Proliferation of Global Talent

Support Shepard, Sagan Passport, and now Landed. 

These are just three  – there are many more. 

Support Shepard, started by Marshall Haas and popularized by Nick Huber and Shaan Puri. Nick and Shaan have driven significant amounts of eyeballs to this business. 

Sagan Passport by Jon Matzner, the OG for global talent. Heck, he used to license some of his processes to Support Shepard. 

And now Assembly Ventures led by Hunter Hammond and Sahil Bloom are launching Landed

For the past year or so, Hunter has launched +5 businesses out of Assembly. All being productized services for video editing and design. 

Their MO was to partner with a creator and launch a business doing what they’re world class at. The video editing business HeyFriends is in partnership with Ali Abdal. 

Hunter mentioned rolling a couple of their businesses into Landed. 

Leveraging global talent to scale these businesses appears to be a shared strategy. I think Baked Design and DesignJoy leverage global talent in their growing businesses. 

Landed is positioning themselves differently than Support Shepard and Sagan Passport. While the later two source, train, and deploy talent to businesses, Landed will remain the place for businesses to come to have work completed. 

Landed will be the talent house and talent will be deployed across their businesses. And not a place for businesses to hire global talent from. 

I’m a huge fan of global talent. In the early days of TheraNest (circa 2014), we leveraged global talent to build a business that later sold for >$1 billion dollars. It allowed us to keep costs low while we built cash flow. 

Another huge benefit of global talent is non-stop output. We started working when they stopped and vice versa. This helped us move at breakneck pace. And when the teams were in sync, production hummed like a machine. It was a beautiful thing. We’d wake up to find our prototypes built and bugs resolved. Customers loved having their problems resolved while they slept (and so did we). 

Looking forward to seeing the continued proliferation of global talent as companies (and people) kick the stigmatism to the curb.