Camille founded Northbank Partners in 2018 after eight years placing product and engineering leadership for a US-headquartered search company. Northbank works with venture-backed software businesses and the technology functions of listed groups, placing chief executives, chief product officers and engineering leadership from Series B to FTSE.
Eight people across London and Bristol. Camille holds the Technology & Software chair in the first volume of The Executive Search Ten.
Pace. Not intelligence, not track record. The ones who fail are usually running at the speed of their last company, and it is the wrong speed for this one, in either direction.
Too fast into a business that needed steadying, too slow into one that needed catching up. The first question I ask a client now is not what the job is, it is what speed the company is actually moving at.
My market builds the tools, so we felt it first. Sourcing is automated, outreach is automated, and candidates know it, which is why response rates collapsed for everyone doing it lazily.
The paradox is that automation made the human call the premium product. A founder who gets a considered phone call from someone who has clearly done the work now notices, because nobody else bothers.
Technical brilliance, in my corner of the market. Companies keep promoting their best engineer and losing their best engineer and their team in the same month.
The overrated quality is the one the industry mythologises. Nobody ever churned a company because the chief executive couldn’t code.
Mostly an excuse, and tech dressed it up worse than anyone: we called it “culture add” and kept hiring people who all went to the same three universities.
The version I will defend is stage fit. A leader who needs structure will drown at thirty people, and one who needs chaos will suffocate at three hundred. That is real and testable.
Someone who can run a smaller, more senior team. The era of scaling headcount as strategy is over: the same product now ships with forty people that used to take two hundred, and leading forty seniors is a completely different job from managing two hundred.
In venture-backed companies the board often is the succession problem: founders get replaced eighteen months too late and the replacement gets blamed for the delay. The kind thing is the early honest conversation, and almost nobody has it.
It is a fashion market. Two years ago every brief said AI-native. Before that it was growth at any cost, before that it was blitzscaling. The people are the same people; the label the market will pay a premium for changes every thirty months.
Below a certain stage, honestly. A seed-stage founder hiring their first sales lead does not need us, they need their investors’ network and a weekend of calls. We say so, and it costs us nothing because they come back at the stage where they do.
Tech talks about it most and moved almost least at the top. The venture boards are still overwhelmingly one demographic, and the executive teams follow the boards.
What actually changed is that the data is public now. You can no longer claim a pipeline problem when three of your competitors solved it.
Seventy per cent the company, and in tech I can prove it: the same executive, same skills, same effort, is a genius in a company with product-market fit and a failure in one without it. The market grades the company and sends the leader the report card.
A head of engineering with no degree, self-taught, running a team inside a company nobody had heard of. The client’s HR function tried to filter her out twice.
She is now the chief technology officer of a company most people reading this use every week.
“What would you build if you weren’t doing this?”
The honest answer is a school. Everything wrong with technology hiring is downstream of who gets told, at eleven years old, that computers are for them.
Asked at every sitting, answered without thinking too hard.