BetterUp is a San Francisco-founded human transformation company that pairs certified human coaches, behavioral science, and AI to deliver personalized professional and leadership development at enterprise scale. It coaches employees at hundreds of companies and government agencies, blending one-on-one coaching, assessments, and data-driven insights, and has increasingly moved toward AI-powered coaching that runs around the clock.
Alexi Robichaux is the CEO and Co-Founder of BetterUp, the human transformation platform he started in 2013 after a soul-searching walk along the Camino de Santiago. He built BetterUp from a two-person idea into a $5 billion company with 2,800 employees and over $628 million in total funding, pioneering digital professional coaching for enterprises including Google, Salesforce, and NASA. A former product executive at VMware who once struggled with imposter syndrome and public speaking anxiety, Robichaux turned his personal journey with coaching into a mission to make elite professional development accessible to everyone.
Modern Health is a global mental wellness platform built for employers. It blends self-guided digital tools, behavioral health coaching, licensed therapy, and crisis support into one app, with care delivered in 50+ languages across more than 200 countries.
Heather Conklin is CEO of Torch, a San Francisco-based digital coaching platform that pairs leaders with expert coaches to drive measurable behavior change at scale. A Salesforce veteran who spent nine years there - culminating as SVP & GM of Trailhead - she joined Torch as COO in 2022 before being elevated to CEO in August 2024. Her philosophy blends behavioral science, data-driven measurement, and the radical idea that vulnerability is a leadership strength, not a weakness.
TaskHuman is a Palo Alto-based digital coaching platform that connects employees to a global network of 1,000+ live, vetted specialists across 1,000+ topics - from leadership and sales to yoga, financial wellness and sleep. Founded in 2017 by Ravi Swaminathan and Daniel Mazzella, the company sells primarily to enterprises that want to give every worker (not just executives) a personal coach on demand.
TeachMe.To is a marketplace for booking in-person private lessons - golf, tennis, pickleball, music, yoga, and more - that matches beginners with vetted local coaches and handles scheduling, payments, and reviews in one place.
Katie Kirsch is an Ecosystem Growth Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she builds the connective tissue of one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture firms - designing programs, products, and spaces that bring together the most ambitious founders, operators, and technologists. A 4x startup founder, ex-IDEO product leader, Stanford engineering graduate, and Harvard Business School MBA, she made Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2024 for consumer tech. Before joining a16z, she founded the mentorship platform Twenty and the coaching startup lume, taught entrepreneurship at Stanford's d.school and Harvard's Graduate School of Education, and volunteered in Uganda and India working on women's health and education. She launched the inaugural a16z Growth Engineer Fellowship in 2025, selecting 65 fellows from thousands of global applicants.
Jon Plax is a Vice President of Software Engineering (Customer Centric Engineering) at Salesforce, where he has spent the bulk of a 23+ year career building and leading globally distributed engineering teams. Known internally as a technically deep yet empathy-driven leader, he has tackled some of Salesforce's most complex scaling challenges - JVM tuning, database bottlenecks, and multi-continent team coordination. He spent five years in Salesforce's Dublin office, briefly detoured to Bumble, then returned to Salesforce. A photography hobbyist with a consistent 'spaceman1066' handle across the internet, he is married to Talia Bailey Plax, a product marketing leader at Atlassian.
Chris Do is a Vietnamese-American designer, Emmy-winning creative director, and founder of The Futur - an educational platform on a mission to teach 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love. He fled Vietnam as a toddler on April 30, 1975, built Blind into a $7M+ annual motion design studio serving Nike, Xbox, and Sony, then pivoted at 42 to education - amassing 2.7 million YouTube subscribers, 500K community members across 190 countries, and a $5,000/hour consulting rate. His philosophy: hard truths, gently told.
Arman Assadi is a serial entrepreneur, AI founder, and copywriter who left Google in 2014 with a one-way ticket to Cuba and never looked back. He co-created the EVO Planner (the most-funded planner in crowdfunding history), built 13 different seven-figure product launches for clients like Neil Patel and Jeff Walker, and now leads Steno.ai — an AI digital twins platform backed by Tony Robbins that lets experts scale their voice and personality across web, mobile, and SDK. He co-hosts the Alfalfa Podcast and has spent a decade on a mission to democratize wisdom.
Corey Wilks, Psy.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist turned executive coach, speaker, and creator based in Austin, TX. After 15 years in clinical psychology, he left the field following a near-death experience during the pandemic and being fired from a remote therapy position, pivoting to help founders and creators remove the psychological bottlenecks costing them business growth. He runs Creator Alchemy - a newsletter, podcast, and community - and is known for his Four Horsemen of Fear framework. His coaching clients include VC-backed founders, CEOs, and bootstrapped entrepreneurs across AI, tech, CPG, and media.
