The first draft of Awardco was a person with a browser. An employee chose a reward. The order reached Steve Sonnenberg’s fledgling company. Then his wife opened Amazon and bought the item. Somewhere between recognition and delivery sat a family doing the work an API would someday do in milliseconds.
It was inelegant, slow and useful. In startup folklore, founders are supposed to find scale. Sonnenberg first found proof. The manual orders showed that companies wanted to let employees choose rewards from the place where millions of people already shopped. The awkward machinery behind the curtain mattered less than the feeling in front of it: somebody had noticed good work, and the recipient could choose something personally worthwhile.
This was not Sonnenberg’s first company, nor even Awardco’s first form. Before software, there had been embroidery: hats, polos and custom golf bags. Then came plaques and trophies. Then a Costco-like membership that offered symbolic awards at wholesale prices. The final idea emerged through these costume changes. The object was never sacred. Choice was.
Learning the family trade, then arguing with it
Sonnenberg grew up in the Chicago area watching his father work in employee recognition. The elder Sonnenberg sold programs involving rings, lapel pins and acrylic awards, serving customers that included McDonald’s, John Deere and the Chicago Bulls. His son learned two lessons at once: appreciation matters, and the traditional catalog had begun to feel like a museum gift shop.
At Utah Valley University, Sonnenberg played a season of basketball, studied computer science and started WholesaleMatch while still a junior. The e-commerce company connected wholesalers and dropshippers. It grew to more than 200 employees and reached a multimillion-dollar valuation. In 2011, civil litigation involving a client engulfed the business. Sonnenberg walked away from what he had built and filed for bankruptcy. He was 30, married, and raising four young children.
The student business had already taught him to submit unfinished ambition to outside judgment. Mentors in UVU’s entrepreneurship program encouraged him to enter Loyola Marymount University’s student entrepreneur contest. He represented UVU and placed second in the western regional competition. It was an early pairing of code and persuasion, the two abilities his later company would demand in equal measure. A platform can be engineered in private. An enterprise customer still has to believe the pitch.
The collapse supplied no cinematic revelation, only a practical question. His father’s industry was familiar. Its limitations were familiar too. Sonnenberg believed a younger workforce would want rewards with variety, transparent value and no ornamental obligation. He borrowed $5,000, bought Awardco.com and gave a large idea a suitably large address.
A sensible way to take an unreasonable chance
Sonnenberg did not immediately leap. For four years he sold Awardco early in the morning and late at night while keeping other employment. One chapter was a roughly 14-month job at Qualtrics. He needed dependable income, but the choice was also curriculum: Qualtrics knew how to sell to enterprise organizations, precisely the skill his own venture would require. He has a phrase for this style of risk, “quality chances.” Optimism, in his telling, is not a blindfold. It is what remains after the obvious risks have been patiently reduced.
His cousin Mike, a back-end developer, joined as co-founder. Together they set about placing Amazon’s vast catalog inside Awardco and translating dollars into points. Amazon initially rejected the plan. The cousins proceeded anyway, carefully enough to prove demand without pretending the process was finished. When orders arrived, Steve’s wife handled fulfillment. The arrangement could not scale, which was fine until it needed to.
Amazon Business launched in 2015. By then, Sonnenberg had relationships inside the company and several years of evidence. At the end of 2016, he presented Awardco at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. This time, the proposal met an organization prepared for it. New integrations automated ordering, and the companies extended the system through Amazon warehouses in markets including India, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates and Brazil.
What looks inevitable after the partnership was peculiar before it. Awardco had behaved as though the necessary infrastructure existed until the infrastructure arrived. There is comedy in the idea of a future global platform being held together by one family’s Amazon checkout routine. There is also discipline. The company did not automate a theory. It automated a habit customers were already paying for.
Making gratitude survive the calendar
Awardco grew during a period when work became less attached to one place. The platform spread recognition through tools employees already used, including Slack, Teams and Outlook, while giving employers a marketplace of products, gift cards, experiences and charitable options. Sonnenberg calls recognition “a universal love language.” The phrase is earnest. His operating method is more concrete.
