Keynote SpeakerSteve Cadigan

Steve Cadigan is one of Silicon Valley’s hottest properties when it comes to people, talent and culture. As founder and CEO of Cadigan Talent Ventures LLC, a strategic leadership advisory firm based in Silicon Valley, he aims to help leaders and organisations worldwide develop winning talent solutions, breaking down any barriers that suffocate, limit, or impede to high performance and the evolution of talent. His specialities include assisting high growth companies with change management, acquisition integration, converting culture into a strategic advantage, leading and scaling in hyper-growth, and assisting organisations successfully through IPO transitions.

With over twenty five years of leadership and executive experience in global Human Resources, Cadigan has practised HR in the US, Canada and Asia-Pacific within a variety of industries. Having led worldwide HR efforts for more than 60 M&A transactions at three global organisations since 1998, he has a deep understanding of business cycles, patterns, high growth, and what it takes to forge an organisation’s sustainability. Over the course of his career, the teams, cultures and organisations he has led and helped build have been recognised as exceptional, “world class” performers by the Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine.

Prior to launching his own firm, Steve Cadigan served as VP Talent at LinkedIn from 2009-12, taking the company from a private firm of 400 employees through an IPO and into the powerhouse that it is recognised as today with over 5,000 employees. The groundbreaking work he did at LinkedIn as the executive responsible for culture, leadership, talent and organisational development is widely seen as a textbook example of how a company can leverage its culture to scale profitably in record time. His work in building LinkedIn’s culture led Stanford University to build a case study about it and today, it is taught to their business students.

From 2004-09, Cadigan served as VP of HR at Electronic Arts and as Global VP of HR for PMC-Sierra, based in Vancouver BC from 1998- 2004. Prior to this, he was Director of HR for Cisco’s Asia Pacific region (based in Singapore) and Director of HR M&A, helping Cisco build its renowned M&A integration team, where he led over 50 acquisitions and was recognised for leading global acquisition integration practices.

Steve Cadigan holds a BA in History from Wesleyan University and an MA in HROD from the University of San Francisco. Today he is a highly sought after speaker and advisor – addressing conferences around the world and speaking at schools such as Stanford University, The Ivey School of Business in Shanghai, IESE in Barcelona and the University of Sydney. In addition to teaching, he advises fast growth tech companies like Twitter and some of Silicon Valley’s leading VC firms such as Andreesen Horowitz and Greylock, and serves on the advisory board of numerous companies going through rapid growth or building disruptive products in the Talent Space.