Ken Norton is a veteran Silicon Valley product leader turned executive coach. After co-founding Grand Central Communications (acquired by Google as Google Voice), spending 14 years at Google and GV shaping products used by over three billion people, he pivoted to running Bring the Donuts - a coaching practice for CPOs, VPs of Product, and Founder/CEOs. His 2005 essay 'How to Hire a Product Manager' is still considered the canonical PM career bible two decades on.
Teresa Torres is the founder of Product Talk and the author of 'Continuous Discovery Habits' (2021), the definitive book on modern product discovery. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who transitioned from front-end engineering to product management to coaching, she pioneered the Opportunity Solution Tree framework and has trained more than 18,000 product professionals through Product Talk Academy. She coaches product teams at companies like Spotify, Tesco, CarMax, and Snagajob, and is widely recognized as one of the most influential people in global product management.
John Cutler is a product thinker, writer, and systems overthinker best known for The Beautiful Mess newsletter (59,000+ subscribers) and the viral concept of the 'feature factory.' A college dropout turned touring musician turned video game creator turned product executive, he has written nearly 1,000 pieces on the messy intersection of product, people, and organizational design. He co-authored Amplitude's North Star Playbook, spent years as a product evangelist coaching teams worldwide, and is now Head of Product at Dotwork — a platform for building product operating systems.
Matt Ragland is a creator-economy builder, founder of HeyCreator, and host of The HeyCreator Show podcast. He went from camp counselor to ConvertKit employee #5, to full-time creator, building a 100,000+ audience across YouTube, newsletters, and social media. Through HeyCreator and Good People Digital, he helps creators turn their expertise into sustainable businesses via courses, communities, and newsletters. Known for radical transparency, outdoor adventures, and a systems-first approach to creative work.
Kent Beck is the creator of Extreme Programming (XP) and a pioneer of Test-Driven Development, pair programming, and the Agile Manifesto. A programmer with 52+ years of experience, he co-created JUnit with Erich Gamma, co-invented CRC cards and design patterns in software with Ward Cunningham, and spent seven years coaching at Facebook. Today he runs the 'Software Design: Tidy First?' Substack newsletter (123,500+ subscribers in 195 countries), hosts the Still Burning podcast, and explores augmented human-AI coding. In April 2026 he publicly announced a Parkinson's disease diagnosis, continuing his mission to help technologists feel safe in the world.
Paweł Huryn is a Warsaw-based product management expert, creator of The Product Compass - a Substack newsletter with 133,000+ subscribers ranked #1 in product management worldwide by Favikon. A former software developer turned CPO turned full-time educator, he brings 15+ years of hands-on product experience to weekly deep-dives on AI product management, strategy, and discovery. His philosophy: build it first, test it, then teach it.
Tara McMullin is a writer, podcaster, and business philosopher who helps small business owners build sustainable, humane companies. Formerly known as Tara Gentile, she spent a decade building a formidable reputation before reclaiming her own name in 2018. She is the founder of What Works, a digital platform and podcast downloaded over 2 million times, co-founder of YellowHouse.Media, and author of books including 'What Works' (Wiley). Drawing on feminist theory, critical sociology, and media studies, she challenges conventional business wisdom with intellectual rigor and a sharp editorial voice.
Shreyas Doshi is one of Silicon Valley's most respected product management voices - a former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo who now runs High Leverage Labs, advising founders and executives while teaching 4,000+ senior product people through his courses and content. Known for frameworks like LNO prioritization and Radical Delegation, he has built a 400,000+ follower audience with candid, no-nonsense writing on product strategy, leadership, and career growth.
Irina Stanescu is an engineering leadership coach, content creator, and former Tech Lead Manager at Google and Uber who turned a severe burnout episode into a mission. She founded The Caring Techie newsletter, now with 61,000+ subscribers, which challenges the tech industry's overwork culture and champions empathy, wellbeing, and influence as learnable leadership skills. Originally from Bucharest, Romania and based in San Francisco, she coaches engineers at companies like Anthropic, Google, and Meta, runs the highly-rated 'Impact through Influence' course on Maven, and speaks at major conferences including Craft Conference and LeadDev Berlin.
Janet Czifrus (born Zsanett Czifrus) is a Hungarian-born transformative coach, TEDx speaker, yoga and meditation teacher, mindful eating coach, and certified doula with over 14 years of management consulting experience across top-tier firms and multinationals. She bridges rigorous business strategy with holistic personal development, focusing on daring women, female founders, and global citizens navigating reinvention. Operating under her coaching brand Zsanett Czifrus Coaching, she runs the newsletter and podcast 'Less Traveled' and the 'Mindful Entrepreneur' community for female founders building service-based businesses.