The people at ACV Auctions aren’t the only ones in Buffalo working for a unicorn software company.
Kristin Lewandowski joined Quantum Metric, based in Colorado Springs, in 2018 just after they raised $25 million in venture capital.
It’s been a good couple of years.
Lewandowski, Quantum Metric’s senior director of talent and recruiting, was about the 40th employee at the firm.
Quantum Metric expects to scale the team to 450 employees by the end of this year and earned a valuation of $1 billion earlier this year when it raised $200 million in venture capital.
“I wanted to join a company that was funded, had venture capital backing where I could have equity, and would be able to build the entire recruiting organization,” she said. “I hired 90 people in my first year and saved the company more than $600,000 in recruiting fees.”
Quantum Metric’s Continued Product Design platform seeks to help other companies build digital products faster.
The Hamburg resident earned a bachelor’s degree from Niagara University and then a master’s from Medaille College in psychology in 2009.
She embarked first on a career in social work before realizing her dual passion for recruiting and startups. She was working as an external recruiter for clients when she met Quantum Metric CEO Mario Ciabarra. He wasn’t yet ready for another external recruiting agency, but when the company closed its Series A round of funding, it brought Lewandowski onboard and she brought the recruiting in-house.
When Lewandowski left the safety of her existing job in 2018, she did so partly because she wanted to help build something new and partly because there are few wealth-generating possibilities as lucrative as equity in a fast-growing tech venture.
It’s a risk – given the failure rate of those ventures – but Lewandowski said she saw it as an opportunity.
“It’s a startup mindset, but I didn’t really realize until I was deep in the startup scene that I had that risk tolerance,” she said. “It’s all about betting on yourself.”
Quantum Metric doesn’t have an office in Buffalo, but Lewandowski has hired five people locally for the company.
She said she wants to continue building her career through Quantum Metric while also becoming more involved in the local startup community.
“I’m more than happy to talk with startups around here about how they’re scaling and how to attract good talent,” she said. “I think Buffalo has a lot to offer tech businesses.”
