When Holly Sanders landed a role at a fast-growing startup, she didn’t just join a high-velocity team - she found the spark for her own. "I became a founding account executive and eventually helped scale the team to over 100 people," she recalls. "It made me realise just how broken early-stage hiring can be and how important it is to get it right."
But that realisation didn’t fade. Between helping other startups hire on the side and drawing on her own background in recruitment, Holly spotted a gap in startup recruitment.
Today, Holly’s the founder of Matchbox, an AI-powered recruitment marketplace pairing early-stage startups with top-tier, domain expert recruiters.
"Startups are time-poor and talent-hungry," she says. "Most founders have no hiring experience. Matchbox is here to make it faster, smarter, and way less painful."
When Holly and I first chatted in mid-2025, she had just wrapped up the Summer Launch Club cohort and landed first place at our bi-annual pitch night. "At the start of Launch Club I had a Notion page, a job board stuck together with sticky tape and was cold-DMing recruiters on LinkedIn," she laughed.
Eight weeks later, things looked very different. She’d built a waitlist of over 480 recruiters, vetted 90 of them, and kicked off conversations with five startups representing $350,000 in potential revenue. Since then, she’s closed clients such as Cursor and Radical AI.
"It’s wild what you can build when you just back yourself. I hadn’t written a single line of code before Launch Club, but the Startmate network is full of people who jump on calls and hold your hand through it. That’s the real magic."
Matchbox is not just a faster job board. It’s a full-stack recruitment platform, combining vetted recruiters with an AI hiring co-pilot that streamlines everything from job descriptions to compensation benchmarks and IP protection.
"We want to take the admin off founders’ plates, filtering candidates, managing talent pools, keeping up with local hiring laws. We’re even integrating equity benchmarks so you’re not just Googling what to pay your first hire," Holly explains.
The platform also helps assess recruiter quality. "We look for domain expertise, their track record in startups, and tangible results. Some of our best recruiters placed early AEs who are now VPs of Sales. That’s the kind of long-term impact we want."
What’s next?
"You’re never going to be ready," she says. "As a founder, if you wait for perfect, you’ll wait forever. I learned during Launch Club that comparison is the thief of time. Everyone’s at a different stage. Just build, test, iterate. Get it out there."
As Matchbox prepares for its founder dashboard launch, Holly is doubling down on what she does best: moving fast, staying scrappy, and helping other founders build teams that scale.
Give it a shot! Join the Matchbox beta trial.
Learn more about Matchbox and connect with Holly.
