It can often be difficult for academic start-up founders to find exactly the right executive and consulting talent to take their venture to the next stage. Particularly if they are first-time entrepreneurs, and/or in non-technology cluster geographies, and/or working with investors and support communities who have limited access to consultants and entrepreneurs with necessary deep technical and domain expertise. Having the right management and/or consultant team can be gating to further funding. I combine extensive experience in academic innovation, early-stage start-ups, and executive search, to help bridge this “talent valley-of-death”. A rigorous process to solve the talent equation can also provide powerful business development, fundraising, strategic, and organizational insights and connections. Because resources may be tight at this stage, I can also provide flexible terms-of-engagement, unbundling of the process, and sensitivity to milestones and value inflection points. I have done extensive work for DARPA’s and NSF’s embedded entrepreneur programs, for BioGenerator in St. Louis, as well as multiple one-off engagements. I have conducted senior level searches in neurodegeneration, vaccines & infectious diseases (multiple), novel diagnostics platforms (multiple), pharmaceutical and biologics manufacturing and supply chain (multiple), dual-use military medicine, gene therapy, medical devices, biosimilars, venture philanthropy, technical customer service, hearing loss, neuro-stimulation, advanced materials, circular economy, oceantech, agtech, big data for ecology, genetic code expansion.