Before Dan Bladen sold software that tells companies where people should work, he sold fishing hooks by the handful. His father’s hardware shop stood in Framlingham, a market town in rural Suffolk. Bladen started there at 11. He counted nails, cleared nettles around the Calor Gas tanks and learned the small electricity of an old cash register closing a sale. The shop carried everything from screws to ride-on lawnmowers, so customer service could mean finding the right washer or helping someone spend thousands of pounds on garden machinery.
At the Suffolk Show, when he was 15, a woman and her husband bought a lawnmower, chainsaw and trimmer from him. She explained the unlikely trust: his enthusiasm had persuaded her. It is tempting to turn that moment into a founder myth. Better to keep the untidy details. Winter stocktaking meant counting fish hooks beside a gas heater. Paper ledgers still mattered. Customers performed the Two Ronnies’ “Four Candles” routine often enough to become part of the shop’s weather. Sales arrived wrapped in chores, smell and repetition.
That practical childhood shared space with another education. Bladen’s grandfather had designed a mechanism for launching fighter jets from aircraft carriers for the British and American navies. In his garage, young Dan tinkered. Families near BT’s headquarters passed along old computers, and he wired them into networks for LAN parties with friends. Before “connected workplace” became a product category, connection meant finding enough obsolete machines and enough cable to play in the same room.
The technologist with a theology degree
At 18, Bladen moved to London and worked at a large church for roughly six years while studying theology at St Mellitus College. When the church parted with its IT manager, Bladen inherited the technology, audiovisual systems and infrastructure. It was an unusual apprenticeship in operations: a community with live gatherings, physical rooms, imperfect equipment and people who simply expected the system to work.
The degree gave him a metaphor that still appears in his thinking. He imagines work as gardening. People do not create the raw materials; they arrange the conditions around them so something can grow. In that picture, leadership is less like watching a production line and more like knowing which plant needs sunlight, which needs shade, and when the soil requires attention. The idea would later become surprisingly literal. Kadence, the company he now leads, arranges people, rooms and time.
“Back yourself.”Dan Bladen’s rule after taking counsel
The company began elsewhere. Bladen married at 22, and he and his wife later spent six months traveling through South America and India. Their movements depended on Wi-Fi, yet their devices kept running out of power. Back home, Bladen and his friend Charlie Cannell began asking whether cafés, hotels and airports could offer wireless power while learning how customers used their spaces. They founded Chargifi in 2013.
Chargifi made connected wireless charging infrastructure. Its cloud layer could manage chargers across many locations, while its hardware promised a simple gesture: put down a phone and let the desk do the rest. The company went through the Techstars and R/GA Internet of Things accelerator, worked with names including Grand Hyatt and Pret a Manger, and developed patented technology. Bladen moved his wife and three children to the Bay Area in November 2019, closer to customers, investors and board members. The timing exposed the company almost immediately.
The market left the building
In early 2020, Chargifi’s product sat on desks in offices that nobody could enter. Customers cancelled orders for thousands of chargers. The company had about 30 employees and let six or seven go, over video, while Bladen’s family faced 14 months of home schooling in Cupertino. Hardware sales did not merely slow. The use case disappeared.
Existing customers supplied the first clue. Accenture and Hewlett Packard Enterprise asked whether their charging points could help manage flexible desks. Chargifi spent about a quarter of a million dollars developing a light ring that showed whether a workstation was clean, occupied or reserved. It was a clever bridge from connected power to connected space, but the bridge stopped at another company’s calendar.
Partners agreed that integrations with Outlook and Google Calendar made sense. They also put the work at the back of their roadmaps. For months, Chargifi’s revived sales pipeline depended on product managers outside the company. Then board adviser Shaun Ritchie and the company’s sales leader texted Bladen on the same day with the same thought: build the scheduling software themselves.
Chargifi doubled its product and engineering group within two months and shipped a minimum viable scheduling product before Christmas 2020. The team wanted it to feel more like Airbnb than enterprise software. When demand arrived, they paused the wireless-charging business rather than run hardware and software companies side by side. Chargifi became Kadence in October 2021.
