Taking Our Talent Practice to the Next Level: Promoting Tammy Han to Talent Partner

A Different Breed of Talent Support

There are all kinds of approaches to helping companies with recruiting. Most firms focus on surfacing candidates for high priority roles. When Tammy came on board, she knew she wanted to take this much further and “teach our founders to fish.” From end to end, Tammy jumps in with founders to define their orgs and hiring priorities, calibrate on profiles, design interview processes, and connect them with the best recruiting partners for their search (while also diving into her network to find the very best candidates). And the work doesn’t end with an offer either. She sees founders through compensation and closing strategies and ensures their hires show up on the first day.

Each step is carefully curated to help the companies she works with make the right decision the first time around. Tammy has seen hundreds of hiring processes since starting her career — she both knows the price of missteps, and how to avoid them. Nothing phases her, allowing her to provide a non-judgmental sounding board for new founders just finding their footing while also trying to field the strongest team. She’s the midnight phone call. The one called in to handle a key hire reneging on their offer or a tough negotiation, uncover references, or tackle a perplexing HR question.

As my Partner Kevin Spain puts it, “Tammy doesn’t just help companies recruit — she helps our founders make better business decisions. It’s an impact that extends far beyond hiring.”

Founders often think they know exactly who they need to hire — until they talk to Tammy. She doesn’t just help fill roles; she reshapes the way leaders think about talent. She challenges assumptions, helping them see that a Head of Sales might not be the first hire they need — that a strategic marketing leader might be a better first step to drive demand before building a sales team. She ensures companies don’t just scale quickly, but in the right way.

This kind of insight is rare. It requires a deep understanding of business models, market dynamics, and company culture — qualities that make Tammy indispensable to founders. As our COO Julie Bell puts it, “What I hear from founders very often is, ‘We just trust Tammy so much.’ She helps them make some of their most critical hiring decisions, often bringing in their first outside executives. That requires a level of trust that is hard to build, but she does it effortlessly. Any executive that has partnered with her on their job search will attest that she asks tough questions that others don’t and helps you with her whole heart.”

It Takes a Unique Background

Tammy’s journey to venture wasn’t a straight path — it was a masterclass in adaptability, precision, and an uncanny ability to understand what organizations truly need before they do. From luxury hospitality at the Four Seasons, to law school, and a fortuitous pivot to recruiting, she cut her teeth building engineering teams for early-stage startups at Riviera Partners, hiring technical talent at VC-backed companies like Pinterest, Airbnb, MoPub (acquired by Twitter), and Karma Science (acquired by Facebook).

It wasn’t just about making hires — it was about architecting teams that could withstand the pressures of scaling. Tammy took this ethos with her to MemSQL (now SingleStore), where she was the company’s first recruiter and experienced firsthand what it takes to build a company from the ground up. This led her to First Round Capital, where she became a go-to talent advisor for hundreds of founders at the earliest stages, long before venture firms had fully realized the power of dedicated talent support.

By the time Tammy joined Emergence in 2018, she was already defining what it meant to be an elite venture talent partner. She brought with her an unmatched network of executives, founders, and advisors, but even more critically, a methodology for scaling teams the right way. She has been instrumental in shaping how Emergence partners with founders—not just filling roles, but helping them think deeply about organizational structure, leadership needs, and long-term growth.

Scaling Tammy’s Impact

Tammy has always been a force multiplier—not just for the founders she supports and the executives she recruits, but for Emergence itself. A third of her time is dedicated to firm-building, ensuring that Emergence scales with the same care and intentionality that she brings to our portfolio companies.

In doing so, she embodies Emergence’s core values in everything she does. She plays the long game, helping founders build leadership teams that don’t just scale but endure. She is a relentless partner, ensuring we are the most valuable firm on the cap table. She cuts through the noise, driving conviction around critical hiring decisions. And she does it all as a true team player — strengthening Emergence from within and ensuring we grow with the same focus, rigor, and commitment we like to see from founders.

With this promotion, she’s taking on an even greater challenge: scaling herself. By building out a talent team around her, she’s expanding Emergence’s ability to support founders while maintaining the deep engagement that has made her indispensable. She’s turning the art of talent strategy into a force that will continue to shape the next generation of great SaaS companies.

This promotion isn’t just a title change — it’s a recognition of the impact we’ve seen Tammy have for years. She’s a trusted advisor, a talent whisperer, a strategic operator, and one of the most important builders in the Emergence community.

Congratulations, Tammy. Emergence has always been fortunate to partner with world-class founders—and if you ask them, they’ll say they’ve been just as fortunate to have you in their corner.