How QuantHub Built Its Talent Stack Through Ember
A conversation with Joshua Jones, CEO of QuantHub, based in Birmingham Alabama.
When Joshua Jones describes how most startups end up hiring, he doesn't pull punches:
"You need a position filled, the clock is running, you get desperate, and you end up hiring based on time more than on the quality of the applicant."
It's the kind of thing every founder has felt and almost none will say on record. It's also the problem Ember was built to solve and over the past six months, QuantHub has tested that thesis harder than any company in our portfolio.
Four hires. Three different programs. Three different seniority levels. One network.
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Ashwin Ramanujam; Senior Special Projects Manager, hired through our alumni program
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Serena Deutch; joined part-time while finishing her MBA, now converting to full-time
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Ahmad Yasser; Chief of Staff, hired straight out of our 2026 Fellow cohort
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Shaylee Ahlborn; HR Director, placed through Ember+, our alumni referral program
No other company has gone this deep across so many hiring motions in such short a window.
The Birmingham Puzzle
QuantHub is an eight-year-old AI education company, headquartered in Birmingham, with 40 employees. They build curriculum that prepares learners for jobs being reshaped by AI, a market that's growing faster than most education companies can hire to meet.
But hiring in Birmingham, Joshua told us, is its own puzzle:
"Bigger cities just have more people. The more specific the talent you need, the fewer people there are in the pool. The advantage is lower cost of living and higher quality of life. $100,000 in Birmingham is the equivalent of $200,000 in SF. The challenge is that if we're recruiting someone from San Francisco making $200,000, they're not going to accept that $100,000 in Birmingham is the same equivalent. There's a mental stigma, people get stuck on a number, and that makes recruiting from larger pools hard."
Then there's the local dynamic that doesn't show up in any recruiting playbook:
"A lot of growth-stage entrepreneurs here are friends and connected. If you take the top 20 growth-stage tech companies in Birmingham, we all know each other, dine together, hang out together and we'd be hesitant to hire one of our friends' employees. So the pool shrinks even further."
The Birmingham market is harder than larger coastal markets not because the talent isn't there, but because the structural and social constraints around accessing talent are real. This is exactly why a network like Ember matters more in cities like Baltimore and Detroit than it does in San Francisco.
Trust Starts with Alumni
The first two Ember hires were Ashwin Ramanujam and Serena Deutch. Both mid-career alumni and both in operationally critical seats. This was QuantHub's first test of the caliber of Ember’s Alumni talent pool.
Ashwin describes the experience from the candidate side:
"In my 8+ years of being in the workforce, I've never had an easier recruiting experience than working with Ember. Akhil reached out to me in early November to introduce QuantHub and get initial alignment that we might be a mutual good fit for a senior level role. By Thanksgiving, I had gone through 2 rounds of interviews with QuantHub (including an on-site) and had an offer in hand. Very thankful for Ember and the strong relationships they have with startup ecosystems in up-and-coming cities."
From cold outreach to signed offer in roughly three weeks, for a senior-level operational role. That's the kind of number that gets a founder's attention.
What Joshua saw on his side was simpler and harder to manufacture:
"Ashwin has been great. He's delivered. He's been with us for a number of months now, and he's clearly solid talent and experience. Serena hasn't started full-time yet but has done a great job part-time. The biggest thing both of them showed: being proactive, demonstrating a sense of ownership."
Serena's story added a wrinkle most recruiting relationships can't accommodate. She joined QuantHub as a contractor in her final semester of business school; a flexible arrangement that gave both sides a long runway to evaluate fit before committing to a full-time hire.
In her own words:
"As an MBA student, I had multiple career pipeline opportunities through my university. However, as I increasingly began to be drawn back into the entrepreneurial ecosystem, I knew that Ember was a trusted source for finding great companies with exciting growth potential. Being able to start work at QuantHub as a contractor in my final semester of school let me get immersed in the company and make an impact early. It gave me a strong foundation to feel confident about joining as a full-time hire post-MBA, and I'm grateful to Ember for making the connection."
The headline detail for founders reading this: Serena had access to every traditional MBA recruiting pipeline her business school could offer. She chose Ember.
Trust Compounds with the Fellow Hire
Once the mid-level hires were producing, QuantHub took a bigger swing. They hired a 2026 Ember Fellow as their Chief of Staff to the CEO.
It's the kind of decision most founders wouldn't make. A 22-year-old in the CoS seat, reading the CEO's email and sitting in on strategy calls, is a high-leverage role with real downside if the person isn't ready. The fact that QuantHub said yes and closed the deal, 18 days from first introduction to signed offer, only makes sense if you understand Joshua’s theory of how to build a company.
"This starts with my theory as an entrepreneur. I'm at a stage in my journey where I want to invest in the next generation. This wasn't a purely selfish 'who's the best person for the role' hire. It was both finding the right person for the role and looking to invest in the next generation.
