Startups are about talent – that's all they really have. From the founders to every team member who joins the journey, talent is what turns an ambitious vision into reality. Especially in the early stages of company building, how you attract, develop and retain top talent is what essentially makes or breaks a startup.

In our mission to help Greek founders build world-class technology companies, we take pride in our hands-on approach, which naturally starts with talent. We love to go above and beyond serving as recruiters, advisors and operators to portfolio companies – there are cases where we have introduced up to half of the new hires!

Today, we are excited to share that Sanne Goslinga is joining the Marathon team as Director of Talent, taking our efforts to the next level. She brings a wealth of practical experience in helping startup teams set up, manage and scale their talent operations. 

Sanne has built HR and recruitment departments from the ground up in three different technology companies, helping them grow from 20 to 200 or even 2000 people. These ranged from a bootstrapped startup setting up offices in 17 countries and getting acquired for nine digits by Tesco, to a household-name US public company setting up its European operations, to a popular analytics company that started fully remote as early as 2014.

An ambassador of the recent trend of high-caliber professionals moving to Greece herself, Sanne will be working directly with our existing and new portfolio companies. She'll be serving as the founders' right hand on all-things-talent until they hire for such role internally, but also continuing to assist with recruitment and as the founders’ confidante after that. Her experience and empathy for entrepreneurs and their team members alike are perfectly aligned to what Marathon stands for.

With the number of employees across our portfolio growing fast and expected to double in size with hundreds of new hires later this year, Sanne will be making sure to leverage the best company building practices in setting up Marathon portfolio companies – and our startup community at large – for success. Please welcome and connect with her on LinkedIn to get all the updates.