Jim sits down with Sean Luke (Partner at SPMB Executive Search) to talk about the art of hiring senior engineering and product leaders—especially now that every job description on Earth has "AI" duct-taped to it.

We get into why sticking with one great search firm beats "random recruiter roulette," why tech interviewing is tough (spoiler: engineers aren't always born interviewers), and the eternal tension between the two key roles - CTO (big brain science/vision) and VP Engineering (keep the trains running, preferably on the tracks).

Then it's on to the AI gold rush: what a normal Head of Engineering should actually be doing with AI (hint: practical stuff like code review, QA, automation), why "Head of AI" is usually a totally separate job, and why "10 years of LLM experience" belongs in the same bin as Web3 buzzword soup.

We also cover who's moving jobs right now, why PE can feel like a saner bet than venture (less "moonshot," more "actual exit"), and what candidates must be able to explain: what you did, and how it moved the business—numbers included. Plus: a few recruiting war stories, including the kind you can't make up and the kind that makes you grateful for a boring Tuesday.

In this episode of The Private Equity Funcast, Jim Milbery sits down with Jennifer Nelson (CEO of Izzy Software), Richard Malone, Rob Swanson (co-founders of CNX Corporation), and Iwona Montgomery to talk about CNX's nearly 30-year glow-up — from green screens to the cloud. After almost three decades in the biz, CNX just joined forces with Izzy Software, and the result? Legacy systems that finally got the spa day they deserved. We dive into how moving to the cloud has made life easier for developers and why low-code tools are giving old-school software a serious second act.

Jim and Leah dive headfirst into a whirlwind chat that covers everything from the fine distinctions between puppets and marionettes to the equally delicate art of building great user experiences. Leah shares her fascinating journey from a Medieval French literature course at Berkeley to leading UX research at companies like Slack, Spotify, Instagram, and Mozilla. Along the way, they tackle why users often don't honestly know what they want, how to avoid building a product no one asked for (looking at you, Juicero), and why good design begins with understanding both people and teams.

It's a conversation about people problems disguised as tech problems—with a few detours into bad movie references, car oil changes, and the mythical Trojan horse. Grab your headphones, settle in, and prepare to laugh, learn, and maybe rethink what "user experience" really means.