Startup hiring is broken. The failure rate for new hires? Around 50%. For early-stage founders already juggling product, fundraising, and runway anxiety, a single bad hire can tank momentum, morale, and months of time. But what if hiring didn’t have to be a gamble?
Enter Matchbox.
Founded by Holly Sanders, Jack Harber, and Nick Glynn, Matchbox is building an AI-powered hiring platform designed to help founders hire like the top 1% from day one. They call it "agentic hiring," but the premise is simple: give every founder the power of an expert recruiter in their laptop.
Three Brits walk into a startup
This wasn’t a neatly planned co-founder origin story. Just one week before Startmate kicked off, Holly cold-DM’d Jack on LinkedIn. They met for a coffee that turned into a three-hour jam session. The vibes were right, the pain points aligned, and so did their conviction: hiring sucks, and no one’s fixing it well.
"We figured three Brits in recruitment were better than two," Jack joked. So they joined forces, formed the company, and pitched to Startmate an hour after their first official team meeting. It was chaos. The good kind.
But their backgrounds weren’t chaotic. Holly brought deep recruiting experience and early revenue. Jack and Nick had both been founders who’d lived the pain of hiring first-hand and were looking deeply at the space. Nick, the technical powerhouse of the team, had already built and sold a startup, Quickapay, and previously served as acting CTO at Spaceship.
Hiring: The unsolved startup problem
Ask any early-stage founder, and they’ll say hiring is brutal. You’re under-resourced, under time pressure, and often unsure what you’re even hiring for.
"Founders don’t know what they don’t know," Nick explained. "And right now, the tools are just duct-taped ChatGPT prompts."
Matchbox fixes this from the ground up. It starts by understanding your business and role DNA: What makes your company tick? What kind of person will thrive here? Then it scopes the role, benchmarks comp, and builds a job description that reflects not just the role but your culture. From there, it supports the full hiring journey, custom interview guides, team calendar sync, ATS integrations, screening and more.
It's not just another job board. It's a co-pilot for one of the most critical decisions a founder makes.
Early traction and real validation
In just a few months, Matchbox has:
- Built a waitlist of 400+ startups across Australia and the US
- Secured design partners contributing revenue
- Received an unsolicited acquisition offer
- Had customers share their demo unprompted on LinkedIn
And they’re not stopping there. Holly’s spearheading a guerrilla-style GTM strategy, placing posters in startup hubs and running founder breakfasts with the likes of Primary, Lorikeet, and Clutch Glue.
"Startups deserve visibility," she says. "Big tech shouldn't get all the talent."
Why this team?
Because they’ve lived both sides of the problem. Holly spent years recruiting across agencies and in-house teams. Jack and Nick have lived the pain as founders.
“Talent is unevenly distributed, and context matters enormously. Some of the best hires Nick and I made early on would never have cleared a traditional CV screen, while others with flawless CVs turned out to be our worst,” Jack recalls.
“The challenge is that no one teaches you the signals to look for at each stage of growth. You usually only learn them by failing.”
That sting became an obsession: How do you de-risk hiring? How do you build that muscle from the start?
Their answer: You build Matchbox.
A 5-year vision that could change work forever
Matchbox isn’t just about better hires. It’s about more meaningful work. Their goal?
Put an expert recruiter in the hands of every founder. Reduce churn. Increase joy. Build teams that stick.
"When the right person joins the right team, everyone wins," Jack says. "We want to make that happen, at scale."
Advice for fellow founders
Their lessons?
- Talk to customers. Every day.
- Don’t wait for perfection. Ship it, test it, learn.
- Find your Holly.
They say that last one a lot.
Matchbox might’ve started with a coffee in Bondi and a last-minute pitch to Startmate, but they’re building something that could reshape hiring for startups across the globe.
And if you're hiring today? You might want to check your inbox. Your expert recruiter could already be waiting.
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