Steve Cadigan

Steve Cadigan is one of Silicon Valley’s hottest personalities when it comes to people, talent and culture. He is the founder and CEO of Cadigan Talent Ventures LLC, a strategic leadership advisory firm based in Silicon Valley, and through his work Steve aims to help leaders and organizations worldwide develop winning talent solutions. Furthermore he helps break down any barriers that suffocate, limit, or create impediments to high performance and the evolution of talent. His specialties include assisting high growth companies with change management, acquisition integration, converting culture into a strategic advantage, leading and scaling in hyper-growth, and assisting organizations successfully through IPO transitions.

With over twenty-five years of leadership and executive experience in global Human Resources, Steve has practiced HR in the US, Canada and Asia-Pacific within a variety of industries. Steve has led worldwide HR efforts for more than 60 M&A transactions at three global organizations since 1998, and he has a deep understanding of business cycles, patterns, high growth, and what it takes to forge an organization’s sustainability.

Through his career, the teams, cultures and organizations he has led and helped build have been recognized as exceptional, “world class” performers by the Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine.

Prior to launching his own firm, Steve served as VP Talent at LinkedIn from 2009 through 2012, taking the company from a private firm of 400 employees through an IPO and into the powerhouse that it is recognized as today with over 5,000 employees. The groundbreaking work Steve did at LinkedIn as the executive responsible for culture, leadership, talent and organizational development is widely seen as THE textbook example of how a company can leverage its culture to scale profitably in record time. Steve’s work in building LinkedIn’s culture led Stanford University to build a case study about it and today, it is taught to their business students.

Earlier in his carrier, Steve served as VP of HR at Electronic Arts from 2004 until 2009 and as Global VP of HR for PMC-Sierra, based in Vancouver BC from 1998 until 2004. Prior to this, Steve was Director of HR for Cisco’s Asia Pacific region (based in Singapore) and Director of HR M&A, helping Cisco build its renowned M&A integration team, where he led over 50 acquisitions and was recognized for leading global acquisition integration practices.

Steve Cadigan holds a BA in History from Wesleyan University and an MA in HROD from the University of San Francisco. Today he is a highly sought after speaker and advisor – addressing conferences around the world and speaking at schools such as Stanford University, The Ivey School of Business in Shanghai, IESE in Barcelona and the University of Sydney. In addition to teaching, Steve advises fast growth tech companies like Twitter and some of Silicon Valley’s leading VC firms such as Andreesen Horowitz and Greylock, and serves on the advisory board of numerous companies going through rapid growth or building disruptive products in the Talent Space.