Elizabeth Zaborowska erased the business plan. It occupied a whiteboard that took up an entire wall of her living room, which is a considerable amount of domestic space to surrender to an idea. The proposed company was called Pitch Hound. It would connect people with stories to tell with people looking for stories, using a software marketplace. She had a technical co-founder and a revenue model. Then the Great Recession made fundraising look distinctly less inviting.
Before wiping the board, she took photographs. A few words survived the erasure, including integrity, creativity, quality and balance. Those had been there before the software architecture. Now they had the wall to themselves.
Bhava Communications, the technology PR and marketing agency she founded in 2009, emerged from that reconsideration. The interesting part is the order of operations. The product idea went away. The working principles proved harder to remove.
A company with a speed limit
By January 2015, Zaborowska was describing a growing business whose expansion would be constrained by the capacity of its culture. There is a small revolt tucked inside that sentence. Growth is usually allowed to set the pace, while everyone else runs behind carrying the furniture.
She also said that Bhava's business had come through networking and referrals, rather than chasing companies. That was her account at that moment in the agency's history, and it helps explain the importance she attached to relationships. A referral carries somebody else's reputation along with it. You can buy an advertisement. You have to earn that introduction.
The decision to let culture constrain expansion makes the agency's ambitions more interesting. Zaborowska wanted a profitable, independent company whose employees could keep learning. That requires choices about hiring, management and the work a business accepts. A beautifully worded value is inexpensive. Giving it authority over the sales pipeline is where the price becomes visible.
“We only want to grow as fast as our culture will support.”
ELIZABETH ZABOROWSKA · 2015
The theater student meets the technical brief
At Tufts University, Zaborowska studied theater and biology. It is an appealing combination for someone who would spend her career helping technical companies explain themselves. Biology rewards attention to how things work. Theater asks whether another person can follow what is happening. A communications assignment can require both kinds of attention before lunch.
Her work has included technology marketing and PR on the company and agency sides. At Bhava, the remit stretches from messaging and positioning to analyst relations, content, social media, search and design. She also facilitates creative ideation, mission and vision, and team-building workshops. The person explaining the product is also interested in how the people making it speak to one another.
Zaborowska has served on the Responsible AI Institute's advisory board and completed a board tenure with Berkeley Humane. Away from work, she is an avid sailor who enjoys coastal cruising and dreams of crossing oceans. The ambition is specific enough to picture: considerably more water, and fewer opportunities to pop home for something forgotten.
When the CEO and the llamas took the floor
In a Bhava improvisation exercise, Zaborowska and account executive Alyssa Marty constructed advice together, one word at a time. Their contribution to managerial wisdom was this: “Whenever you encounter llamas, remember to look both ways.” It remains difficult to improve upon as a piece of highly specialized traffic guidance.
The exercise was called “Good Advice.” Its point was to accept a partner's contribution and build on it, without deciding in advance where the sentence should go. Sensible advice was optional. Collaboration was the assignment. Each participant had to relinquish enough control for the other person's idea to alter the outcome.
That is an instructive setting for a founder. A CEO has plenty of opportunities to finish everybody else's sentence. Here, finishing it alone would defeat the exercise. The absurd result makes the lesson easier to remember than a slide about listening skills. Somewhere between the llama and the road, the people in the room have practiced making something neither could have prescribed.
- 01Offer a wordOne person starts the advice.
- 02Accept the turnThe next person builds on it.
- 03Release the scriptNo one controls the whole sentence.
- 04Make it togetherMeaning can wait. Listening cannot.
The less glamorous machinery of belonging
Workplace culture becomes easier to assess when somebody describes the calendar. In 2024, Bhava employee Stephanie Floyd outlined an agency spread across multiple U.S. time zones, with a midweek check-in and Friday “Stand Up and Shout Out” calls. There were regional working days and travel between regions. Connection had recurring appointments.
