Biography
Dionne Hosten is a senior advisor and CEO succession specialist at Pearl Meyer (Blake Street Group). She is a trusted leadership advisor to investors, boards, CEOs, and senior teams on their most important leadership decisions and challenges. Dionne is known for her broad business acumen, industry knowledge, and nuanced understanding of what really matters and “what good looks like” in key sectors, including enterprise software, e-commerce, media, and more. She brings deep experience in CEO succession planning and execution; leadership selection and onboarding; executive feedback, development, and coaching; organizational assessment; talent strategy; team dynamics; and pre-close management/organizational due diligence.
Dionne is also a highly regarded top-of-the-house executive coach and has worked successfully with experienced and first time CEOs, as well as with “heirs apparent” preparing for the transition to CEO.
Dionne was formerly the Managing Director of Portfolio Talent at Vista Equity Partners, a PE firm investing exclusively in enterprise software. Prior to Vista, Dionne was a Partner and member of the Management Committee at ghSMART & Company, where she co-founded their CEO Succession Practice and partnered with numerous public company boards on their succession process. Dionne has also been an operator, having led Global Talent Management at Ralph Lauren. Earlier in her career, Dionne specialized in C-Suite searches in TMT at Spencer Stuart and was a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company.
Dionne is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and its School of Engineering and Applied Science, where she earned Bachelors of Science in both Economics and Engineering. She received her MBA from Harvard Business School, where she focused her elective coursework on leadership and organizational strategy.