The Employee Number Five Leap That Built a Relationship Business | Leslie Loveless (3/4)
October 5, 2026
Leslie Loveless joined Slone Partners after a major personal transition, leaving a large healthcare company to become employee number five at a small recruiting firm. She hadn't worked in recruiting before, and at the time, she didn't fully appreciate how big the leap would be.
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“People are our clients. People are our product, and connecting them is what we do.”
Leslie Loveless joined Slone Partners after a major personal transition, leaving a large healthcare company to become employee number five at a small recruiting firm. She hadn't worked in recruiting before, and at the time, she didn't fully appreciate how big the leap would be.
Leslie revisits the firm's early startup days, when meetings ran through improvised conference calls and the team relied on paper, notebooks, and spreadsheets. She also explains how Slone expanded beyond laboratory and diagnostics recruiting into biotech, research tools, pharma services, healthtech, digital health, and academic medicine.
At the center of that growth is a relationship-driven approach to search. Leslie discusses investor and portfolio-company relationships, the importance of long-tenured teams, the difference between an experienced candidate and the right fit, and why attitude matters when the work is inherently unpredictable.
Key Topics Covered:
- Leaving a large healthcare company to join a five-person recruiting firm
- Adopting Leslie's daughter during her first year at Slone Partners
- Evaluating whether candidates can thrive in startup environments
- Slone Partners' expansion beyond laboratory and diagnostics recruiting
- Executive search relationships with venture capital and private equity investors
- Hiring across biotech, genomics, research tools, pharma services, and healthtech
- The changing role of diagnostics, liquid biopsy, prognostics, and early detection
- Why long team tenure can compound relationships and industry knowledge
- Reading candidate motivations, behavior, and company fit beyond the resume
- Why attitude and resilience matter in a people-centered business
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Find our guest, Leslie Loveless, at these links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leslieloveless1
Slone Partners: https://slonepartners.com/
Find our host, Jon Chee, at these links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonchee/
Learn more about Excedr:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/excedr/
Website: https://www.excedr.com
Intro & Outro Songs Created by OkKyojin
OkKyojin: https://flow.page/kyojin
OkKyojin: https://flow.page/kyojin
Resources & Articles:
Slone Partners: https://slonepartners.com/
Labcorp: https://www.labcorp.com/
Quest Diagnostics: https://www.questdiagnostics.com/
NVIDIA: https://www.nvidia.com/
Companies, Universities, & People Mentioned:
LabCorp: https://www.labcorp.com/
NVIDIA: https://www.nvidia.com/
Jensen Huang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen_Huang
Purdue University: https://www.purdue.edu/
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:39 The Promotion That Coincided With Adoption
02:16 A Phone Call, Then a New Baby
02:36 Reconnecting With Adam
03:01 Becoming Employee Number Five
03:33 A Leap She Didn't Fully Understand
07:17 Hardcore Startup Mode
07:44 Who Can Really Thrive at a Startup?
08:49 Why Leslie Still Uses Notebooks
11:31 When the Original Market Changes
11:54 Building Around Investor Relationships
12:32 The Expanding Life Sciences Footprint
14:22 How Consolidation Reshaped Diagnostics
15:23 Growing One Connection at a Time
17:03 People Are the Product
19:52 The Difference Between Experience and Fit
32:03 Outro
The Biotech Startups Podcast gives you a front-row seat to the business and science of building a biotech. Hosted by Jon Chee, CEO of Excedr, the show features honest conversations with founders, execs, and investors about their work, their companies, and how they got there. From scientific breakthroughs to startup lessons, each episode explores what it really takes to grow a life science company—from pre-seed to IPO.