Our Team
Jay Nguyen, Managing Director
Jay combines years of Fortune 1000 executive search and VC/PE backed experience to help create GLS. He has worked as a Partner at one of the largest global search firms and has accumulated a body of work that includes placing board members, c-suite executives, VPs, directors, and expert contributors. His unique background has enabled him to work with Venture and PE backed clients as well as the largest Fortune 1000 companies.
The industries and clients he works with goes across consumer/small business/enterprise SaaS, mobile, data, IOT, AI/ML, and computer vision/AR/VR.
In his spare time, he loves playing and watching tennis with his two little girls. The rest of the time, he’s trying to understand why they like Roblox so much.
Dayna Hydrusko, Partner
Some of the best search professionals come from the business with P&L responsibility. Dayna joined Intuit as a Marketing Associate and quickly rose up the ranks to become a Sr Marketing Manager for a 600M division. She wanted to pivot her career and join a fast growing startup which led her to 3br as their CMO. She grew their marketing function from the ground up and helped this hypergrowth startup scale from 0 to 10M in revenue.
She has extensive domain knowledge with an incredible network and a keen eye for knowing what good likes like. She runs our go to market practice focused on CRO, CMO, and CGO placements.
Her personal time involves chasing her new Bichon Maltese puppy, Buddy, around. To re-energize, she enjoys all types of dance classes.
Jian Yang, Advisor
Jian is a serial operational CFO who has helped multiple startups scale from 10s to 100s of employees. Finding the best talent to help companies grow is a personal passion and as such, he has built and managed multiple talent teams. His in house and consulting experience with many companies gives him an unique perspective on placing the right talent. Jian’s background has enabled him to work with startups, public companies, and private/PE backed enterprises.
In his spare time, Jian enjoys traveling and has been to 70+ countries.
David Drollette, Advisor
David has a passion for data and technology which led him to his current dual position serving as both a CTO and CDO. He enjoys the journey of finding the perfect person for a role; whether that be someone bringing a multiplying effect to a team already in place, or someone coming in to build a team of their own. David is no stranger to scaling teams, having built his analytics team at Wayfair from five in the early stages to a group of nearly 200. He has leadership experience with companies and teams both large and small, and understands the unique challenges of growing headcount in each of those settings.
David has two small children who constantly keep him on his toes in his spare time, and they try their best to keep him from talking about Bruno.
Mary Sagripanti, Advisor
Mary is a senior marketing executive and general manager – her background combines consumer packaged goods brand marketing with data-driven digital marketing from her years at Amazon. She has led teams at Fortune 100, start-up, agency, and PE-backed businesses, including taking a company through the IPO process to listing on the NYSE. Mary is experienced leading small, nimble teams rapidly scaling businesses through customer acquisition and lifecycle management, as well as large, cross-functional teams reinventing mature brands. She is skilled at identifying “superpowers” in talent and has a knack for matching people with roles where their unique capabilities can truly shine.
In her free time, Mary is an avid skier and dog lover, and enjoys renovating old homes.
Jake Darley, Advisor
Jake is passionate about helping high growth technology companies scale their Finance/Accounting and Operation teams efficiently, which he has done twice previously, with successful exits both at Workfront (Adobe) and Qualtrics (SAP/IPO), and is currently working on a 3rd as the CFO of Stratifyd. He believes attracting, hiring, and retaining the right talent is the recipe for success for any company, no matter what stage they are in. He has a knack for finding the right talent, and putting individuals in positions to be successful.
Jake has a young family that keeps him active. If you can’t find them at a basketball or football game, you will most likely find them in the mountains.
Ramsey Masri, Advisor
Ramsey is an experienced technology executive with expertise in both public and private sector companies. His past 25+ years have been focused on helping companies hire and scale from $1m to $200m+. As a former CEO, COO and CRO, Ramsey has a deep understanding of cross-functional teams and the intricacies of running global organizations.
While at Oracle, Ramsey was responsible for leading the hyper-growth Wireless Telecom team before moving over to VC/PE led companies.
In his spare time, he is an avid mountain biker and enjoys cooking with friends and family.
Aaron Hydrusko, Principal
Aaron spent the first half of his career in technology as a quality engineer. At Electronics Arts, he learned how to operate within a large organization. He then transitioned to high growth start-up environments including MobiTV and MobileIron where he had to wear multiple hats, learn fast, fail fast, and help scale growing engineering organizations. As part of the hiring team, he honed his assessment skills of what agile engineering teams needed and the importance of hiring the right talent. This curiosity for talent led to a career pivot to search where he can leverage his a deep understanding of Gaming, SaaS, and Mobile environments to help our clients win.
Zack Merrihew, Associate
Zack is an associate working out of our Chicago office. Prior to joining GLS, he worked at Uber as a B2B sales professional in their Uber eats division. At Uber, he learned how to be scrappy to win over businesses to add to their restaurant portfolio. His ability to build trust quickly with potential customers translates well to executive search when working with leaders and clients. In addition, as part of the interview team helping to hire new sales reps, he learned to appreciate the value of bringing in top talent.
He graduated with a Bachelor’s in Commerce from the University of Kentucky. As a fun fact, Zack was part of the cheer team that won the National Championship in 2018. That led to the team’s invitation to perform at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Korea.