Steve Peltzman

Peltzman runs FeedbackNow, and as of September 2024 he runs it on his own terms. That month the company he had been leading inside Forrester Research separated into a standalone business, backed by a $9 million Series A from Motivate VC, Uncorrelated Ventures and AI Growth Capital Partners. The smiley buttons came along for the ride - and so did a plan to make them far smarter than a happy face.

The pitch is disarmingly simple. Surveys are slow, they arrive late, and people lie on them. A button pressed in the moment - hot, tired, mid-journey - tells you the truth while you can still do something about it. Multiply that by hundreds of sensors counting foot traffic, measuring noise, tracking occupancy, and you stop guessing how a physical space is performing and start watching it live.

That expansion is the whole game now. Healthcare is the fastest-growing slice of the business. Convenience chains use the data to correlate satisfaction with spend. Airports use it to know that the queue at Gate 14 has crossed from annoying into a problem. The new platform Peltzman launched alongside the funding ingests data from those sensors, throws AI at it, and pushes alerts and predictions instead of static reports.

What makes Peltzman an unusual person to be holding this particular clipboard is everything that came before it. He is an aeronautical engineer by training, with a BS from MIT and an MBA from Columbia. He spent seven years as a U.S. Air Force officer, developing and assessing stealth technology for the B-2 Stealth Bomber Program Office and directing the Joint Mission Planning Program Office. The through-line from a bomber designed to vanish from radar to a button designed to catch your eye is not obvious - which is exactly why it is interesting. Both are about the same thing: getting a complicated physical system to behave the way it should, and knowing instantly when it does not.

Then came the decade nobody expects on a customer-experience resume. From the early 2000s Peltzman was chief information officer of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he led the technology vision for MoMA's $858 million expansion. His guiding rule there was a kind of anti-technology technology: the systems had to disappear so the art could speak. He tucked some 75 wireless nodes into gallery ceilings so staff could log artworks as they hung them, and he was vigilant that none of it ever pulled a visitor's eye from the canvas. He also happens to be a sculptor, which makes the museum chapter feel less like a detour and more like a homecoming.

In October 2011 he joined Forrester Research as its first-ever Chief Business Technology Officer - a title coined to argue that technology teams exist to serve the business, not to admire their own stack. "Technology teams should be focused on business, not on technology for technology's sake," he said at the time. When Forrester acquired FeedbackNow, Peltzman took the helm of it, and when the moment came to set it free, he was the one who carried it out the door.

His argument for independence is less about valuation than about clocks. Inside a public company, every quarter has a deadline. Outside one, he can build on a longer horizon - chasing client value and patient, compounding growth instead of the next earnings call. For a man whose career has alternated between thirty-year defense programs, a museum built to last centuries, and the brutal short cycle of a survey response, that long view feels earned.

The future he describes is one where the dumb button gets a brain. FlexBox, the next-generation device, is built to capture not just whether you were unhappy but why - in messy, high-traffic places like airports, hospitals and venues where a single red tap used to be a dead end. Pair that with predictive service recovery and the pitch shifts from measuring experience to repairing it before the customer ever files a complaint. The grin on the button stays simple. Everything behind it is getting harder to fool.