The concept from the start was to hire someone with Ahmad’s profile, capabilities, and character, with the thesis that we'd invest in the individual through a one-year rotation, with the goal of placing him somewhere else in the business after he spends a year figuring out where he's best. I've done this a couple of times before, and in each case the person who rotated out of that role did really well in the company. They knew my management style, the context, the DNA of the business intimately, because they spent a year reading my emails and calendar.
The intent is for Ahmad to rotate into another role once he finishes his year, then backfill his position, most likely with another Ember Fellow, and keep repeating that process. It gives them a playbook so that whenever they want to go start their own business, they've gotten a unique training program you can't find elsewhere. Meanwhile, we've gotten some of the top talent, because people like Ahmad have a lot of options, and we needed it to be a compelling offering."
This is the model the rest of the case study orbits around. Not "we hired one person” but rather that we built a Fellowship-rotation-program, a recurring slot in the org chart that the network refills, year after year, with talent that learns the business inside out and either rotates into permanent roles or leaves to start their own companies with a playbook in hand.
Ahmad joined in March 2026. His perspective three months in:
"Having worked with Shark Tank startups and fast-moving corporations across two different countries and continents, I didn't expect a Birmingham, Alabama startup to be moving at this speed or shaping education across the country at this scale. Holding a senior seat at a mature startup scaling from 40 to 100+ employees has been humbling and eye-opening; in college, we'd look at the San Francisco startups raising millions and assume that running a company, especially with the rise of AI, was an easy task. But in reality, it really is not. Being a thought partner to the CEO makes it even more exciting, because you actually see your ideas put into motion in real-time."
From first introduction to a signed offer in 18 days, for a Chief of Staff role, closing faster than QuantHub had closed any senior hire before, and faster than most CoS searches close at companies twice their size.
From Hire to Buyer
The last hire in the sequence closed the loop in a way we didn't plan but couldn't have scripted better.
QuantHub needed an HR Director. They went back to Ember, this time through Ember+, our alumni referral program. Ember+ exists on a simple premise: high performers gravitate towards each other. Our alumni experienced the program firsthand, they know what makes the network unique, they value colleagues who are competent and enjoyable to work with, and we take their referrals seriously because of it. When an alum vouches for someone, it carries weight. That's a massive force multiplier. When a company hires through Ember+, they're tapping into those second-degree connections with the same confidence they'd have hiring an alum directly.
Shaylee Ahlborn's placement is exactly that. She came to QuantHub through an alumni referral. Not a Fellow herself, but someone an alum had worked closely with and trusted enough to send our way. The network extended its reach by one degree, and QuantHub got an HR Director who's now in the seat.
Today, Shaylee is the one managing QuantHub's relationship with Ember from the inside. The candidate became the buyer.
In her words:
"I came to QuantHub through Ember, so I've experienced them from both sides, as a candidate and now, managing the relationship. What stood out then and still stands out now is how high-touch the process is. The quality of candidates and the speed of placement aren't just talking points. I've experienced them firsthand.
She's also the person best positioned to quantify what that means in practice:
"Without Ember, I'm averaging around 20 hours per role to source, filter applications, and complete initial screens. With your referrals, that drops to roughly 5 hours — so we're looking at about a 75% reduction in sourcing and screening time per hire."
The implications go beyond the single hire. A relationship where the person you placed is now the person buying from you is the rarest and most durable form of talent partnership. It compounds. Every time QuantHub hires through Ember now, Shaylee is on the inside understanding the process from a place few HR Directors ever get to.
Dialed in to the type of talent startups need
We asked Joshua to describe Ember in his own words to another founder. His answer was the cleanest definition we've heard:
"A recruiting firm that understands the unique needs of a startup and is dialed in to the type of talent startups need, which is a very niche area."
But the more useful framing came when we asked what advice he'd give a founder hiring their first five employees:
"I've used Ember to find really top talent and then look across the organization to figure out where's the best place to put someone who's still figuring out what they're going to do, who's ambidextrous and can cover a lot of territory. That's really important for a startup. At a corporation, there's a very set role and job description. At a startup, it's 'we need you to figure everything out, cover a lot of ground, be highly motivated, and have a strong ability to deal with ambiguity.' That's where Ember is strongest, and that's where I'd advise earlier-stage founders to really lean into the network."
This is the model we wish more founders would adopt. Most companies hire for a job description. The best ones hire for trajectory; for the person who'll be three roles into your org chart in two years, not just the person who can do the role you have open today. Ember was built for that mode of hiring, and QuantHub is the clearest demonstration of what it looks like in practice.
Four hires. Three levels. One network. Six months.
Interested in building a similar pipeline at your company? Reach out to Akhil Aniff at akhil@emberfellows.org.