Talent
Adam
Ward
Adam is a Visiting Talent Partner at Gigascale, a founding partner at Growth by Design Talent (GBD), and a trusted advisor to many of today’s leading venture-backed companies. At Gigascale, he leads talent strategy, working with portfolio founders to build strong teams from day one. His approach blends speed with structure so growth can happen quickly and intentionally at the same time.
He brings over 20 years of in-house recruiting experience at high-growth companies and, for the past six years, has led GBD, building a team of experienced in-house operators with deep expertise in inclusive hiring, sustainable recruiting cultures, and employer brand development. GBD’s clients include OpenAI, Anthropic, Notion, Brex, and Stripe.
Before founding GBD, Adam held recruiting leadership roles at top-tier tech companies through periods of rapid scale. At Pinterest, he helped grow the company from 200 to 2,500 in five years, first as Head of Technical Recruiting and later leading the full recruiting function. He also built an in-house executive recruiting team. At Facebook (now Meta), Adam was one of the company’s first recruiting leaders, joining with fewer than 1,000 employees and leading a global team of 65 technical recruiters through IPO as the company scaled to over 10,000 employees in three years. At Qualcomm, he led APAC recruiting, then global university recruiting, programs, and operations.
Adam holds a BA in Communications and Psychology from Wake Forest University.
