frontline-workers
(13)
The Engineer Running Zebra's Marketing Playbook
An electrical engineer runs marketing for the company behind every barcode you have ever scanned. His pitch: stop trying to do more with less.
Vardhan Kapoor
Vardhan Kapoor is the CEO and co-founder of FirstWork (YC S24), an AI-native HR and compliance platform built for frontline and seasonal workers. Before founding FirstWork in 2024, he ran strategy and operations at Deliveroo during its hypergrowth years and served as Head of Region for APAC at Remitly, where he built a business approaching $100M in annual recurring revenue and helped take the company public on NASDAQ. FirstWork raised a $5M seed round in early 2025, led by Gradient, to cut onboarding time for high-turnover workforces by more than 75%.
Tito Goldstein
Tito Goldstein is the co-founder and co-CEO of Teambridge, an AI-native, composable workforce management platform built for hourly, shift-based, and frontline teams. A former principal product designer at Uber, he and co-founder Arjun Vora interviewed thousands of drivers and realized the self-service and agency of the Uber app was missing for the roughly 60% of the global workforce still stuck on legacy tools. After two years of near-zero revenue, they rebuilt the product as configurable building blocks, and it outsold two years of prior work in its first month. Teambridge now serves 200+ enterprise customers and over 500,000 workers, has raised $35M+ including a $28M Series B, and Goldstein was named to Forbes' Top AI Founders to Watch in 2025.
Yong Kim
Yong Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Wonolo, an on-demand staffing marketplace that connects businesses with more than one million frontline workers across the United States. Born in Seoul, he moved alone to a New Hampshire boarding school at 15, graduated as valedictorian, and went on to the University of Chicago and Harvard before a career in tech investment banking at Deutsche Bank. A stint at a Coca-Cola innovation accelerator exposed the broken state of hourly staffing and led him to launch Wonolo in 2014. The company has raised roughly $200 million, including a Sequoia-led round, and Kim has become a prominent voice for treating gig and hourly workers with dignity, flexibility, and fair pay.
Fred Goff
Fred Goff is the co-founder and CEO of Jobcase, the Cambridge-based social platform built for and around workers rather than recruiters. A first-generation college graduate from Toledo, Ohio, he ran roughly a billion dollars in emerging-markets trading on Wall Street before turning a machine-learning hedge fund team loose on the labor market in 2009. Jobcase now counts more than 130 million registered members and ranks among the largest online destinations for career services. Goff has become one of the more vocal executives arguing that the AI era should put people first, a stance that landed him on the 2026 TIME100 list.
Ricardo Flores
Ricardo Flores is the co-founder and CEO of MiChamba, a startup that turns WhatsApp into an AI-powered management platform for deskless teams in construction, logistics, hospitality, and industrial services across Latin America. A kid who worked scorching El Paso roofs before heading to Georgetown and Wall Street, he left finance and an early seat at fintech Wealth.com to build software for the blue-collar workforce he came from. Less than a year after launch, MiChamba raised a $2.25M pre-seed led by Wollef and signed names like Pemex, Hilton, and Repsol, betting that for the 3 billion people who run their work lives on WhatsApp, management should live there too.
Vivek Kumar
Vivek Kumar is the CEO and co-founder of Teamforce AI, a San Francisco software company that builds what it calls a 'system of proof' for operational risk. Instead of treating safety as a paperwork exercise, his platform surfaces the hazards and near-misses that never get reported, then verifies that fixes actually change behavior on the factory floor. A Wharton graduate, FINRA-licensed finance professional turned operator, patent holder, and angel investor, he hosts the Frontline Advantage podcast and works with manufacturers like Detroit Manufacturing Systems and BASF.
Mohit Garg
Mohit Garg is the co-founder and CEO of OLOID, a Sunnyvale-based company building passwordless authentication and identity tools for the 1.8 billion frontline and deskless workers who clock in on shared devices rather than personal laptops. A serial entrepreneur out of Silicon Valley, he earlier co-founded Mindtickle, the AI-driven sales-readiness platform that grew into a unicorn, and trained at the Stanford StartX accelerator on a computer-vision product for the enterprise. He was named to Thinkers50's Leaders50 list in 2024.
Andrew Duffy
Andrew Duffy is the co-founder and CEO of SparkPlug, a San Francisco software company that pays frontline retail and restaurant workers cash bonuses for the sales they actually drive. A behavioral-science nerd from Harvard who put in time at Bridgewater Associates and built a luxury whole-leaf tea brand before this, Duffy turned a teenage hot streak selling margaritas into a venture-backed platform that has routed millions of dollars in supplemental income to hourly employees and raised $11.5 million to keep going.
Chris Turlica
Chris Turlica is the CEO and Co-Founder of MaintainX, a San Francisco-based industrial operations platform that has raised $254M and reached a $2.5B valuation. A McGill commerce graduate who previously built and sold a consumer messaging startup, Turlica spotted a striking data point while at Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners — 80% of the global workforce is deskless, yet only 1% of enterprise software spend serves them. That insight became MaintainX, which now helps over 11,000 companies manage 11M+ assets and has transformed maintenance teams at companies including ABInBev, Duracell, Marriott, and McDonald's.
Nick Haase
Nick Haase is co-founder of MaintainX, the AI-powered CMMS and connected worker platform that reached a $2.5B valuation after its $150M Series D in July 2025. Leading go-to-market strategy, Haase has helped grow MaintainX to 11,000+ enterprise customers across manufacturing, food & beverage, and facilities — while separately angel-investing in 40+ startups including Anduril, Hadrian, and Figure. A former mobile marketing founder turned industrial software builder, he's spent years on factory floors helping maintenance teams ditch paper checklists and embrace digital workflows.
Bill Schuh
Bill Schuh is the Chief Executive Officer of Firstup, the intelligent workforce communication platform built to reach, inform, and activate every employee from deskless frontline workers to corporate HQ. A Princeton-educated SaaS veteran, Schuh has spent three decades scaling enterprise software companies through IPOs and billion-dollar revenue milestones — from Sunrun to Medallia to Anaplan — before taking the helm at Firstup in June 2025 to lead the company's next chapter of growth.
Errette Dunn
Errette Dunn is Co-Founder and CEO of Rever, a San Francisco-based frontline intelligence platform that helps global industrial companies unlock the creative potential of their deskless workers. Drawing on hands-on stints at Toyota and Airbus, he spent a decade coaching operations leaders across 17 countries before co-founding Rever in 2015. Today the company-backed by Y Combinator, Sequoia, Ulu Ventures, and Mundi Ventures-serves world-class manufacturers like Volkswagen, Grupo Bimbo, and Hyundai in more than 70 countries, giving factory floor workers an AI-powered mobile app to photograph problems, build solutions, and earn recognition in minutes.