Executive Search by Executives

When we say first-hand experience, we really mean it

Bluebird’s consultants are former VPs of Sales, Heads of Marketing and Tech Leads.

Machiel Kunst

Founder & CEO

Machiel spent 9 years at SolarWinds MSP playing a pivotal role in their growth from $6mio to $250mio ARR. He hired, trained and groomed the EMEA sales team consisting of 45 people. At FastSpring he hired a sales team of 15 people within a year and built the region from $0 to $3mio. High integrity, quality and conscientiousness are at the core of his approach.

James Bergl

Managing Partner APAC

James graduated from uni in 2008 and joined SAP’s sales grad program. From there, he found his love for velocity solution sales in the IT channel with Autotask. He got transferred to Australia from the UK with N-able in 2013 and in 2015 had his career win in launching Datto as their founding AE in 2015. Within 6 years, they’d grown the business to $40m in turnover and 130 staff. Most recently, he helped to launch Pax8, a cloud distributor in APAC in 2022 and within 2 years they’d grown to 2000+ partners and 160 staff across APAC. In March 2024, he came on board with Bluebird as Managing Partner for APAC where he hopes to help other emerging SaaS vendors identify and hire top talent.

Bas Oostenbrink

Principal Recruitment Consultant

Bas started his software sales career at a Dutch SaaS start-up where he was hired as one of the first salespeople. He quickly climbed the ranks from Account Executive, to Sr. Account Executive + Teamlead, and later their Head of Sales. He has built out a team of 12 Account Executives, and played a crucial role in scaling the company from €250K ARR to €5mio ARR. He’s built out sales playbooks, processes and was actively involved in the international expansion of the company. In Bas, you will find someone who’s inspiring, passionate, and ambitious.

Dennis van Valderen

Managing Partner IT & Dev

Dennis began his software engineering career while still a student, working with diverse tech stacks such as PHP, Laravel, JavaScript, Angular, and React. He later joined codecentric as a consultant and developed accreditation software for Mojo Concerts, utilizing a serverless architecture on GCP integrated with AWS services.

Following this, Dennis worked with various clients, focusing on Angular and Java on the AWS cloud platform. At Alphabet Lease, he led a team of 10 frontend engineers, made key architectural decisions including the introduction of a monorepo for frontend applications, and chaired weekly frontend meetings.

Marc Hellingman

Senior Recruitment consultant

Marc started his career as a Digital Marketeer and later became the Marketing Manager for a large tech company in Amsterdam. After successfully hiring and training a team of SDR’s he moved into sales himself. He joined SolarWinds as an SDR, where his drive and performance landed him a promotion to AE in only 3 months. Thereafter he made Presidents Club multiple times, landed one of the biggest deals in the region and helped to scale the EMEA partner channel. Marc is known for his strong work ethic, for being reliable and a genuine desire to help others.

Hakar Sidik

Recruitment Consultant

Hakar…

Finding the right executive for your organization requires deep industry expertise. Who better to do this than former SaaS leaders?

Bluebird’s consultants are former Sales, Marketing & IT leaders. This allows us to not only understand what you’re looking for, but we can also help you prevent making costly mishires and advise you on what the ideal executive looks like.

Our commitment is additionally fueled by the fact that we don’t only do executive search, we will also help this leader build their team. The stronger the leader, the easier it is to get top talent. Through this top-down approach, we’ve helped 300+ SaaS companies build their commercial & technical organizations around the world.

As we started scaling our SaaS business distribution, the VP of Sales position became a critical one. We also knew it would be very hard to find the right person. We needed a partner that could not only help us define the role, but also bring us several high quality candidates. Machiel and his team of former SaaS leaders put their heads together to launch the search at unbelievable speed. Right in line with their value proposition, they introduced us to the ideal candidate seven days after the intake call. He has now been with us for a year and a half and he is the right hire for the role.

Alex Louisy

CEO @ Upflow

We partnered with Bluebird to hire a CRO. Bluebird’s dedication, expertise, and professionalism stood out during the hiring process. From the initial consultation to the final candidate selection, Bluebird demonstrated a deep understanding of our requirements and the industry landscape. Their team’s ability to source and present a diverse range of highly qualified candidates showcased their commitment to finding the perfect fit for our organization. Ultimately, the quality of the candidates they presented to us was exceptional, making our decision to hire a CRO both exciting and challenging. We found our CRO within 3 months. Moving forward, I have no hesitation in recommending Bluebird to other organizations seeking top-tier executive recruitment services.

Rick van Echtelt

CEO and Co-founder @ AG5

I am the VP of People at Horizon3.ai, a ~150 person Series C company with a small international team. We used Bluebird to hire a head of our EMEA business (Director/VP level was the mandate) and we interviewed opportunistic AE candidates. We worked directly with Silien and Lydia. We had a fantastic experience – they sent us well vetted, experienced candidates that were right on target from an experience and comp perspective. With each candidate, they sent a very thoughtful summary with all of the details we would need to review a candidate before interviewing them. They were incredibly fast in getting us high quality candidates and the whole process took about 4-6 weeks from kick-off to hire. We would love to work with them again and would consider them for roles at any level.

Torie Runzel

VP of People @ Horizon3.ai

After securing our Series A funding round we were looking for an experienced Head of Sales. We assigned Bluebird this task; during a short period of time Bluebird introduced us to various high profile candidates. The process was well structured. We’re happy to have Floris Welman on board for several months now and we’ve seen huge steps forward in our Go To Market strategy and execution. As founders of our SaaS business we now have more time for strategic work, which is great!

Sander Verseput

Founder @ Chainels

I have been very impressed with Bluebird, Especially Machiel. He’s a previous VP Sales himself, so knows how to find good sales and sales leadership talent. He’s placed a number of senior roles and also some juniors with me, all of which were incredibly successful. We’ve saved a huge amount of time on screening because his grasp of our brief has been spot on, and that alone has directly translated into more revenue for the company by not tying the team up in recruitment cycles. 100% recommend.

Brad Cross

Global VP Revenue @ Upflow

I worked with Machiel and Ash to hire a Global VP of sales at Panaseer. I have worked with many recruiters before but Bluebird differentiated itself with a team of career sales leaders who now focus in recruiting, rather than traditional recruiting career people.

The difference was clear. It meant better candidates (they recruit from a peer perspective and speak their language), better qualification (they could screen like former sales leaders), and better close (they were able to help us close the right candidate). As I have looked for recruiters in other parts of our business, I now look for other using this model of former practitioners.

Brian Levin

Chief Customer Officer @ Panaseer

We worked with Bluebird on filling several sales roles. Since previous experience with recruiting agencies was underwhelming, I was sceptical to say the best. However, Bluebird came highly recommended by an advisor. 2 months later: boy did they deliver. I was impressed by their speed and also the quality of the candidates. We hired 2 sales leaders and 8 AEs in 7 weeks. Ramp for some is still going on and so far it looks very promising for all. We continue to work with Bluebird and don’t plan to stop.