George Carollo

George Carollo is co-founder and CEO of Dover, the San Francisco recruiting company he built with Max Kolysh and Anvisha Pai. A Stanford-trained economist and engineer, he is known for studying incentives in hiring markets and for steering Dover through a hard reset after the 2022 hiring crash.

Stanford systems thinking into recruiting

At Stanford, Carollo studied economics and urban studies, then completed a master's in civil and environmental engineering and researched public-private infrastructure partnerships. He later built financial models at Parsons Brinckerhoff, worked on Forbes Midas List analysis at TrueBridge, and led strategy and finance at the fintech then known as LendingHome. In 2016 he co-founded TopFunnel, an earlier recruiting software company, before joining friends Kolysh and Pai on Dover.

Dover as service, then software, then marketplace

Dover began by doing recruiting work by hand so the founders could see where the process broke. The company joined Y Combinator in 2019 and grew a recruiting-automation product that, by Carollo's account, reached roughly $15 million in recurring revenue before the 2022 hiring downturn pulled revenue down to about $1.8 million. After experiments failed to revive the old engine, Carollo ran a focused rebuild that became a marketplace for fractional recruiters paired with Dover's free ATS. In early 2026 he became CEO as that second product path took hold.

On incentives and starting over

Writing and interviews return to recruiter incentives and the cost of clinging to old code. On Mixergy he has talked about learning to work with friends he already trusted. Elsewhere he has said teams sometimes have to delete years of product and start again when the customer's problem disappears.