A person to support a house manager and “bring the yacht experience to land." That was the job description an unnamed principal of a family office forwarded down three levels of workers to David Chie, a recruiter.
Finding that person was not an easy task.
One thing Bravo’s reality television series “Below Deck” teaches viewers is that the “yacht experience” can mean different things to different people. Good service and dining are expected. But some passengers want to jet ski or explore tiny islands. Others want to sunbathe with a specific cocktail, stirred to perfection, or their whole $300,000 boat trip is basically ruined.
“I had no idea what he considers luxury,” Chie said about the mysterious principal he was working for. But it quickly became clear that the family's real estate portfolio and expectations required a very specific candidate. “I interviewed pretty much every hotel manager at Aman [Resorts], the Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton.” The office eventually hired one of his candidates.
In hindsight, he learned some lessons and started thinking more critically about his own business and profession.
Recruiting for a company is inherently easier than recruiting for a family office. Companies have deadlines — open jobs must be filled because a drag on productivity could jeopardize a project or revenue. They care less about whether someone is a fit or their personal quirks. Family offices demand exceptional workers, care deeply about small details, and want a “protector,” which are exhausting traits to truly understand and then filter candidates for. Recruiters, especially those new to family offices, waste a lot of time sending profiles to the chiefs of staff and principals. “They can't do much because they don't really even know the principal's preferences. They're kind of sending it into a black box,” Chie told Modus.
After a decade leading Palo Alto Staffing, an executive search firm established in Silicon Valley in 1979, Chie decided to start a new company that would use technology to address the pains felt by recruiters, candidates and clients. In January of 2024, he founded Maple Drive, an “AI-first” firm.
Chie hired King & Partners, an agency that counts brands like Four Seasons, The Greenwich Hotel, Skims, and JP Morgan Chase as clients, to help with Maple Drive’s website and overall experience. The tech behind the recruiting might be powerful, but that couldn’t come at the expense of an elevated experience for clients, especially family offices.
“One of the things that we really want to make clear to people is that we're not replacing the recruiters in the process,” Chie said. “I have to deliver the perfect candidate. I don't need the client to know that there is AI working in the background. That has to be my secret sauce. I want this to be a very natural experience. People should feel like the only person they're working with is their talent advisor or me, and I'm just superhuman because of the capacity that I've built behind me with the technology.”
Maple Drive spent all of last year building Lucy, a suite of AI tools Chie said will make recruiting for family offices, private equity firms, and other clients dramatically more efficient.
In January, they began using Lucy to analyze their proprietary database of more than 7,500 candidates, which includes many thousands more data points once candidate resumes, and notes about them by Maple Drive and hiring managers are included, as well as other information. The instantaneous research is superior to what people could do on their own, and getting better, according to Chie.
“It's become a lot more robust,” Chie said. “We've been running all of our searches through it for at least six months now…the product's getting better, the searches are getting completed more quickly.”
The typical search in the industry takes 12 weeks, according to Chie, and Maple Drive thinks it can reduce that to eight weeks. Once it can do that consistently, the firm plans to share some of the cost benefits with the clients.
Maple Drive currently has three service tiers for the employers it works with. The first self-service tier costs $1,000 per month and gives them the ability to post jobs, visibility into the platform and limited sourcing. The second self-service tier costs $2,500 per month for all the benefits of the first tier, plus Maple Drive’s daily help finding and reaching out to candidates. The third tier is a white-glove search by Maple Drive for $5,000 per month, which it says, given the length of time it takes to place candidates, is more advantageous to clients compared to a retainer or a fee contingent on a placement.
Right now, Maple Drive is running searches for 10 clients. Each one is trying to fill an average of two to three positions at the same time. The search firm currently has 10 employees, including three software engineers, a project manager and and some operations staff. Chie, who is also a frequent angel investor, bootstrapped the company and said he has no immediate plans to raise capital for the business.
Many search firm websites have a place for candidates to submit a resume, but Maple Drive’s is better than most. It takes just a minute to create a profile, where candidates can also use Clear to confirm their identity without any charge.
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Chie says more exciting candidate and client features are coming in the near future. Soon, Lucy will power a copilot tool that candidates and clients can use to talk about what they are interested in. That data, which will be anonymized, will then be used to further improve profiles and match them together. The firm is also exploring how AI analysis of video interviews could help match or filter candidates.
