Acceleration

Dan Hynes

Dan is a Partner at Atomico, based in London. He is responsible for leading and evolving our Growth Acceleration Team who help portfolio companies scale to category winners. Dan brings extensive global experience in technology talent and staffing to help portfolio companies find, grow and retain the best employees as well as build high performing teams.

I have an extremely high opinion of Dan Hynes who has spent many weeks in our offices in Helsinki and has helped us to recruit our first internal recruiter. His ability to leverage his network and his connection base has been incredibly beneficial and has led to really successful appointments.

Ilkka Paananen, co-founder & CEO of Supercell

I am passionate about founders who believe they have the potential to build category winners, and who understand the importance of visionary leadership as part of this journey.

Working at Google taught me what it really means to scale talent - and the importance of combining high-speed with high-quality.

I was the Talent lead at Google from 2005 to 2010, where I grew the EMEA team from 100 based in London to 8500 across Europe by 2010 - that’s an awful lot of great people in not a lot of time.

There are a surprising number of parallels between succeeding in a startup and in the Armed Forces.

After growing up between London and Birmingham in the UK, I joined the Army at 18. Spending 6 years in the forces, in an operational role, taught me first-hand the importance of building and leading high performance teams in stressful and chaotic environments where having strong values and culture, clear alignment and communications around outcomes were key.

I remember Dan used to fly to our office twice a week and worked with our recruiting department to help us recruit when we were scaling 150% of our workforce. It’s that level of attention and detail that they (Atomico) can provide that’s very different from what other venture firms can provide.

Robert Vis, founder & CEO of Messagebird

Systems-thinking is more important than you, er... think.

Think of your People function like a system.. Values, leadership, management, hiring, onboarding, development and so on. Get the foundations right, inspect what you expect, measure everything and AB test in smaller groups. Management to me is like an API between Leadership and the IC doing the work.

At Atomico, I help our portfolio companies perfect these systems.

Working with us, they strengthen their leadership teams, build recruitment processes, build manager effectiveness programmes, design compensation programmes and create internal communications plans - all of which are crucial components of creating a system that doesn’t just work but which succeeds.

You have the chance to make your company a magnet for Talent - starting early to build diverse and inclusive teams, with meaningful values and culture as part of your People Stack, focus on building effective managers early and avoid People debt - and distribute meaningful stock to all.

Dan Hynes

I relish the challenge of helping companies scale through talent.

Working with 6Wunderkinder, Gympass, Klarna, Lilium, Infarm, MessageBird, Omio, Supercell, Truecaller and Varjo, among others, has shown me the differences and commonalities of need from sector-to-sector, and I can’t wait to help new category leaders emerge - whatever category that might be.