bloom

We’re really excited to see the bloom community flourish since our re-launch just three months ago, with members starting to meet in-person in London, NYC, and San Fran 🌍 👥 💜 Last week, 25 of us gathered in Shoreditch for very informal afterwork drinks, a fantastic reminder of the power of in-person connections 💜 So, what is bloom? We're a two-part business: a recruitment agency and a community platform. At our core, we specialise in recruitment across Product, Engineering, and Product Design, helping tech companies hire world-class talent at every growth stage – from pre-seed to post-IPO. We partner with VCs like General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Kindred Capital VC, and firstminute capital, with some of our partners including Monzo Bank, Deliveroo, Google, Causaly, Sling Money, Bumble Inc., Depop, Synthesia, Paddle, Granola, Human Native AI, Lightnote (South Park Commons) and Patients.app. Both with 10+ years of recruitment experience, Alex and I have built bloom as a people-first business driven by high-calibre matchmaking. With that in mind, four years ago we expanded bloom by creating a community for product people which we recently relaunched on the Circle platform. Our community is a space for peer support, mentorship, and industry connections, whether in-person or online .... bloom is here to support your journey 🪜 What Can You Expect in The Community?: 🌍 In-person Monthly Meetups : We host regular in-person city meetups, always covering the first drink for members to kick-start connections! No need to wait for meetups to stay connected! 💬 Active Online Community : With 82 global members (and growing), bloom offers peer support, mentorship pairings, "ask the community" sections and many more. 👥 Personalised Member Profiles & Member Tags : Members fill out detailed profiles for tailored matches by interest, location, and expertise. We even use the MBTI test to enhance member connections. 🔓 Easy Access : Members can log in via our website or our mobile app for on-the-go access. Community Highlights: 🌎 Global Reach : 82 members across London (50), the U.S. (17 across NYC, San Francisco, and Philadelphia), and Europe (5). 🎉 Connections & Opportunities : 81% of members have met in person, and off the back of joining the community, four of our members have secured roles at Cleo, Monzo Bank, Hupe & Stride. 🫂 Member-Driven Experience : Focused on quality, we create a human experience that grows with our members. Membership Details: 💷 At £19.99 + VAT/month, many members expense the membership, with most employed members using L&D benefits. There’s no contract, so you can cancel anytime. 🌍 Join Us! We’re actively welcoming new members worldwide, with a strong focus for now on members living and working in London, NYC, and San Francisco. Are you a product manager, product leader, founder, or GM ready to join a community that puts people first? Apply here >> https://lnkd.in/eDYKA5Gi #bloom

Lightscreen AI (YC F24) is building a voice agent for uncheatable tech screens, helping hiring teams focus on genuinely skilled candidates. Up to 30% of candidates cheat on coding tests. With the increased prevalence of AI tools and remote interviewing, cheating is only becoming more common. Yet traditional screening tools remain outdated—many are still unproctored and rely on questions easily answered by AI. Lightscreen’s AI interviewer works with candidates step-by-step through dynamic coding problems like a pair programmer, observing their problem-solving process. It analyzes a variety of signals in real time to make sure their work is genuine. Lightscreen's problems are also designed to measure more than the ability to solve coding puzzles, offering insights into problem-solving and engineering skills. Founders Prachie Banthia and Gavin Saldanha experienced the problem firsthand, both as hiring managers and interviewees. They met while working at Google and have since worked on NLP, ML, and speech AI products. Their shared experience and interest led them to create Lightscreen AI, with the mission to enable fairer and faster hiring of top technical talent with AI. Congrats to the team on the launch! 🚀 https://lnkd.in/gEZCrCnu

I’ve been wanting to dive into more product networking for a while, and last week, I finally made it happen. As part of my membership with bloom, I attended their in-person networking event, and it was fantastic. It was great to meet new product people and chat about product but also lots of other things like dogs and karaoke🎤. Huge thanks to bloom founders Sam Helire-Howell and Alex Castell-Howard for building such a welcoming community and hosting an great, personal event.

An incredible night meeting awesome people!! So stoked to be a part of the bloom community and foster relationships with PM’s and people I admire. Thank you to Sam Helire-Howell and Alex Castell-Howard for bringing us together for a night of inspiration!

Our team has a wide array of jobs, but even wider array of jobs their parents think they do 👷🧑💻👮 From creating Flappy Bird to fixing printers to fighting crime, apparently we do it all here at Sling!

We’re proud to announce that we have raised approximately $8B of new capital, across our core VC funds and separately managed accounts, to fuel the next generation of groundbreaking technologies and businesses. As we venture beyond with entrepreneurs globally to expand what’s possible, the future has never been brighter.    For 25 years, we've been committed to partnering with founders from their beginnings, investing early in companies like Stripe and Airbnb, and creating companies like Livongo, Commure, and Homeward. By scaling our global seed capacity in Europe and India, we’re staying true to our core, while playing the long game to unlock outliers. We’re also doubling down on the founder experience through GC Famiglia — our community of founders, business leaders and policymakers who we support with world-class programming and services. Creating transformative impact through applied AI and global resilience mandates moving beyond the traditional scope of venture capital. So our GC Transformation Flywheel connects innovators with adopters to scale impact through uncommon collaboration. This is reflected in our Health Assurance Transformation Company and GC Institute, and in our new products like the Customer Value Strategy to give founders more non-dilutive opportunities to grow their business. We’re grateful to our LPs for believing in our expansive vision, and invite you to learn more from our CEO Hemant Taneja here: https://bit.ly/gc-xii #VentureBeyond #GlobalResilience #AppliedAI #Startups #VentureCapital 

We're excited to announce our $20 million Series A led by Nabeel Hyatt at Spark Capital, along with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/d2JKdpSJ

A big thank you to Jeremy Kahn, for the brilliant deep dive into what we’re building at Human Native – and for speaking with some of the newer members of our team, including Madhav Chinnappa, Matt Hervey, and Tim Palmer. We’re so excited to have you all on board! Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/dXPge2ps

In case you missed it, watch our CEO Mike Hudack's full talk from the Solana Foundation's conference on Friday. We're very excited to have built an app that lets you send money to anyone, anywhere, and now lets you send stablecoins to and from wallets that support USDC or USDP 🚀

We’re delighted to announce the appointment of Thor Mitchell as Executive in Residence! Thor has over 10 years of experience building product teams at early and growth companies across the globe, having previously led product management at Google and Miro. Welcome Thor Mitchell! Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eKuVHjZ6