to embed values across promotions, goal-setting, and business decisions. In this way, the team has been able to build values into operational infrastructure.

She says: “Culture greases the wheels of the business so it can run well. But only if it's operationalised bottom-up, not just declared top-down… Florian and the team had built something genuinely distinctive. My job was to make sure it didn't get diluted as the company grew and the US became its own centre of gravity.”

Scaling culture is critical for any startup as they grow, and becomes even more so during rapid growth and international expansion. At Dawn, we are here to support founders through this journey. You can read more about how culture scales in action in our interviews with Quantexa founder and CEO, Vish Marria, Dataiku co-founder and CEO, Florian Douetteau, and Collibra founder and CEO, Felix van de Maele.

Expanding into the US can unlock a massive market, but also bring complex new challenges.

This guide outlines practical steps to take for venture-backed startups planning their US launch, and some common pitfalls to avoid. We hope it will be helpful in supporting early-stage founders, executives and talent leaders think through what to prepare for and how to bridge the regulatory gaps when planning their US Expansion.

Be prepared to rethink your approach to professional services

A key insight from our partners at Wilson Sonsini is that there is often a fundamental gap between companies in the UK/Europe and the US in their approach to professional services in the early stages of building a business.

In the UK and Europe, founders may initially try to do everything in-house. By contrast, US startups have historically tended to outsource specialised functions to expert advisors very early on, engaging experienced lawyers, accountants, banks, and other providers from day one. As Daniel Glazer at Wilson Sonsini says: “In the US, you focus on running your business; it’s someone else’s job – with appropriate oversight – to make sure that it’s done correctly.”

Why the difference? It is largely because the downside risk of getting it wrong in the US is too high. The US business environment is highly litigious and compliance-heavy, which means seemingly minor mistakes with contracts or taxes can trigger legal claims or penalties that young companies cannot afford. Experienced entrepreneurs often look back and wish they had proactively hired US specialists sooner to avoid painful pitfalls. You can always bring functions in-house as you scale, but outsourcing to US experts initially buys you both peace of mind and execution speed.

To further validate the American approach to professional services, Dan recommends speaking with the US-based representatives of the UK/European economic development organizations and international trade programs (e.g., the UK Department for Business and Trade, Enterprise Ireland, ScaleNL, Business France, etc.), as well as the founders and management teams of “homegrown” US companies.

Core professional services advisors you might consider for US expansion:

• Legal firm – Engage a US legal firm experienced with venture-backed startups. They will handle forming your US entity, setting up equity schemes, localizing contracts, protecting IP, data privacy compliance, and more. US law firms that regularly work with venture-backed startups also typically leverage their networks to help clients connect with investors, corporates, and other advisors.
• Tax/accounting firm – US tax law is fragmented and convoluted, so you’ll need accountants based in both the US and your home country. They can advise on optimal structuring, transfer pricing between entities, and compliance with federal and state tax filings.
• Banking – Set up your banking early. US banking has different payment systems, and often requires a US presence and strong documentation.
• Insurance provider – Don’t overlook business insurance when expanding in the US. Many UK/European insurance policies have exclusions that do not cover US operations.
• HR, Payroll, & Benefits – US employment administration is complex – involving federal and state payroll taxes, health insurance, 401(k) plans (retirement), and a long list of labor laws. Early-stage companies often outsource this to an EOR (Employer of Record) or PEO (Professional Employer Organization).
• Immigration – If you plan to send UK/EU staff to the US, consult an immigration specialist early. The US visa system is notoriously complicated. An immigration lawyer can help determine the best route to get your founders or key team members legally working in the US.

