After a decade leading Palo Alto Staffing, an executive search firm in Silicon Valley, David Chie decided in 2024 to start a new company alongside it called Maple Drive, an “AI-first” platform that would be better for recruiters, candidates and clients alike.
Chie, who, in addition to his experience helping family offices, venture capitalists and private equity firms find and hire employees, is also a prolific angel investor, knew that for Maple Drive to work, it needed to meet the high expectations of would-be tech-savvy users. He paired all that he knew about recruiting with the latest AI technology, hired a hot brand agency called King & Partners, and invested his own money into making Maple Drive a self-service wonder for family offices.
It never sought to totally replace humans in the hiring process, but Maple Drive wanted to make it more efficient; better, faster and cheaper.
Last spring, the platform was offering clients three different service tiers. A self-service tier for $1,000 per month that gave employers the ability to post jobs, visibility into the platform and limited sourcing; a second self-service tier for $2,500 per month with all the benefits of the first tier, plus Maple Drive’s daily help finding and reaching out to candidates; and a third tier that included white-glove search by Maple Drive for $5,000 per month. Given the length of time it takes to place candidates, all of those were advantageous to clients compared to a retainer or a fee contingent on a placement, Chie told Modus at the time.
Maple Drive’s platform, which now includes a proprietary database of 8,000 candidate profiles and AI-powered agents, has proved tremendously useful and made recruiters dramatically more efficient, according to its founder. But a year later, Chie’s venture hasn’t gone quite as planned. Family offices still want to talk to him on the phone.
“We've learned lots of things about what we were trying to deliver and decided that the self-service aspect is just not ideal for the target demographic. They really need the consultative conversations,” Chie said.
That wasn’t a revelation to Chie and his colleagues. For family offices, hiring is especially personal and relationship-driven; principals need to be able to trust employees with all manner of things that are usually a blend of personal and financial. They can afford and are willing to pay for high-touch service from a recruiter, so that’s what they want.
Offices, as much as ever, are also mistaken about the type of candidate they are looking for, or are running a misguided search in general. After a call with Chie, the candidate profiles, titles, compensation range and more often change. “They're thinking more in terms of execution as opposed to all of the soft skills,” and the breadth of responsibilities family-office jobs come with.
Established offices filling positions that haven’t been open for 10 or more years are perplexed by how much their ideal replacement will cost, Chie said. Or a family’s wealth and complexity have grown substantially over time, and they haven’t adjusted compensation at their office accordingly.
Those are all things that Maple Drive’s tiered model struggled to identify quickly, and both offices and the recruiters realized that. The company has discontinued the tiered service and is currently only doing retained searches.
Still, Chie says Maple Drive has been a success.
“Our research process is instantaneous. We can do a market map of candidates and talent within a second. Literally as soon as you put the job description into our portal, by the time you've clicked save, you have 15 profiles in front of you that are perfect family-office people that we've been sourcing and basically building into our [knowledge] graph,” Chie said. The firm’s knowledge graph—the structured network of data that represents relationships between entities—includes 8,000 family-office and asset-management organizations, as well as publicly available data on their investments and other information.
Sifting through all that and hoping to remember additional details and connect dots to build a quality market map used to be a one-month job for an employee. “Conversations with chiefs of staff and COOs, they've had really different experiences with different operations—that definitely doesn't come up on a resume. In the past, it's been me remembering those little tidbits, but I'm able to search through my notes a lot more efficiently,” Chie said.
The time saved, along with the efficiency of other platform features, has boosted individual productivity by 4-fold or as much as 10-fold, Chie said. The recruiters have been able to find candidates faster, fill positions more quickly and juggle more job orders than they could before. If the average executive recruiter works on 10 to 15 roles a year, Chie says he can see a future where those at Maple Drive could do at least twice as many and offer better service.
The firm is also using saved time to elevate the hospitality of its business. AI helps the employees remember birthdays and details about people that crystallize relationships, which can make all the difference. A candidate placed today might be a hiring manager tomorrow.
Heavy use of AI comes with a cost. “Our data and our computers are big line items now. That probably is the cost of a researcher,” Chie said. But it’s proven to be worth it. Between Maple Drive and Palo Alto Staffing, Chie said revenue is up 50% over last year. He recently hired a chief operating officer to help him scale the businesses. He also recently started looking for other executive search consultants and partners to join him.
Consulting was once a core part of executive recruiting, and Chie says that it will be again, if it isn’t already. Maple Drive seemed to prove that over the past year.
“I've been saying this for a long time, and I continue to think that recruiting is changing, going back to how it was done originally…where you have subject matter experts interacting with their peers. That's how recruiting shops have developed their relationships and connections,” Chie said.
“I can market-map instantaneously. It's incredible. But I think that moving forward, the relationship and the human connection are going to be valuable again, and it hasn't been truly valuable in a lot of recruiting instances for a very long time.”
For more than 10 years, top-tier allocators have chosen Santangel's Roundtables:
1 day
One-on-one meetings based on your preferences, presentations, networking breaks, lunch and a cocktail hour at Convene in Midtown.
80+ allocators
Endowments, foundations and family offices—representing over $400 billion in assets.
40+ differentiated managers
Who aren't yet widely known.
Invite-only
All attendees are personally vetted by Santangel's Founder Steven Friedman, a former hedge-fund investor, and his colleagues.
