Handshake Bolsters Management Team with New CDO and CFO Hires, and Executive Promotions

Handshake, the largest early career network, announced two C-level appointments to help scale the company towards its rapidly expanding market opportunity to help millions of employers, universities and students embrace an increasingly virtual future of recruiting and hiring. Malthe Sigurdsson joins the company as Chief Design Officer and Brian Kreiner as Chief Financial Officer. The company also promoted Jordan Pedraza, VP Global Support, Katherine Kelly to VP EDU Marketing, and Mallory Wheaton, VP Employer Customer Experience.

“Over the past 6 months, we’ve made a concerted effort to strengthen our management team and Board with world-class individuals who have both a proven track record in scaling hypergrowth companies and a personal mission to democratize hiring,” said Garrett Lord, Co-Founder and CEO of Handshake. “With the addition of Malthe and Brian, we now have the most complete team we’ve ever had to help students around the globe find their first professional job, and build a career-long relationship with them as they seek future opportunities. And our promotions of Jordan, Katie and Mallory reflect how much we’ve invested in building and growing our teams.”

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Malthe Sigurdsson, widely considered as one of the world’s leading design innovators, is the former Head of Design at Stripe, where he spent 6 years growing the design team from 5 to over 70 as the company increased its valuation by approximately 7 times. Prior to Stripe, he was SVP Product and Design at Rdio and Head of Design at Skype.

“I’ve spent my career applying design thinking to optimize products and technologies that millions of people use everyday,” said Malthe. “Today, students looking for an internship or their first job must navigate a tortuous process that is not particularly fair and overly dependent on traditional credentials and the luck of who they or their parents know. It’s my greatest career challenge and privilege to design a customer experience for job seekers that makes it many times easier to engage with employers and helps them grow their job network, even if they don’t have one business connection to start.”

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Brian Kreiner was most recently CFO at Convoy, the digital freight network that is disrupting the $800B trucking industry. He was instrumental in leading the company through its $400M Series D fundraise at a $2.75B valuation. Prior to Convoy, Brian was CEO of Cal Net Technology Group and Managing Partner of Olympic Valley Capital.

“Handshake has built an incredible business by being laser focused on the early talent hiring problem that no other company has been able to solve,” said Brian. “Now that we have found product/market fit, the challenge is adding more value to all customers in our three-sided marketplace, growing internationally and scaling beyond the $10B college recruiting market and into the $100B hiring market.”

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