The ability to confidently and securely share information within Maple Drive is already helping Chie and his colleagues attract talent (large language models used to build Lucy are not trained with Maple Drive data). Not everyone has a LinkedIn profile or an online presence that tells much about them or their work history. Once Maple Drive finds those people, or those people find Maple Drive, they are more likely to submit information to the platform.
The firm is also using data to help refine job postings. Recruiters have, of course, always offered their advice on this (or written job postings for employers). But Chie says choosing just a few different words over others can tilt a posting from bland to one that catches the attention of candidates. Lucy can help inform those decisions with data.
Instant insights for a small team of recruiters don’t just have the potential to scale Maple Drive. Chie thinks his new company’s model is inevitably how work will be done.
“If you look at family offices, it's a really good way of seeing the future as to how companies are going to be built. They're highly talent-dense, small, high talent density teams... they have to be really smart people. They have to be at the top of their game,” he said.
And as the number of family offices is expected to grow throughout this decade, thousands of positions will need to be filled.“It's not something to be afraid of,” Chie said about AI. “The value here is going to be that the recruiters, whatever they're called in the future, are actually going to be more significantly important to you.”
Other News
- ICYMI: On Wednesday, Modus sent a newsletter with original reporting about UBS’s 2025 global family office report.
- An Ode to the Penny.
- Without a Prenup, David Geffen’s Divorce Could Get Interesting. There’s a lot of assets at stake. The entertainment mogul is estimated to be worth several billion dollars. “No matter how nice their lifestyle is, his net worth is so significant that I could imagine that any spousal support that he’d be ordered to pay probably will not make a dent for him.” Geffen, 82, married 32-year-old dancer David Armstrong in March 2023.
- Christopher Ketcham’s 82-year-old father had so many girlfriends he couldn’t believe his luck, in this story from The Cut about elder fraud. Losses due to elder fraud — from fictitious tech support, fake investment opportunities, cryptocurrency schemes, and, to a lesser degree, confidence and romance scams — totaled $3.4 billion in 2023. The average dollar loss per victim, according to the FBI, was about $34,000.
- A Secret Trove of Rare Guitars Heads to the Met. (Also, who knew that Dirk Ziff, the wealthy publishing heir and financier, is a guitarist who had recorded and toured with Carly Simon?)
- Before you move on to the employment section below, know that the “best and final” job offer usually isn’t final.
Jobs
- The office of the Taylor-Kindle family, owners of Enterprise Mobility (Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental and Alamo Rent a Car), is hiring a financial planning advisor.
- Agreus is helping a family office in Grand Rapids, Michigan, hire a vice president of operations. It appears this is the same role the family was trying to fill in January with a different search firm. Among the usual duties expected on this job, this person will help support and oversee a commercial resort property in the British Virgin Islands and the family’s private yacht program.
- A real estate development family in North Bethesda, Maryland, is hiring a director. The family actively leads the operating company, which was founded by the first generation in 1947 and has “an extensive history of entrepreneurial success in commercial and residential real estate development in the DMV (Washington DC-Maryland-Virginia) and Delaware regions.” Their office is a financial and asset management team that supports the second, third and fourth generations.
- A family office in Fort Worth, Texas, is looking for an accountant. This person will report to the CFO. No compensation details are shared.
- A U.S. multifamily office with $150 billion in client assets is growing and hiring a family office advisor to serve as a senior planning specialist and trusted advisor alongside client-facing advisors at the firm. This person will have “extensive” internal resources at the company, including tax, insurance, estate, and CFO-type services, to leverage on behalf of the wealthiest families. You should have at least seven years of experience. No comp deets for this position either.
- A general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is hiring a chief of staff. Salary is up to $391,000.
Other Stuff
- More people follow the Modus LinkedIn every day — you should, too!
- What should Modus be covering? Or what do you wish there was more to read about? Reply to this and let me know.
- Broadway? Broadway and journalism? Broadway, journalism and George Clooney!?!? The play “Good Night, and Good Luck” checks a lot of boxes for me. I went last weekend and really liked it, but admittedly, it’s not something I would tell most people to run out and spend $500 to see (I bought a $69 standing ticket, for the record). But CNN is planning a live broadcast of the performance on June 7 at 7 p.m. Eastern.
I'll be in...
- New Jersey this weekend, only to see Beyoncé.
- New York City.