Seen from a distance, the move looks clean: hardware out, SaaS in. Inside it were cancelled orders, layoffs, a costly interim bet and the possibility of a fire sale. Bladen’s father had taught him, “There’s always a way.” His own version is “Back yourself.” Neither means ignoring advice. He describes the founder’s job as gathering counsel, combining it with the private density of company data, and accepting responsibility for the final call.
Make the commute make sense
Kadence now sells workplace intelligence: desk and room booking, team schedules, visitor management, occupancy data and tools for planning office space. In July 2025, it announced a $20 million Series A led by High Alpha, with participation from Kickstart, Midwich Ignite, Four Cities Capital, Mantaray and 515 Ventures. The company said more than 10,000 teams in over 40 countries used its software. The round was earmarked in part for an expanded AI roadmap.
Bladen’s public argument has matured alongside the product. He once spoke about hybrid work as a historic expansion of flexibility. By 2026, he was calling “hybrid” a loaded and increasingly unhelpful word. A hybrid washer-dryer, he joked, rarely excels at either job. He prefers agile work: choose the place that best serves the task, and coordinate people so the choice works for everybody around them.
His useful division is “heads up” and “heads down.” Heads-up work sets direction, resolves ambiguity and builds trust, especially for new colleagues. The room carries more information than a chain of messages. Heads-down work turns the decision into output. Engineers in a deep build cycle do not benefit from casual interruptions merely because a policy assigned them a desk that day.
This distinction moves the debate away from a weekly number. Two office days can be wasteful if everyone commutes to join separate video calls. A single gathering can be valuable when the right people settle a decision that had drifted for a week. Location becomes an input to performance, not a performance measure itself.
Are the right people in the right place, at the right time, for the work in front of them?
Bladen is equally wary of attendance as a target. He compares it with counting corners in football: useful context, perhaps, but not the score. Being together can help a new employee ramp faster or let a product team decide faster. Those are reasons to design good gatherings. They are not reasons to treat a badge swipe as the finished outcome.
There is empathy in his position. Leaders want to feel that people are with them. Distributed companies can lack the management habits needed to operate without constant visibility. Bladen does not pretend every team can scatter without consequence. His sharper point is that a mandate cannot substitute for those habits. “If you can get it to be a magnet,” he has said, the office begins to solve its own attendance problem.
A company built in rhythms
The name Kadence carries the theology graduate back into the software. Bladen talks about rhythms of presence and solitude, direction and execution, work and family. His own days start early because a UK team is eight hours ahead. Three children and, by his description, a Northern Irish wife remove any remaining temptation to linger in bed. He camps with his family in California and writes publicly about technology, work, faith and the occasional basketball analogy.
He also brings personality frameworks into the mundane work of communication. Knowing whether a colleague prefers a quick call, a structured note or time to process can remove avoidable friction across London, Salt Lake City and the Bay Area. He has described using custom AI tools to test how a message might land with a teammate. The point is not to turn colleagues into four-letter types. It is to develop enough context and empathy to choose the right channel.
- Co-founds wireless-power company Chargifi with Charlie Cannell.
- Moves to the San Francisco Bay Area with his family.
- Leads the shift from charging hardware to workplace scheduling.
- Chargifi takes the new name Kadence.
- Kadence announces a $20 million Series A for its next stage.
- Argues for agile work and offices designed around outcomes.
The continuity in Bladen’s story is not wireless power, desk booking or AI. It is infrastructure. A church sound system, a charging network and a hybrid workplace all fail in the same discouraging way when the machinery becomes more noticeable than the people using it. Good infrastructure recedes. The microphone works. The phone charges. The right colleague is there when a conversation needs to happen.
That makes Kadence’s ambition both technical and domestic. Bladen wants to coordinate large assets - people, time and real estate - but judges the result in human units: less friction, faster trust, a school pickup that can remain on the calendar, a shared table after the team reaches the summit. He says he believes “the best is yet to come.” For a founder whose first market vanished, optimism sounds less like decoration than a practiced operating stance.
The hardware-store boy would recognize the task. Listen past the customer’s first request. Find the problem behind the product. Put the useful thing in reach. Then let the register ping.