Manuel Salcedo

Who they are

Manuel Salcedo is Founder of UpScale — an AI-forward recruitment agency he built to match high-performing candidates with global startups, while also operating as a Partner at Shiny, the fractional-executive marketplace.

Person

Manuel studied at Tecnológico de Monterrey before adding executive education at Harvard Business School — a combination that signals someone who built operational instincts before layering on strategic credibility. His career ran through ops and country leadership roles at companies including Nelo and Kinsu, each a short stint that suggests he moves when the problem is solved or the fit isn't right. He served as COO and Country Lead across those stints, accumulating the kind of multi-market, early-stage operator experience that becomes the raw material for a founder. In 2023 he founded UpScale, an AI-forward recruitment agency that matches high-performing candidates with global startups and scaleups — his own answer to the hiring problem he'd lived inside as an operator. In March 2026 he joined Shiny as a Partner, a marketplace connecting startups with vetted fractional executives, which runs neatly alongside UpScale rather than replacing it. He posts on LinkedIn about fractional leadership, AI in hiring, and the future of work — practical operator takes, not thought-leadership abstraction. The through-line is someone who keeps moving toward the talent and ops layer of startup-building, now from both the supply side (UpScale) and the platform side (Shiny).

How they likely show up

  • Short-stint tenure pattern across Nelo, Kinsu, and fractional roles → likely optimizes for impact windows, not longevity; he moves on when the work is done.
  • Founded UpScale while also operating as a fractional COO → high agency, runs parallel tracks rather than sequential ones.
  • Joined Shiny as a Partner in March 2026 while UpScale remains active → comfortable holding multiple operator bets simultaneously; not an either/or thinker.
  • LinkedIn posts focus on fractional leadership and AI hiring rather than personal branding → communicates to practitioners, not to an audience looking for inspiration.
  • COO and Country Lead roles across early-stage companies → used to being the person who makes things work operationally before the playbook exists.

Conversation tips

  • → Ask about a specific hiring failure he's seen at startups — his UpScale thesis comes from lived frustration, and he'll have concrete stories.
  • → Reference the fractional-executive model specifically, not just 'flexible work' — he distinguishes between the two and the distinction matters to him.
  • → He's Madrid-based and has worked across Latin American startups (Nelo, Kinsu) — acknowledging the cross-Atlantic context will land better than assuming a purely European frame.
  • → He posts on LinkedIn; if you've read a specific post, cite it — he'll know whether you actually did.

Toolbox

Openers

  • Open on UpScale — he founded it in 2023 specifically to solve the startup hiring problem he'd encountered as a COO and Country Lead, which makes it a pointed practitioner bet rather than an opportunistic pivot.
  • Reference his March 2026 move to Shiny as a Partner — joining a fractional-executive marketplace while keeping UpScale running is an interesting dual-position, and asking how he thinks about the two fitting together will get a real answer.
  • He holds both a Tecnológico de Monterrey degree and Harvard Business School executive education — a combination that reflects a deliberate investment in credibility alongside the operator track, worth acknowledging as a framing choice.

Discovery questions

  1. How do you think about the difference between what UpScale does for a startup versus what Shiny does — do founders come to you with different problems depending on which door they walk through?
  2. You've done COO and Country Lead roles at multiple early-stage companies — what's the most common operational mistake you saw that shaped how you built UpScale's matching process?
  3. You write about AI in recruitment — where do you think the AI-powered hiring tools are genuinely changing outcomes versus adding noise for founders trying to hire?

Avoid

Don't pitch generic 'AI will transform hiring' narratives without specifics — he's built a company on that thesis and will expect you to have a concrete point of view, not a headline.

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Sources

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Generated by briefthecall.com from public web sources on July 10, 2026. Each claim is linked to its source above.

Automatically generated by AI from public sources. May be inaccurate or out of date. Remove or correct this profile →