As the Chief of Staff at late stage marketplace technology company Mirakl, it makes perfect sense that Amelia Van Camp was born in Commerce, Michigan. Her spiritual guide up above might just be a capitalist. But if you asked Amelia where she’s from she would say a small town in Illinois 60 miles outside of Chicago.
Amelia lived across the western world during her childhood residing in Michigan, Canada, back to Michigan then over the pond to Düsseldorf, Germany before coming back to spend her teenage years in Illinois. Her dad was a traveling sales executive who spent almost his entire career at multinational automotive giant SKF selling customized ball bearings, seals and other vehicle related products. The family moved around a lot to support his career as he took on different leadership and turnaround roles. They almost moved to India once! Amelia’s grandfather ran a seals & bearings business where her dad worked as a kid too. There was a strong widget lineage in the Van Camp family.
Amelia looks back fondly on her time in Düsseldorf where she lived from Pre-K until 6th grade. Germany taught her independence and she speaks German fluently to this day. She took the subway by herself to and from school each day along with her classmates. It’s the European way. She thinks she brought some of that German work ethic & doggedness into adulthood as well as a focus on sustainability. Even as a kid she was sorting her recyclables.
The family moved back to Illinois to be closer to relatives and her dad’s new SKF role as Amelia, her older sister & younger brother were all reaching their teenage years. It was a bit of a culture shock after 6 years in Germany. At the age of 13, Amelia had to re-learn some American culture norms like a little less eye contact.. People get intimidated when it looks like you’re staring through someone’s soul. There were casual English words she didn’t know. Amelia remembers standing up in front of her middle school class describing what she wanted to be when she grew up and she didn’t know the English word for “tierarzt”, a veterinarian. Luckily, Midwesterners are nice! Amelia was able to make friends and really enjoyed Illinois. It was a warm, inviting small town community.
Amelia went off to UConn for undergrad because her sister, who she is really close with, moved to Connecticut for her MBA. As a German Studies major, Amelia really enjoyed rediscovering her German childhood and the uniqueness of German history. She thought she might pursue a PhD and become a professor. Instead, she pursued law.
She enrolled at the University Tennessee School of Law right after college to be close to her father who was working in state at the time. The people are easy to talk to, it’s beautiful down there, and a much slower way of life. Between reading case law or writing briefs, you’re always short on time in law school. Amelia had to learn to schedule the proper amount of time for grocery runs because people will always stop you for a chit chat. She never really mastered it but the Southern way helped her understand that your words carry weight and people love to hang on them. Being well intentioned and giving people time is important to give them the benefit of your conversation.
As law school neared its end, she wasn’t sure she wanted to pursue a career as an attorney. Which is kind of the whole point of law school. She wrestled with the decision but a career in law seemed restrictive for some of the broader goals she had in her career. Amelia told me “I always enjoyed learning. If I could be in school full time I 100% would. It’s a shame that life is so short and you can only learn a certain amount of things”. After going straight to law school after undergrad, she wanted the opportunity to go learn in a new field and experience adulthood more fully too.
She was drawn back to the Northeast to live in Boston for a job opportunity as an executive recruiter. During her time at UConn, she visited friends many times around Boston at campuses like Bentley & BC. She thought she would probably only be here for 3 years max but it drew her in. She loves the proximity to downtown, the ocean, and the White Mountains from her home in Savin Hill. Boston is central with a “salt of the earth” vibe and a lot of history. “It’s the culmination of every aspect of my life” Amelia tells me. She adds that people can be blunt, a little Germanic even. Once you find your rhythm, after perhaps a little difficulty breaking in, she feels like it’s been a welcoming place where people have helped her.
There’s a bustling tech scene that feels like a true community. It doesn’t feel like a competition. People want to see each other succeed, a unique selling point she believes which has led to a lot of positives in her career. Who she’s become professionally & personally maps nicely to what the city has given her. Today she enjoys long bike rides, checking out the Minuteman trail, and even travels to do some certified scuba diving outside of the city.
Ok, back to Amelia’s career! Her executive recruiting firm was in the banking & financial services sector. There, she learned about the deep financial presence the industry held in Boston. She ran the full desk of services – pitching new clients, closing them, and then finding their talent. Private equity & investment banking firms are inundated with applications so they need thoughtful help recruiting and curating. Each firm has different definitions of what they’re looking for in their employees. She loved being client facing because “every person is different. How do you position the best parts of an individual to match what the client wants? How do you manage the offer process so what the client is giving the candidate meets their threshold? You’re a mediator in a sense.”
She also began to see how much traction tech was getting in Boston so she joined another executive recruiting firm, based out of France, that was starting a U.S. entity as their 2nd hire spending a lot of time at CIC (Cambridge Innovation Center). They were focused on life sciences, tech recruiting, and the firm was also building some recruiting tech – a multi-product startup trying to see what stuck! She worked at the firm for two years helping scale their operations up to five people. Eventually, management in Paris decided to bring the business back to Europe so Amelia had to look for a new role.
Mirakl, another French company with an emerging American presence, was one of the companies their firm contracted with. They were looking for their first HR/Recruiting hire. Amelia had a feeling that Mirakl was going to be big. Really big. She came in and interviewed with the team, almost missing her interview because she couldn’t find the concealed front entrance across from Lamplighter in Cambridge.
