The wrong early hire can cost a funded startup a year it can't afford. We exist to make sure that doesn't happen.
Protege is a premium talent acquisition firm built for funded UK startups making the hires that matter most — the first commercial leader, the founding sales team, the operations and finance leads who carry what the founder used to hold themselves. These are the appointments that shape the next 18 months, and they're too important for a CV firehose.
It starts with a consultation process unlike anything else in hiring. Before we look at a single candidate, we go deep on you — your culture, the way your team actually works, the mindset and temperament a person needs to thrive here, not just the skills on paper. Most hires fail not because someone couldn't do the job, but because they didn't fit the environment they walked into. We find the fit first, then the candidate.
From there, our model is deliberately different. For every role, we present exactly three candidates — vetted, interviewed, and referenced before they ever reach you. Not a longlist to wade through. Three people we'd stake our name on. It means founders spend their time deciding between strong options, not filtering out weak ones.
We work primarily with B2B SaaS founders at the inflection point between founder-led growth and a built-out team — often domain experts and first-time founders in trust-sensitive and regulated spaces, where one wrong hire does outsized damage.
We take on a small number of roles at a time, so every role gets the depth it demands.
If you've got a hire you can't afford to get wrong, let's talk.

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