Inside Awardco, meetings with more than ten people begin with a recognition. Company screens display the recognition feed. Executive meetings use the same ritual. In weekly all-hands sessions, Sonnenberg highlights examples from the previous week. Repetition is the point. A value framed on a wall can be admired and ignored; a value placed at the opening of a crowded meeting has interrupted the schedule and therefore become real.
When more than ten people gather, begin by naming something that went well.
That practice reveals Sonnenberg’s talent for converting sentiment into a system. He speaks in the bright language of curiosity, optimism and recognizing the good, but he is a computer-science graduate and a product operator. Beneath the warmth lies a series of mechanisms: points, nominations, reminders, integrations, budgets, catalogs and data. The thank-you remains personal; the infrastructure ensures it is not forgotten.
The listening has machinery too. Awardco formed a customer advisory board where representatives from large organizations bring the company their workplace problems. Sonnenberg describes the posture as customer obsession rather than competitor obsession, borrowing another cue from Amazon. The phrase is fashionable; the arrangement gives it teeth. Customers are not asked merely whether they like a feature. They help determine which friction deserves a feature at all.
The business milestones accumulated. Awardco ranked No. 25 on the Inc. 5000 in 2019 and No. 63 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 in 2020. In 2021, the company raised a $65 million Series A and was valued around $900 million. Sonnenberg received Utah Valley University’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 2023. The university that had taught him computer science later became an Awardco customer, using the platform to recognize its own employees.
The billion-dollar comma
In May 2025, Awardco raised $165 million in a Series B led by Sixth Street Growth and Spectrum Equity, with continuing support from General Catalyst and Ryan Smith. The valuation exceeded $1 billion. At the time, Awardco said it served more than six million users in 163 countries and offered more than 300 million reward options. Sonnenberg treated the valuation as a source of pride for employees, not a trophy to place at reception.
The financing also widened the product’s assignment. Awardco began moving beyond rewards into engagement, employee listening, performance incentives, analytics and AI-assisted action. In 2026, Sonnenberg’s public agenda included the prospect of using recognition patterns as predictive workforce data. The old lapel pin had become a data point, though ideally without losing the kindness that made it worth giving.
That direction returns to a question Sonnenberg has pressed on HR leaders: if belonging and appreciation influence whether people stay, why are those signals so rarely measured? Recognition flowing through everyday work creates a trail. Who is being seen? Who is doing the seeing? Which teams have fallen quiet? The next version of Awardco is meant to turn those patterns into prompts for action, joining the emotional vocabulary of appreciation to the colder grammar of dashboards.
There is an obvious hazard here. Measure a generous act too aggressively and it starts to resemble compliance. Automate appreciation too thoroughly and the compliment acquires the warmth of a parking receipt. Sonnenberg’s answer is to keep recognition inside ordinary human routines. Let the software carry the reminder, the budget and the fulfillment. Let a person supply the specific reason another person mattered.
That distinction also describes how he built. Sonnenberg did not protect the first model of Awardco. Embroidery could go. Plaques could go. The wholesale membership could go. Manual ordering could go. Even the original boundary around rewards could expand. He kept the problem and replaced the answers.
His favored identity is “curious explorer,” a phrase he once developed through the story of Ernest Shackleton. Yet the less romantic details explain him better: the day job, the borrowed Wi-Fi in a one-room office, the cousin writing back-end code, the spouse placing orders, the pitch that failed before the partnership succeeded. Exploration, in this case, looked remarkably like administration performed with unusual patience.
Sonnenberg advises people to reserve 30 minutes each day for curiosity. It is a modest prescription from someone whose career has been shaped by beginning before conditions looked agreeable. His particular gift may be less dramatic than disruption. He starts. He listens. He changes the route. Then he starts again, until an unscalable thank-you becomes a piece of global workplace infrastructure.