My Toughest Challenge: Gurvendra Suri

“As we all know, the economy has been doing great for the last couple of years. We are almost at full employment. In order for the company to grow, we have to add talent, and new talent is just not readily available to hire. Everyone is fully employed, and to gain talent from competitors or other places, the premiums are very high. Plus, talent is difficult to identify, because people are not out looking for jobs. Even if you do identify them, it’s difficult to attract them because they’re happily and gainfully employed. Fortunately, we have good equity options for executives across our portfolio companies, which helps with talent acquisition. People tend to look at equity options and say, ‘I can see my compensation increase by 30 to 40 percent now.’ They make a tradeoff between immediate and long-term gain.”