Jacquelyn Kung and the Value of Being Heard

In 2010, Jacquelyn Kung wrote to the City of San Francisco about a sandwich shop. Ike’s Place had become a point of contention in the neighborhood, and she wanted the planners to understand what they might lose. She described cheerful staff, friendly customers and a corner where neighbors could meet. Friends, she explained, would happily organize a whole day around going there. A sandwich was apparently capable of a fairly ambitious social calendar.

Her argument concerned something a balance sheet would struggle to name: the way a business makes people feel toward one another. Years later, Kung would build a company around asking people about their experience at work. But here was an earlier version of that attention, preserved in the wonderfully unglamorous setting of a planning document. She noticed a business because it made a neighborhood less anonymous.

Rice fields, Norway and an acceptance letter

Kung’s parents had been rice farmers. Her father went on to earn a doctorate in computer science in Norway, beginning in a language he did not speak. Her mother earned a master’s degree in economics. In Kung’s account of her path to Harvard Business School, their example established a demanding household standard. Obstacles were familiar family territory. An impressive excuse was still an excuse.

The business school acceptance letter produced a different response. She remembered seeing her parents cry, something she had never witnessed before. Her own conclusion was spare: ‘You simply try.’ It is a useful detail because the family story includes both achievement and uncertainty. Applying was an action she could take before anyone could promise the result.

She earned her undergraduate degree in economics at Harvard, an MBA at Harvard Business School and a doctorate at Johns Hopkins. She also started her first business while still in high school. The sequence gives her a substantial collection of qualifications, although her later writing is refreshingly willing to puncture the idea that qualifications spare a founder the ordinary embarrassment of learning.

“You simply try.”

Jacquelyn Kung, reflecting on her path to business school

A thousand colleagues before the software

Before Activated Insights, Kung’s work included Goldman Sachs International, McKinsey and Erickson. At Erickson, she managed a retirement community with 2,100 residents and approximately $70 million in annual revenue. Her own professional biography describes a staff of 1,000. Those numbers put an unusually concrete organization behind the word ‘operator.’ An employee survey would eventually become her product; a large workforce had already been her responsibility.

There is a practical distinction between describing an organization and having to run one. With a thousand employees, the person at the top cannot rely on personal acquaintance to understand every working day. Reports travel upward through layers. The view gets tidier with each floor. Asking people directly offers another route to information, including information that may be distinctly inconvenient for the person asking.

Kung cofounded ClearCare and served as its chief operating officer. The software business later became part of WellSky. Her career had moved across finance, consulting, large organizations and enterprise technology. The combination would matter when she returned to a deceptively ordinary problem: how to make the experience of people inside an organization visible to the people making decisions about it.

The conversation that became a list

In late 2017, a conversation with a friend connected Kung with Great Place to Work. By September 2018, Activated Insights and Fortune had published their first Best Workplaces in Aging Services list. The new category placed senior living employers within a familiar national conversation about where people wanted to work. An industry-specific list could give applicants another way to recognize an employer worth considering.

The underlying process asked employees to describe their workplaces through Great Place to Work’s Trust Index. Its 60 questions made a fairly important change to the usual company introduction: management would not be supplying all the answers. Employees’ accounts of trust, fairness and their experience on the job would help determine whether an organization qualified for recognition.

Recognition supplied a reason to participate. Feedback supplied something to work on afterward. It was a business model with a productive tension inside it: companies wanted the badge, while the answers might reveal why they had not earned it. The interesting work lay between those two moments. A certificate could hang on a wall; a manager still had to decide what to do on Monday.

At the Senior Living Innovation Forum in 2018, Kung made the case for acting on employee feedback. The temptation to confuse an appealing workplace with a lavish collection of perks was an easy target. She directed attention toward what leaders did with the information they gathered. Free things were less useful as an explanation than the daily experience of being taken seriously.