Here are the 10 things to think about as a Founder when first exploring your launch into the United States. We’ve included topics to consider, and helpful questions to ask as a team…

1. Legal
   To do: Form your US entity, localise employment and commercial contracts, establish local option plan, protect IP, ensure data compliance. Key question to ask: Could we close a high-value US customer or a critical hire tomorrow with our current setup?
2. Visas/immigration
   To do: Decide who across your organization needs to relocate to the US, or work in the US, and secure the right visas. Consider what support you will offer.
   Key question to ask: Do we have everything in place for our founders or key European team members to work/live legally in the US?
3. Taxes
   To do: Establish a lean, defensible baseline in the US and in your home market – tick the material boxes now; plan for deeper build-out as you scale and budgets grow.
   Key question to ask: Are we aware of, and do we satisfy, the most material US tax and compliance requirements applicable to our business?
4. Insurance
   To do: Extend business insurance to the US.
   Key question to ask: Do our insurance policies meet US customer requirements and state mandates in our launch states from day one?
5. Banking
   To do: Coordinate US and home market banking arrangements.
   Key question to ask: Will we invoice and close business in USD, and are international bank connections ready?
6. Government Support
   To do: Connect with your new home market and US development agencies.
   Key question to ask: Have we identified and engaged federal/state programs and secured any available incentives or grants?
7. US landing hub location
   To do: Decide where to anchor your US footprint, factoring in proximity to target customers, access to top talent, and where your competitors sit. Note that while most European companies incorporate their US entity in Delaware, your actual office and hires will almost certainly be elsewhere. Key question to ask: Does our chosen location give us the best shot at landing top talent, our first customers, and work practically with our European HQ?
8. Group Structure & Hiring Strategy
   To do: Decide whether to hire through an EOR or to employ directly by forming a US entity, and determine any required state registrations or subsidiaries.
   Key question to ask: Have we chosen the right entity structure, and do we know which states require subsidiaries or foreign registrations as we hire?
9. HR, Talent, and Compensation
   To do: Stand up benefits, payroll, compensation administration, and bookkeeping.
   Key question to ask: Are our US benefits, payroll, and compensation packages competitive and compliant with each state we plan to hire in?
10. Funding
    To do: If you are looking to explore funding from US investors, prepare your executive summary, deck, and pitch, working with your current investors to ensure alignment with US VC fund expectations. Ensure the data room is up to date and easy to navigate.
    Key question to ask: Could a US VC diligence and send money with minimal constraints?

And before you make your first US hire, double check the following:

1. Employment model: Decide between direct employment or using an EOR, and ensure compliance.
2. At-will employment: Unlike in Europe, most US employment is “at-will” by default – meaning you can terminate an employee at any time, without needing a reason or notice period. It also means that employees typically give shorter notice periods in the US; two weeks is often customary.
3. Localised contracts: Work with US counsel to draft a standard offer letter, IP assignment and confidentiality agreement.
4. Worker classification: Be cautious when classifying any US team member as an independent contractor (self-employed) rather than a full-time employee. US tax law has strict tests to determine if a worker is truly a contractor. If a role is ongoing and essential, it is safer to hire the employee properly. When in doubt, consult a labor lawyer.
5. Overtime pay: US labor law mandates overtime pay for many employees who work over 40 hours/week, unless they meet certain exemptions. Under US law, only employees who qualify as exempt can be on a fixed salary without overtime. Roles like admin staff, entry-level analysts and support reps might be non-exempt.
6. State laws: In the US, employment law is partly federal (nationwide) and partly state-specific. This means what applies in New York might differ in California or Massachusetts. If you hire in multiple states, you’ll need to tailor your documents and policies to each location.
7. Non-competes: Restrictive covenants – non-competes – are enforceable in some (but not all) states, but only if certain conditions are satisfied. Make sure to check the rules in your hiring state(s).
8. Compensation: When it comes to bonuses, severance, and other compensation elements, there is a greater risk of disputes if drafting is not clear. Therefore, you must make sure you’ve had legal support in drafting contracts, to cover all aspects -including structuring to avoid any tax penalties.
9. Equity and Incentives: Set up a US-compatible equity plan and board-approved option pool as you form your US entity. Adopt plan documents and grant templates for consistency and compliance.
10. Immigration: Employers must verify every single one of their employees is authorised to work in the US.
11. Tax exposure: Employees or contractors can create US tax exposure for your foreign entity. This means it’s important to seek legal advice in both the US and your home market, and to plan accordingly.

If you have any queries, or would like to connect with the Wilson Sonsini team, please reach out to us on bridget@dawncapital.com and avalon@dawncapital.com.