Mirakl had 8 employees as part of their U.S. landing team at the time. The office was pretty cramped, consisting of basically desks on a concrete floor. But everyone she met was brilliant. You could feel they had something special. She would have killed to work with the people she met during her interview process – CMO Jess Iandiorio, Co-Founder & GM Kamal Kirpalani and Founder & CEO Adrien Nussenbaum. The Mirakl team was the smartest she’d come across and she knew she’d be a fool not to join them. For context, the whole company was less than 100 employees at the time and had just raised their Series B round of capital.
She landed the role! It was a…nevermind. Amelia led recruiting and established their brand locally as the only HR employee in the U.S. She learned how to sell their mission because of her strong belief in that initial team. She’d get on phone screens, do outbound prospecting, and spoke with a ton of candidates. Was this Meraki? No, it was Mirakl. It takes time to iron out the kinks and build a brand.
Today, Mirakl is a SaaS marketplace provider serving 400+ clients across B2C and B2B use cases, driving more than $130M in ARR from $6B in GMV with 750 employees across the globe. How did I fit that into one sentence?? Amelia’s childhood knowledge of automotive supply chains and marketplaces finally came in handy. Looking back now, it’s easy to say that it was a smooth ride.
Bringing talented people into any startup without an established brand isn’t easy. And Mirakl was looking for the best. Amelia progressed from an individual recruiting role to an HRBP advisor role. This transition forced her to strategize about ways to scale the business alongside their talent base. What profiles or gaps were there in the product & where the company was going? How do you train, coach and build a team around you to do that?
Over 6 years Amelia built out the talent acquisition team in the U.S., owning the Americas & APAC, across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia & Japan. She owned payroll & benefits as part of her people partner role. She ran people analytics to better measure their talent strategy. She did employee branding, managed the workplace experience, and handled executive support too. She managed more than 40 people and easily interviewed thousands over her time in the HR & Recruiting department.
Mirakl’s rapid growth gave her a keen understanding of aligning talent strategy to business strategy and the evolution that comes with the constant drumbeat of its evolution. She spent years with the executive team understanding their needs and how to match that to the talent acquisition strategy. She spent a lot of time with Mirakl’s CEO, Adrien, over those 6 years so it was a natural progression to Amelia’s current Chief of Staff role.
As many of us know, a Chief of Staff role can mean pretty much anything. At Mirakl, Amelia is ramping up on everything Adrien has been working on for her first six months in the role. She’s essentially gathering an understanding of Mirakl’s strategic initiatives as a 2nd party to the CEO. She’s spending time with their GTM functions and their Sales & Marketing executive leaders. She’s partnering on granular topics like “what are our business KPIs? Are they the right ones?”
She does board calls. She does calls with journalists. She does calls with analysts too. She makes introductions on behalf of Mirakl to potential sales prospects. She’s spending time helping to evolve their operating model as they become a more established multi-product organization. How do you get 750 people rowing in the same direction? What should we change? She’s spending a lot of time with Mirakl’s Chief Strategy Officer, Shahadat Hasan, regarding their plans on the growth side to figure out what, where & how to continue to invest. Most people can learn how to do anything, Amelia tells me, just by learning. She spends her time listening and mapping the insights she gathers back to their core company initiatives. Simple, but wise advice. And that’s about it.. I’m exhausted just going through my notes typing this!
Here are three things Amelia shared with me about what she’s learned scaling Mirakl’s HR operations in the U.S. and now in her new role as the Chief of Staff to the CEO:
Balancing the Scales – “when you’re a small group your interactions with one another are so numerous that you build trust naturally. You tell everyone everything. As you scale you have to master how to instill that trust and organizational transparency. You don’t want to go too far where you tell everyone everything but you need to send realistic messages and empower people so that they feel there is transparency”. If those scales aren’t in balance, it’s very hard to scale a business rapidly. At Mirakl they’ve always strived to put trust & transparency at the forefront
Sponsorship – “when you leave the room, what are people saying about you? I aspire to the 70/30 rule. If 70% of people think what you’re doing is good and support you, that’s the goal. You want to make sure you have the majority of sponsorship from your team around the table in order to show you’ve mastered collaboration and communication through your interactions”. Bringing other people in as you grow as a leader is important too in order to see who else needs to be pulled up. Collaboration and communication is paramount to maintaining sponsorship as the stakes and scale continue to reach new heights
Listening – “I joke with my best friend from law school that being smart is just listening to smart people and finding new ways to say the same thing. But joking aside, a lot of what I”ve learned in my career to date I’ve learned from listening. It’s silly but a lot of people don’t do this well.” You can learn so much about a business and the circumstances of a specific situation and how to fix it by just listening thoughtfully to what a person is telling you
Amelia wants to continue growing her career next by helping to take Mirakl public. Or eventually start a business like her older sister. This current experience though has been a bit of a miraculous career defending ride! It’s easier to learn and be able to put all the pieces together when you know the people well that work alongside you. Amelia is HR for life now she adds. You can’t stop thinking about it once you’ve done it!
For more on Amelia check her out on LinkedIn, scuba diving off of the Great Boston reef, or jet setting back to Europe to see old friends & family. Thanks for sharing. From Commerce to Boston to..the moon? We’ll see you out there Amelia!
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