Her 2022 conference advice was similarly specific. She urged leaders to develop a pipeline by promoting internally, suggesting a goal of filling 40 percent of promotions from within. She also challenged the habit of letting troubled properties consume nearly all an executive’s attention. That advice has the texture of operating experience: the urgent building is very good at getting another meeting.

The expensive education after the MBA

Kung’s public advice to founders has room for mistakes, including her own. In a 2023 essay, she described following investor suggestions in her first startup despite doubts about whether the suggested marketing fit its customers. The company spent heavily on advertising that produced few useful leads and on a retained recruiter who made no hires. More fundraising followed, with more dilution.

She did not present the episode as proof that sophisticated investors were always wrong. Her account was about accepting directions she already suspected would fail. Financial credentials had not supplied the confidence to challenge them. It is a less polished founder anecdote than the triumphant fundraising announcement, and considerably more helpful to someone about to sign a large monthly commitment.

By August 2023, her writing about venture capital asked entrepreneurs to consider capital requirements, ownership and control before chasing a round. Her first company had used venture funding; she subsequently favored other ways to finance growth. The questions were personal as well as financial. What would the founder have to give up, and would that bargain still suit the life they wanted?

Her bookkeeping essays brought the same willingness to discuss the supposedly dull parts. She acknowledged having struggled with finances in her first startup and learning through later attempts. She wrote about separating revenue, delivery costs, sales, development and administration so a founder could see what was happening. The glamorous business of entrepreneurship, in this telling, has a surprisingly large accounts folder.

Even her article on setting up finance processes started with ordinary infrastructure: choose a system and consider outsourced bookkeeping. Those are small decisions beside a product launch, yet they determine whether anyone can explain the company’s numbers. Kung’s writing gives them the attention founders often reserve for more photogenic achievements. A clean set of books rarely asks for a spotlight.

Knowing how to sell is different from selling your own

Home Care Pulse announced its acquisition of Activated Insights in January 2023, alongside the acquisition of Pinnacle Quality Insight. Kung’s original company would become part of a larger group. In October 2024, the combined businesses adopted the Activated Insights name. That chronology matters: the founder of the original survey company and the leadership of the expanded platform belong to different chapters.

When Kung discussed the sale afterward, she explained why she had hired Software Equity Group as an adviser. She had considered handling it herself. Her investment banking background and consulting experience seemed relevant enough. Yet being the founder negotiating with prospective buyers meant running the company while also managing a sale in which every difficult conversation was personally hers.

An adviser offered distance as well as expertise. Kung described preparation for buyers’ questions and help navigating a transaction that nearly failed to close. Her account supplies a useful counterweight to the family instruction to keep trying: effort can include bringing in someone else. An accomplished founder can understand a process and still benefit from having another person manage it.

A whiteboard with room for a life

In another 2023 essay, Kung described helping an entrepreneur she called Dan work backward from the life he wanted. Their conversation began with time for family, the ability to help people close to him, a home and travel. They used a whiteboard to connect those wishes to business goals. The exercise started with the person who would eventually have to live with the plan.

It is an instructive choice of opening question. A company can grow while its owner’s reasons for building it become harder to remember. Kung’s exercise gave those reasons space before the calculations took over. The numbers were there to make an ambition concrete. For once, a whiteboard had been recruited to reduce the size of a problem rather than manufacture another strategy diagram.

Her work since the sale includes an independent board appointment at Discovery Senior Living, announced in May 2023. The Smithsonian also lists her on its SITES and Affiliations board. In June 2026, she joined the seed round for Vali alongside Bonfire Ventures, Supernode and Comma Capital. Bonfire identified her as both an investor and an adviser to the software startup.

These roles place her experience beside other people’s decisions. The recurring concern is still practical: how organizations operate, how workers experience them and how leaders learn enough to make useful changes. Her career offers plenty of large numbers. The detail that lingers is smaller: a neighbor taking the trouble to explain why a local shop mattered. Someone had made people feel welcome, and Kung thought the decision-makers ought to hear about it.