New hires went through three months of onboarding. Mentorship, peer training, weekly manager check-ins and professional development conversations continued afterward. Employees had a framework connecting their own goals with the agency's annual objectives. These are ordinary management practices. Their ordinariness is useful. They give the expansive language of a founding idea something repeatable to do on a Tuesday.
Pamela Njissang described another side of the arrangement in a 2024 anniversary reflection. She had joined eleven years earlier while raising four children, the youngest still a baby, and had been able to advance her career as her family grew. She credited Zaborowska's determination to build a different workplace. The account puts a person's years behind the word flexibility. Policies acquire meaning through the lives people can lead while working under them.
In June 2024, Bhava was named to Inc.'s Best Workplaces list, one of 543 honorees that year. The process included an employee survey and an audit of benefits. The agency also marked fifteen years and reported having worked with nearly 200 technology businesses, from startups to public enterprises. Those are different kinds of evidence: longevity, customer experience and employee feedback. Together, they give the living-room experiment some history.
A new company for an old preoccupation
Spring Catalyst officially launched on March 20, 2025, as a spin-off from Bhava. Zaborowska was its founder and CEO. The offering brought together team workshops, individual coaching, professional development frameworks and events, with AI readiness woven into the work. The subject had expanded from telling a technology company's story to preparing its people for technological change.
The team had already facilitated a full-day creative ideation offsite for Brave. Its marketing leader, Shezmeen Hudani, described executives, managers and individual contributors coming together across functions and geographies, leaving with marketing initiatives to pursue. That detail matters because an offsite can produce an excellent group photograph and very little else. The intended souvenir here was work the team wanted to carry forward.
The same emphasis appears in Spring Catalyst's range of services: speaker training alongside team workshops, AI coaching alongside event planning. A new tool can enter an organization through procurement. Learning to use it together takes more than a receipt.
The agency that speaks several languages
In April 2025, Zaborowska gave Bhava's approach a useful description: the “polyglot agency.” She traced the term to a conversation with John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. The languages in question were professional ones: brand strategy, PR, content, research, analyst relations, investor communications, sales enablement and more.
The point was coordination. An investor presentation, a social post and a journalist's briefing may concern the same company while asking different things of the reader. Zaborowska argued for teams that understand how those disciplines fit together and can adapt the work to each medium. She connected the approach to Bhava's integrated model going back to its founding.
Her position on generative AI followed the same logic. Use it selectively to develop ideas, refine work and improve efficiency, while keeping human judgment involved where accuracy, originality and strategy depend on it. The agency's versatility would have to include deciding when a new capability actually served the assignment. More ways to make something also mean more occasions to choose.
Permission to learn, responsibility to judge
On The Brave Technologist in October 2025, Zaborowska discussed a practical obstacle to AI adoption: managers may tell busy employees to use new tools without giving them enough training. Some people experiment eagerly. Others hesitate. Her response was to encourage teams to share useful techniques and prompts, so that one person's discovery could become everybody's resource.
She also insisted that the person delivering the work remains responsible for its quality. A machine-generated answer does not relieve its sender of the obligation to assess it. She urged fact-checking and review by people who know the subject. This is the demanding part of her enthusiasm: the tools can accelerate production while leaving the hard questions on the human desk.
In January 2026, speaking with Nicole McMackin on Elevate Your Career, Zaborowska connected her outlook to her parents, who had come from Poland seeking opportunity for their child. She described herself as first-generation American and recalled the abundance mindset they taught her. Helping someone was worth doing before knowing whether it would produce a financial return.
That belief gives the referral-driven agency, the collaborative exercises and the training business a common thread. Each begins with somebody else's capacity to do something. Her personal interests supply a less solemn footnote. On her about.me page, Zaborowska calls herself a motorcycle fanatic and an aspiring equestrian, and declares a belief that a little sparkle can improve almost anything. The founder who kept her principles on the wall has room for embellishment. She simply seems to prefer choosing the foundation first.