We'd love you to join us on May 7, 2026, in New York City.
More News
- Modus is looking for family offices in New York City that are great at investing in consumer businesses—who should I talk to?
- Last week’s Modus exclusive: The Funeral Home of New York's Celebrities and Ultrarich Has a Message for Family Offices.
- Delisha Grant, general counsel at Addepar, has left the software company. Under her leadership, the legal team nearly tripled in size. Last month, the company began rolling out its AI platform “Addison” to all users.
- Bill Ackman detailed trouble at his family office, TABLE Management, in a long post on X this week.
The hedge-fund manager wrote that the office has become bloated, so he hired his nephew to help improve it. They determined layoffs were necessary, and among those laid off were the president and an in-house lawyer. According to Ackman, the latter hired legal counsel, asked for a nearly $2 million severance package and accused the nephew of making inappropriate comments in the workplace. Ackamn characterized the severance request as an attempted shakedown and wrote that he was “reaching out to the @X community for advice with the likely risk of sharing TMI.”
On X, Ackman said he planned to “fight this nonsense to the end of the earth in the hope that it inspires other CEOs to do the same so we shut down this despicable behavior that is a large tax on society, employment, and the economy and contributes to workplace discrimination rather than reducing it.” That fight might not be worth it.
In an opinion essay for Inc. magazine, human resources consultant Suzanne Lucas (who has the objectively great X handle: @RealEvilHRLady) wrote that Ackman’s post “showed why being right in court often matters less than making the right business decision.” - The SpaceX IPO is set to be the biggest and one of the most interesting in history.
At a $2 trillion valuation, the listing could raise as much as $75 billion for the rocket company, and there are concerns about what will happen when waves of shareholders seeking liquidity begin to break in the months that follow. In anticipation of that, the banks are considering allowing some insiders to sell shares before the standard 180-day lock-up expires, Semafor reported exclusively on Thursday.
Also, when the IPO finally happens, investors who bought into layers of SPVs based on forward contracts—not actual share ownership—will finally get to see what those are worth. Some people who thought they invested in economic exposure might learn a hard lesson in counterparty risk, as the astute founders of Ivy Invest noted recently. - Women are reporting fleas, filth, and neglect at a luxury birth center on the Upper East Side.
- Blue Owl has expanded its family-office coverage group to eight people over the past year, and the private-credit turmoil hasn’t stopped them from pitching, Bloomberg reported this week. On average, small portions of family-office portfolios are invested in private credit, but those allocations have grown in recent years from effectively zero to 4%. In dollar terms, that’s many billions of dollars.
- The SEC announced its 2025 enforcement results. John Reed Stark, who worked at the commission for 18 years and founded its office of internet enforcement, had a scathing take on it: “As expected, the report did not disappoint — if you were rooting for the collapse of American securities regulation.”
- John Carreyrou, the veteran investigative journalist who won two Pulitzer Prizes and broke the Theranos story, spent a year digging through thousands of decades-old internet postings in search of Bitcoin’s creator. This week, he published a story that suggests that Satoshi Nakamoto is a computer scientist named Adam Back.
- The Observer wrote about Why the World’s Biggest Banks Are Getting Into the Art Advisory Business but didn’t mention UBS, which continues to expand that years-old unit.
- How much is your wealth management practice worth? Advisor Upside partnered with Diamond Consultants to create a calculator for advisors.
Is your private aviation optimized?
Integris Aviation Consultancy helps C-suite executives, family offices, and corporate flight departments worldwide navigate the complexities of private aircraft sales, acquisitions, and more.
See how we turned a $1 million per year loss into $5 million in net revenue for this real estate developer’s aircraft lease.
Reach out to Founder David Clark to learn more: david@integrisaviation.com
Jobs
- Secocha Ventures, a single-family office responsible for a global portfolio of operating companies, trusts, and evergreen investment holding structures across the U.S. and India, is hiring a controller and an accountant in Aventura, Florida. These are in-office jobs offering salaries of $110,000 and $90,000, respectively, and other benefits.
- The investment team at a single-family office in Houston, Texas, is looking for either an associate or senior associate. This group helps execute a “flexible, opportunistic mandate” across private equity, venture capital, infrastructure, and other alternative asset classes.
- Bench Consulting, which families hire for navigating leadership and generational transitions, governance challenges, and other family dynamics, is hiring a senior relationships manager. It pays a salary of $275,000 and offers other benefits.
- Wilmington Trust’s family office advisory group is looking for an associate analyst in the Philadelphia area. Candidates will be doing a lot of administrative work and should be fluent in AI tools, the posting says. Pay range for this position is “$24.87 - $41.45” per hour. Oof. For those wondering if that's low, $25 per hour would put you right above $50,000 per year—in a major metro area. If you apply, ask high!
Other Stuff
- Join 2,000+ people and follow Modus on LinkedIn for periodic, worthwhile updates.
- News tips are important. To share information in confidence, reply to this email or message me on Signal (+1 330-962-6441) using a personal device that your employer cannot access.
- Want to sponsor Modus? Fill out this form. I’ll send you the latest sales deck with new case studies.
I'll be...
- At the Asya Geisberg Gallery tonight for Orkideh Torabi's "Kings and Conquerors" exhibition.
- Packing at my apartment.
- In Mexico next week, taking a much-needed vacation.
