About Cascadia Ascent

Two trails.
One rope.

We came up different routes, one through recruiting and one through engineering, and met at the same place: helping growing tech companies get the people and the systems right.

We know what good looks like. Together we bring 30+ years of combined experience across startups and small to mid-sized tech companies.

Christina is a technical recruiter with deep startup experience, helping teams attract and hire top technical talent. Kyle is a VP of Technology who has led engineering organizations through rapid growth and transformation, and has spent his career building and modernizing web software.

From taking teams from zero to one to putting in the systems and process that scale, we help founders build strong technical teams and the foundations to grow with the business.

The routes we took

How we got to basecamp.

Christina · trailhead, 2014
Recruiting team of one at an ML startup
A hire a week, 94% offer acceptance
Helped double SeekOut engineering

Kyle · trailhead, 2002
Individual contributor to VP of Technology
Data center to Google Cloud, 99.9% uptime
Avg. Google rank from ~20 to 7.4

Basecamp · Cascadia Ascent

The rope team

Trail cards.

Route A · Hire

Christina Vidauri

Partner & Senior Recruiter

On the trail: 12+ years
Specialty: Technical recruiting for startups
Known for: “I know what good looks like.”

Christina has recruited technical teams since 2014. She started at Versive (then Context Relevant) as a recruiting team of one, hiring engineers and machine learning scientists and reporting to the VP of Engineering.

She was the first in-house recruiter at an early-stage blockchain startup, then hired senior server engineers, SREs and QA leads for Niantic's Bellevue office. At Big Fish Games she went from senior to lead technical recruiter, averaging a hire a week with offer acceptance as high as 94%.

As Principal Technical Recruiter at SeekOut, she helped more than double engineering in 2022, with women making up 28% of those hires, and helped stand up a new engineering office in Bengaluru. Today she is also a Senior Recruitment Consultant at Qumulo.

She builds the hiring systems behind the hires, too: structured interview loops, hiring manager training and applicant tracking rollouts. She holds certificates in data-driven diversity recruiting and DEI in the workplace.

Route B · Build

Kyle Johnson

Partner, Engineering

On the trail: 20+ years
Specialty: Web apps, websites, modernization
Known for: 99.9% uptime through big migrations

Kyle has built for the web since 2002. He started as a web designer in Nebraska, then ran the public websites for The Nebraska Medical Center and Seattle Children's Hospital.

After front-end architecture work at Microsoft and four years as lead engineer at Prep Sportswear, he spent five years at QuoteWizard, which LendingTree bought while he was there. He went from team lead to Director of Engineering, running a 20-person org behind $200M+ a year in revenue.

In 2021 Prep Sportswear asked him back as VP of Technology. Since then he's moved it off its own data center onto Google Cloud at 99.9% uptime, cut $185k a year from cloud spend, taken its average Google position from about 20 to 7.4 and built the AI agent that answers every customer first.

He still ships his own software, too. The Palms Commons, on our Apps page, is his.

Summit register

What we sign our names to.

Entry 01
People before checkboxes.
Deep conversations over surface-level screens, for candidates and clients alike.
Entry 02
Build it to last.
Systems and teams that hold up after we hand them back.
Entry 03
An extension of your team.
We treat your culture with the same respect we treat our own.

Rope up with us.

Thirty minutes, free. Tell us where you're headed.

Book a free consultation

Two trails.One rope.