What happens when you take a room full of former C-suite leaders from Nike, Shell, and Coca-Cola - people who don't want another full-time gig but still want to do work that matters - and give them a platform that connects them directly with the businesses that need them?
That was the question Klarus brought to us. Not as a polished brief with a 40-page requirements document, but as an idea with conviction behind it and a lot of blank space where the product needed to be. They wanted to build something from zero. We were in.
Here's a pattern that plays out across the business world every day. A growing company hits a wall - maybe it's an M&A transaction they're not equipped to handle, or a board that needs serious non-exec experience, or a strategic project that's too important for the B-team. So they call a headhunter. Or they call a management consultancy. And what follows is a process that's slow, opaque, and - let's be honest - eye-wateringly expensive. The founder or CEO ends up paying a premium for an introduction that probably should have happened over LinkedIn.
Meanwhile, there's a growing wave of what Klarus calls "Portfolio Executives" - senior leaders who've stepped out of full-time roles at companies like WPP, SAP, and Reckitt, and who want to do meaningful, high-impact project work. They don't want to be on someone's bench. They don't want to be farmed out by a middleman who takes 40% of the fee. They want direct access to interesting problems.
Both sides of this equation were being underserved, and the traditional models - headhunting firms, big consultancies - weren't adapting fast enough. Klarus saw the gap. They just needed someone to help them build the thing that would fill it.
When Klarus came to Rise, there was no product. No platform. No MVP. There was a sharp thesis about the future of executive work and a founding team with the network and credibility to pull it off. But the technology? That was all still to be built.
And that's exactly the kind of project we love. Not because we enjoy the chaos (well, maybe a bit), but because building from zero means you get to make the right decisions early - before technical debt starts piling up and before you've painted yourself into a corner with the wrong architecture.
The gig economy had already transformed how businesses accessed everything from design to development. Klarus wanted to bring the same logic to the C-suite - and make it feel premium, not transactional.
We worked closely with the Klarus team to define the product from the ground up. That meant figuring out not just what the platform needed to do, but how it needed to feel. This wasn't a marketplace for freelancers. It was a private executive network. The experience had to reflect that - from the onboarding of advisors, to the way businesses searched for and engaged with them, to the commercial model underneath it all.
The Klarus model wasn't a simple two-sided marketplace. Businesses could engage with the network in four distinct ways, each with its own workflow and commercial logic:
Each of these pillars had different user journeys, different expectations, and different commercial considerations. Building a platform that handled all four without feeling like four different products stitched together was one of the core design challenges - and one we spent a lot of early thinking on.
There's no shortage of talent platforms out there. So what made Klarus worth building? Three things stood out to us - and shaped a lot of the product decisions we made.
Fixed pricing. If you've ever worked with a traditional consultancy, you'll know the drill. The proposal comes in, it looks reasonable, and then the invoices start arriving with the regularity (and surprise factor) of a British summer downpour. Klarus went the other way entirely - transparent, fixed pricing from the outset. That's a bold move in a market where ambiguity is practically a business model, and it needed to be baked into the platform's commercial engine, not just stuck on a landing page.
The vetted network. Klarus wasn't open to everyone. Their value proposition was built on the calibre of their members - former leaders from Nike, Shell, Coca-Cola, WPP, SAP, Reckitt, and others at that level. For a business browsing the platform, that curation was the product. So we had to build an onboarding and vetting process that maintained quality without creating a bottleneck that slowed the whole thing down.
Speed. Traditional executive search can take months. Klarus wanted to reduce that to days. Their tailored matching methodologies were designed to surface the right advisors fast, and the platform needed to support that speed without sacrificing the considered, premium feel of the experience. Nobody wants to feel like they've been matched by an algorithm when they're about to hand someone the keys to their M&A strategy.
Klarus established a dual-base strategy from the start - headquarters at 14 Hanover Square in Mayfair (right in the middle of London's private equity and corporate hub) and a European office at the Millennium Tower in Dublin. The platform needed to serve both markets and, eventually, scale beyond them.
That influenced a lot of our technical decisions. Multi-market support, localisation considerations, compliance across jurisdictions - these aren't the glamorous bits of product development, but getting them right early saves you from a world of pain later. We've seen too many startups bolt on international support as an afterthought and end up rebuilding half the product. Klarus didn't have that problem because we planned for it from day one.
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We took Klarus from concept to a live, tech-enabled platform - the kind of thing that could sit comfortably alongside any funded SaaS product, but built with the pace and pragmatism of a startup that was still finding its market.
The platform handled advisor onboarding and vetting, business-side search and matching, multi-format engagement workflows across all four pillars, commercial and billing logic for their fixed-pricing model, and a user experience that felt premium without being fussy. And we did it in a way that left Klarus room to iterate - because the first version of anything is never the last, and we'd rather build something that can evolve than something that looks finished but can't flex.
Klarus wasn't just a marketplace. It was a private network with a point of view about how the future of executive work should look. The product had to carry that conviction.
Every project reinforces things we already know but sometimes need reminding of. With Klarus, it was this: the most interesting products to build are the ones where the business model is the product. Klarus didn't need a website with a contact form. They needed technology that embodied a completely different way of connecting businesses with executive talent. The platform wasn't a nice-to-have bolted onto a consulting practice - it was the practice.
And that's the kind of build where getting the fundamentals right matters more than shipping fast. We could have thrown together a basic two-sided marketplace in a few weeks. But that wouldn't have been the product Klarus needed, and it wouldn't have given them the foundation to grow on.
If you're sitting on a concept that could reshape how an industry works - even a corner of it - and you're not sure how to turn it into something real, that's exactly the conversation we like having. Book a 30-minute discovery call with one of our founders. No obligation, no pitch deck required, and you'll come away with something useful whether we end up working together or not.
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