Manuel Salcedo

Who they are

Manuel Salcedo is a Partner at Shiny — he founded UpScale, an AI-powered recruitment agency for global startup teams.

Person

Manuel came up through a hybrid operator-founder track, running as a Fractional COO before founding UpScale, an AI-powered recruitment agency built to staff global startup teams. He then moved to Shiny, an early-stage marketplace for fractional executives, where he's now a Partner — a natural next step for someone who has worked both sides of the fractional equation, as a provider and a builder. The through-line is fractional and distributed work: he's consistently bet that the future of executive talent is flexible, global, and tech-enabled. Possibly — his founding of UpScale alongside fractional COO work suggests he runs multiple tracks simultaneously rather than sequential career moves.

How they likely show up

  • Hybrid role-type pattern (founder, fractional COO, marketplace partner) → comfortable operating without a fixed job description; likely self-directs rather than waiting for a brief.
  • Founded UpScale while also working fractional COO engagements → runs parallel workstreams; not a single-focus operator.
  • Moved from running a recruitment agency to partnering at a fractional-exec marketplace → understands both the supply and demand sides of talent markets, which shapes how he frames problems.
  • Possibly — mixed tenure shape suggests he moves when the opportunity changes, not on a fixed schedule — don't expect him to stay somewhere out of inertia.

Conversation tips

  • → Ask about UpScale first — he built it, so he has strong opinions on what AI actually changes in recruiting versus what's hype.
  • → He's lived the fractional COO role himself, so he'll engage at a practical level on operational challenges — skip the theory.
  • → Possibly — he thinks in terms of market structure (supply, demand, matching), so framing questions around how markets work will resonate more than how companies work internally.

Toolbox

Openers

  • Open on UpScale — he built an AI-powered recruitment agency for global startup teams, which is a specific thesis about where hiring is going; ask what the AI actually does that a traditional agency can't.
  • Reference his Fractional COO background before Shiny — he's been on the service-provider side of the fractional market, which makes his perspective as a Shiny Partner unusually grounded.
  • Lead with Shiny's model as a marketplace for fractional executives — he joined at an early/growth stage, so he's close to the platform-building decisions and will have strong views on what's working.

Discovery questions

  1. Having run UpScale as an AI-powered agency, what did you learn about where AI actually adds value in hiring versus where it falls short?
  2. You've been a fractional COO and now you're at a marketplace for fractional executives — how does being on the supply side change how you think about what Shiny needs to build?
  3. What does a startup team get wrong when they decide to hire fractionally versus full-time, and how do you diagnose that early?

Avoid

Don't treat fractional work as a second-tier alternative to full-time hiring — he has built his career around it and will disengage fast if the framing is dismissive.

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Sources

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Generated by briefthecall.com from public web sources on June 9, 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 →