US ExpansionScaleNLInternational HiringExecutive SearchNetherlands
Why We Partner with ScaleNL, and What Dutch Founders Actually Need When They Land in the US
Key Search has partnered with ScaleNL across four cohorts to help Dutch and European founders make the right first US hire. Here’s what we’ve learned.
There's a moment every international founder knows. You've validated your product, raised your round, and made the decision: it's time to enter the US market. The opportunity is real. So is the risk. And one of the first questions that will make or break your expansion isn't about finding customers or building a sales motion. It's about people. Specifically: who will lead your company on the ground in North America?
At Key Search, we've spent over a year and a half partnering with ScaleNL because we believe that question deserves a much more serious answer than it typically gets.
What ScaleNL Is Building
ScaleNL exists to help Dutch and European technology companies successfully enter the American market. They do this through curated cohorts of founders, structured programming, and a network of mentors, operators, and partners who have done this before.
We've now been present through four of their cohorts, most recently in San Francisco. Each cohort brings together a small group of founders, typically five to ten companies, at very different stages, in very different verticals, with very different challenges. That mix is, in itself, a feature. There's no single playbook for expanding to the US, and ScaleNL doesn't pretend there is.
What we've seen cohort after cohort is a common thread underneath all the differences: the founders who struggle most are not the ones with the weakest products. They're the ones who underestimate how different the American hiring market is, and how much the wrong first hire can set them back.
What We Bring to the Table
Key Search specializes in placing C-suite and senior executives at technology companies across Europe and the US. We're not generalists. We don't fill roles across every function at every level. We focus on the leadership decisions that carry the most risk and the most upside.
In the context of ScaleNL, that means one thing above all: helping founders make the right first US hire.
That hire, typically a General Manager, Country Manager, or VP of Sales, is not just an operational decision. It tells the market something about who you are. It sets the tone internally. It's the person who will carry the company's credibility in rooms the founder can't yet be in every day. Get it right and your expansion accelerates. Get it wrong and you don't just lose time. You lose momentum, money, and often the window itself.
Our role in the ScaleNL partnership is partly hands-on and partly advisory. When we run sessions with founders in the cohort, we share what we've learned from doing this across dozens of European scaleups entering North America: what strong US executive candidates actually look like, how they evaluate opportunities from international companies, what compensation expectations are today, and where founders most often misjudge how complex the hire will be.
What We’ve Learned From the Cohorts
After four cohorts and counting, a few patterns stand out.
Founders arrive with the right ambition but often the wrong assumptions. The US market moves fast and expects confident leadership, but it also has a particular culture that can catch European founders off guard. The executive who thrives in Amsterdam or Berlin is not always the one who will thrive in New York or San Francisco. That's not a soft observation. It has real consequences.
The first hire timeline is almost always underestimated. Founders often arrive thinking they can close a senior US hire in six to eight weeks. In reality, for the right person at the right level, you're typically looking at twelve to sixteen weeks from brief to accepted offer, and longer if few people in the US have heard of your company yet. Planning matters.
Candidate quality is a two-way street. In the US market, strong candidates have options. They are evaluating your company just as rigorously as you are evaluating them. How you run your search, the structure, the communication, the speed, says something about the company you are before they've even met the team. A poorly run process costs you the best people.
Compensation benchmarks are not transferable. What a VP of Sales earns in the Netherlands is not what they earn in the US. This surprises almost every founder we work with. Getting the structure right, base, bonus, equity, matters both for attracting the right people and for keeping things fair as the team grows.
Why This Partnership Matters to Us
We are selective about the partnerships we invest in. ScaleNL earns our commitment because their mission aligns with work we find genuinely meaningful: giving founders from the Netherlands and beyond a real shot at building something in the most competitive market in the world.
Dutch founders build exceptional companies. The Netherlands has produced global leaders across fintech, logistics, healthtech, enterprise software, and more. But strong technology and a great product don't automatically translate into American market success, not without the right people leading the charge. That's where we can help. And that's why we keep showing up.
Four cohorts in, the relationship has become less about what we do and more about what we know. We show up to share it, ask hard questions, and be useful to founders who are about to make one of the most consequential decisions of their expansion. If that leads to working together, great. If not, we'll still be at the next one.
If you're a founder preparing for that move, or an investor supporting companies through it, we'd love to talk.
Key Search is the executive search partner for ScaleNL, specializing in placing C-suite and senior leaders at high-growth technology companies across Europe and the United States. Learn more at keysearch.com.
Key Search
Key Search specializes in expansion hires across Europe, the US, and transatlantic searches. To find out more about our US and North American hiring capability, visit us below.
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