CEO at Dex
Paddy Lambros
I'm Paddy, Co-Founder and CEO at Dex. I've spent more than a decade helping companies like Improbable and the VC fund Atomico to hire elite talent. I've interviewed more than 10,000 people, everything from software engineers to secret agents. Expelled from school and spent time on the streets, I've made it here, and I'm just getting started. I'm Paddy, Co-Founder and CEO at Dex.
Questions & Answers
What's the story behind your company?
I've spent more than a decade hiring elite teams at companies like Improbable and one of Europe's Largest VC funds, Atomico. Late in 2024, my co-founder Harry and I, were building a tool for Atomico to track and identify talent for portfolio founders - we scraped all of LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Twitter, GitHub, etc, to identify and attempt to introduce talent to our founders. We quickly realised that despite having almost every public and private data set available, there was simply not enough candidate data available to make meaningful, long-term matches. It was at the moment the penny dropped - you have to create a deeper data set to make high-quality matches at scale. To create the data, you need to have a reason for people to engage with you. And thus, Dex was born. We wrapped up our jobs at Atomico in February 2025 and launched Dex shortly thereafter.
What inspired you to start your business?
I spent the last few years at Atomico, supporting 100+ companies on hiring as a fractional head of talent, building engines, fixing bottlenecks, and seeing first-hand how broken the system is. Competition for top engineers exploded, GPT-generated applicants swamped teams, tenures dropped, churn rose. Meanwhile, every “AI for hiring” pitch we saw just scaled spam, outbounding or is LinkedIn search with lipstick. None actually solved the problem. Frustrated, I realised founders without recruitment experience were approaching this with buzzwords, not first principles. I got tired of waiting for someone to solve this problem, and realised that person was me. I quit my cushy VC job, and with a 12-month-old baby, embarked on a mission to solve this problem.
Why are you excited about your company/product?
If we’re lucky we’ve got 18,000 days left on the planet. Too many people will spend those days at jobs they hate. The way companies evaluate candidates and present their opportunities is fundamentally broken, as evidenced by the fact that 46% of hires that fail before they get to 18 months in role. The days of matching JDs to CVs, needs to be over. I’m excited by solving these big issues and having a profound impact on both employees' fulfilment and on businesss ability to innovate and grow.
What sets you apart from others in your industry?
1) Industry expertise - I've thought about this problem every day for 12+ years. I've spent my whole life building to this moment. 2) Distribution - we have done virtually zero business development, yet we count a number of the world’s leading start-ups, scale-ups and hedgefunds as clients - this is because of our strong reputation and brand. My personal network amongst Europe's recruiting leaders is very helpful in this regard. 3) This is my shot. You'll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
Can you share a distinctive achievement or highlight from your career?
I think it's less about one moment and more about the overall journey. As a child, my mum was severely mentally ill, which led to substance misuse and severe physical abuse. I was expelled from school, stabbed in the chest, and had my teeth knocked out. I realised no one was coming to save me, so I decided to save myself. I'm the only person in my family to finish basic education. I somehow managed to get myself into university, and despite setback after setback, including spending six months homeless, I landed a job at Improbable in 2016 as employee 50. I've had to work twice as hard to get where I am today, and I've always done that. I rose through the ranks at Improbable, then moved on to another start-up called Sensat, where I led people, talent and ops. From there, I joined the VC fund Atomico. In 2022, I was recognised as one of the world's 100 top leaders in Talent. And now I'm a founder. I've already been through more than most, and I'm just getting started.
What's a memorable 'aha' moment you've had while building your startup?
Watching the quality of candidates that are signing up to Dex every day, we're seeing incredibly accomplished engineers from places like Citadel, Meta, Tower Research, Google Deepmind, and other illustrious businesses sign up - it shows that our strategy of starting high, with elite talent, can and will work.
What problem or opportunity inspired you to start your company, and how has your vision evolved since then?
Two things became very clear to me in late 2024 1) We are in the faster horses era of AI - There has been a distinct lack of first principles thinking when it comes to AI. The existence of CV's, Job Descriptions and interview processes is due to a lack of time - you cannot speak to every person to evaluate them. AI means that's no longer true. 2) Building recruiting tools for companies is a race to the bottom. There is a reason that $700bn will be spent on agency fees this year, and the market cap of HR Tech is less than $400bn - the value in hiring accrues to whoever owns the candidate. I realised that if we built a solution for candidates, it would naturally solve the larger hiring problem on the business side. I also knew we could scale the highly personalised feel of career matchmaking using AI, and we could do it efficiently, making it possible to compete for the much larger service revenues.
How is your team uniquely positioned to solve the problem you're tackling?
Paddy - CEO - 10+ years hiring elite talent, Globally recognised top 100 talent leader. Ex Atomico VC, Improbable Harry - CTO - Built a talent and company graph for identifying talent and companies at Atomico - Imperial CompSci - International level rower - Youngest person to row the English Channel solo Kemi - CoS - Recovering Venture Investor - Ex NEA, General Atlantic and GS Petr - Founding ML Engineer - Ex-Lead ML engineer @Perplexity & Yandex - expert in recommender systems Ryan - Founding Engineer - AI Lead at Convergene (acq. Salesforce) - 10x engineer Rob - Head of Growth - Ex-Cleo Growth Product Lead Siva - Software Engineer - 1st class graduate from Birmingham, previously founding engineer @ StudyStash
