How I Helped a Space Startup Scale from 12 to 300 Employees

This is the story of a single engagement that lasted over a decade. It started with a pre-revenue satellite company that had 12 employees and an ambitious plan to build a new operator from the ground up. It ended with a publicly listed international space company valued at approximately $1.8 billion at IPO, with more than 300 people.

I was involved at both ends of that journey and at several points between. This is what that looked like in practice.

The Starting Point and Why This Was Not a Normal Recruitment Brief

When I first partnered with this company, it had virtually no employer brand. Twelve employees. Pre-revenue. A bold technical vision but no track record to point to when trying to convince experienced professionals to join.

The challenge was not simply finding good people. The talent this company needed was already working for established satellite operators and manufacturers across Europe and North America. Many of the candidates we needed would have to relocate internationally to join a business that few people in the industry had heard of. We were asking experienced space professionals to leave secure careers, uproot their families, and take a calculated risk on an early-stage company with nothing but a plan and the credibility of its founding team.

Traditional recruitment advertising was not going to work. The people we needed were not browsing job boards. They were deep into programmes at established operators and would only consider a move if the opportunity was positioned in exactly the right way, by someone who understood their world well enough to have a credible conversation.

Building the Executive and Engineering Leadership Team

My first priority was establishing the senior leadership capability the company needed to execute its strategy. Before you can scale an engineering organisation, you need the leaders who will build and run it.

Through targeted international search, I recruited a number of business-critical leaders including the Chief Technology Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, VP Spacecraft, Executive Director of Engineering, Flight Dynamics Manager, and Spectrum Manager. Each of these hires required a different search strategy, a different candidate profile, and a different pitch. The CTO search focused on finding someone with a procurement background who could lead technical, spectrum and business-development activities. The CFO needed to be comfortable with the financial ambiguity of a pre-revenue business while having the rigour to build the financial infrastructure that would support future fundraising.

Beyond the leadership team, I recruited dozens of specialists across engineering and other critical functions as the organisation began to grow. Every search required the same approach. Map the talent across the established satellite ecosystem, identify the individuals with the right combination of technical depth and startup adaptability, and approach people who were not actively looking for a new role.

The challenge was never finding CVs. It was understanding exactly where the relevant capability existed in a global market and creating a compelling enough proposition for those individuals to make the move. In a niche sector where the talent pool is small, reputation and relationships are what open doors that cold outreach cannot.

Scaling from 12 to 300 Employees Across Multiple Growth Phases

Over the following years, the company grew from approximately 12 employees to more than 300. That growth did not happen in a straight line. It happened in phases, and each phase demanded a different hiring approach.

The first phase was about foundational capability. Building the core engineering and leadership team that would define the company's technical direction and culture. At this stage, every hire mattered enormously because these people would set the standard for everyone who followed. A wrong hire at the leadership level during this phase would have had consequences that compounded across the entire organisation.

The second phase began as the business moved from initial formation into a major build-and-scale programme. Backed by its shareholder and with significant project financing secured to fund the satellite programme, the company needed to build organisational capability rapidly across multiple functions simultaneously. This required a structured approach to scaling startup hiring that maintained quality standards while increasing volume. The risk during this phase is always the same: pressure to hire quickly can cause the bar to drop. Roles get filled with candidates who are good enough rather than right, and those compromises often become visible six months later when performance issues surface and the cost of bad hires starts accumulating.

The third phase was organisational maturity. As the company grew past 100 employees, the requirements shifted from individual contributor hiring to building teams, establishing management layers, and creating the governance structures that would support further growth. This is where workforce planning and talent playbooks become essential, because the hiring process can no longer depend on a single person's judgment or network.

Many of the people recruited during those formative years became part of the leadership and technical foundations upon which the entire organisation was built. That is the compounding value of getting early hires right. They do not just fill a seat. They shape the culture, set the technical standards, and attract the next generation of talent through their own networks and reputation.

Recruiting for IPO Readiness a Decade Later

My relationship with the business continued long after the initial scale-up. Approximately twelve years after making the company's original CFO appointment, I was asked to recruit its next CFO.

This time, the requirement was fundamentally different. The company was preparing for its next stage of growth and needed a financial leader with significant capital-markets and IPO experience. The profile had shifted from someone who could build financial infrastructure in a startup to someone who could lead a company through the public-market journey.

This is a transition that investors scrutinise closely. The leadership team that built the company from zero is not always the leadership team that takes it public. Recognising that transition and having the relationships to execute on it quickly is one of the most valuable things a long-term talent advisory partner can provide.

I identified and recruited the executive who subsequently helped lead the company through its public-market journey, culminating in an IPO valuation of approximately $1.8 billion.

What This Case Study Reveals About Talent Strategy for Space Startups

Looking back across more than a decade of partnership with this company, a few principles stand out.

The first is that talent strategy is not a one-time exercise. The people you need at 12 employees are different from the people you need at 100, and different again from the people you need at 300. A talent advisor on a retainer who understands your business deeply enough to anticipate those transitions is worth significantly more than a series of transactional agency searches that start from scratch every time.

The second is that early hires define everything that follows. The CTO, the VP Spacecraft, and the Executive Director of Engineering who joined at the 12-person stage shaped the technical culture that attracted the next 288 people. Getting those foundational hires wrong would have changed the trajectory of the entire company.

The third is that the hardest hires are not the most senior ones. They are the ones that require convincing a successful, well-compensated professional at an established company to take a risk on an unknown startup. That is not a job description problem or a compensation problem. It is a positioning and relationship problem, and it requires someone who understands both the candidate's world and the opportunity well enough to bridge the gap between them.

The fourth is that the value of a talent advisory relationship compounds over time. The context, relationships, and institutional knowledge that I built during the first phase of this engagement made every subsequent phase faster and more effective. When the company needed a new CFO twelve years later, I already understood the business, the culture, the board dynamics, and what kind of leader would succeed in that environment. That context would have taken a new advisor months to build.

Build the Talent Strategy That Takes Your Space Startup from Startup to Scale

What began as a little-known, pre-revenue satellite company with around 12 employees became a 300-person international space business and ultimately a publicly listed company valued at approximately $1.8 billion. I was privileged to be part of that journey from the earliest leadership hires through to IPO readiness.

If you are building a space or deep tech company and want a talent advisory partner who has done this before, from first engineering hires through to the leadership transitions that define whether a company reaches its full potential, I would welcome a conversation.

Reach out at hello@ianstammers.com or book a call through the contact page.