hr-technology
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Ana Perez Makes the Complicated Business of Benefits Feel Human
PlanSource's chief marketing officer has spent her career translating dense systems into clear choices. Her method joins revenue discipline to a warmer idea: technology earns attention only when people can trust what it helps them do.
Jennifer Lorenzo Makes the Back Office Worth Looking At
After years of marketing payroll, people operations and professional employer services, Jennifer Lorenzo has learned the quiet craft of making complex work feel clear - across brands, borders and buying committees.
Josh McCullough Learned Marketing from the Revenue Side of the Table
After two decades spanning sales, HR technology, collaboration software, and AI contracts, Greenshades' CMO has a plain conviction: marketing works when it shares a scoreboard with revenue.
Adam Christensen Has Spent 25 Years Making Technology Sound Human
Before BambooHR made him its first chief marketing officer, Christensen learned the trade in PR, helped tell PayPal's independence story, and spent years arguing that trust belongs on the same dashboard as growth.
Samir Gulati Has Spent Three Decades Making Enterprise Software Make Sense
From electronic commerce at GE to AI-assisted hiring at Hirevue, Gulati’s career follows one durable idea: complicated technology earns attention only when its value becomes plain.
Kate Freer Made a Career Out of Marketing the Work Nobody Sees
Before employee relations became boardroom language, Kate Freer learned how to sell another invisible system: the machinery behind how companies pay. Now she is turning workplace casework into a category leaders can see, measure and discuss.
Carl Madaffari Learned the Database, Then Learned to Tell Its Story
After two decades inside Epsilon's data machinery, Carl Madaffari took a breath, changed lanes, and found a second act translating complex products into plain business value.
Mike Vannoy Has Spent 30 Years Turning HR Complexity Into a Growth Story
Before HR became a cloud platform and marketing became an AI workflow, Mike Vannoy was already learning how work gets measured, sold and explained. His career is a case study in staying with one stubborn business problem long enough to watch the tools change completely.
Allie Collins Is Making the Performance Review Face Real Life
After more than 15 years marketing SaaS, Betterworks CMO Allie Collins has arrived at a deceptively human thesis: work improves when managers get better signals, employees get timely conversations, and everyone stops pretending an annual form can remember the year for them.
Daniel Yanisse Put Trust Behind an API. Then the Hard Part Began.
A slow background check gave a young robotics engineer an elegant startup idea. Twelve years later, Daniel Yanisse is still working through the gloriously untidy question hidden inside it: how should software decide whom to trust?
Athena Karp Put a Conscience in the Hiring Machine
A bathroom line on Wall Street exposed a workforce imbalance. Eleven years later, the company she built from that observation joined Workday - and her argument for explainable AI moved into the center of enterprise software.
Chris Fudge Is Betting the Workplace on One Small Signal: I Saw What You Did
After three decades crossing marketing, sales, service and coaching, the Achievers CMO has arrived at a plainspoken thesis: culture is built in the moments when useful work becomes visible.
Gary Goldstein Is Still Fixing the Paperwork Nobody Sees
The Insynctive CEO has spent decades turning forms, handoffs and disconnected systems into software. His career is a study in the unglamorous work that keeps companies moving.
Samantha Orihuela Is Building ADP's Next Growth Story Around People
After two decades moving between brand, experience, innovation and growth, Samantha Orihuela has returned to ADP with a clear brief: make a global company feel coherent, useful and human.
Alan Miegel Put Twenty Years of Pay Data Into One Focused Bet
After two decades inside compensation software, Miegel built Bettercomp around a narrow idea: give pay teams control of their data, remove the manual grind, and let customers shape what ships next.
Sam Fitzroy
Sam Fitzroy is the co-founder and CEO of Dalia, a Boston-based candidate conversion platform that re-engages job seekers who visit career sites but don't apply. A former Indeed early employee and later VP at The Muse and partnerships lead at Jobcase, he started Dalia in 2019 and raised a $5M Series A in January 2023. His pitch, delivered in interviews with a kind of exhausted evangelism, is that 75% of applicants drop off at the account-creation step, and someone should probably do something about that.
Siobhan Savage
Siobhan Savage is the CEO and co-founder of Reejig, a workforce intelligence and AI orchestration platform built to eliminate what she calls 'zero wasted potential' in the labor market. Sketched during maternity leave in 2018 and now used across 66 countries, Reejig became the first company to independently audit its talent AI for bias. Savage is a Forbes Cloud 100 Rising Star and a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and previously spent almost two decades running workforce strategy on billion-dollar infrastructure programs including Sydney Metro, Melbourne Metro, and Roy Hill.
Alexei Dunaway
Alexei Dunaway is the founder and CEO of Pinnacle, a New York and Palo Alto based startup building Pascal, an AI performance and career coach that lives inside Slack, Teams, and Zoom. A Stanford GSB graduate and Fulbright Scholar, he spent five years building an entrepreneur accelerator in Kenya before running an executive coaching practice for venture-backed founders. He now wants to give every worker the kind of coaching that used to be reserved for the C-suite. Pinnacle raised a $2.5M seed round in March 2025 led by eLab Ventures.
Peter McKee
Peter McKee is the co-founder and CEO of Aeqium, a San Francisco compensation-management platform that pulls HR and finance teams out of spreadsheet chaos and into a controlled, data-driven system for planning salaries, bonuses, equity, and benefits. An MIT-trained engineer who led self-driving rider experience at Uber and was an early backend engineering manager at Braze, McKee also served as a US Army officer running battalion combat-engineer operations in Afghanistan. He started Aeqium in late 2020 to make pay fairer, faster, and less of a fire drill.
Jim McCoy
Jim McCoy is the CEO of Atlas HXM, the company that pioneered the direct Employer of Record model for hiring across 160-plus countries. He took the top job in December 2023 after 14 years at ManpowerGroup, where he scaled the world's largest recruitment process outsourcing business into 56 countries and managed a quarter-million placements a year. He builds for scale while obsessing over the local user experience, borrows ideas from B2C playbooks for a B2B world, and frames the work as democratizing access to economic opportunity.
Matt Levin
Matt Levin is the CEO of Modern Health, a leading global workplace mental health platform. A serial CEO with two decades of leadership across HR technology, health care, and benefits, Levin has helmed Benefitfocus (sold to Voya Financial), People 2.0 (a 50-country HR platform), and held C-suite roles at ADP and Aon. He was part of the core team that engineered the landmark $4.9 billion Aon-Hewitt merger and was recognized as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2013. A Chicago-based operator and longtime lecturer at both Northwestern and the University of Chicago, he now leads Modern Health's mission to bring proactive, globally equitable mental health care to the world's workforce.
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.
Joshua Barrow
Joshua Barrow is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Skillcentrix, the only consultancy 100% focused on Workday customers' entire talent lifecycle. With a Harvard CS background and 25+ years building and selling tech companies - from Breakaway Solutions' 1999 IPO to selling Third Sky to VMware in 2014 - he now sits at the intersection of HR strategy and enterprise software, helping healthcare organizations make skills data safety-critical rather than just strategic.
Michael Yan
Michael Yan is the co-founder and CEO of Simplify (YC W21), a San Francisco-based AI-powered job search platform that has helped over 1 million job seekers apply to roughly 100 million job openings. A Morgantown, West Virginia native, Yan dropped out of Stanford to build Simplify after recognizing that students everywhere were lost in the job application chaos. He previously engineered AI/ML systems at Meta, conducted research at MIT CSAIL, and interned at Harvard Medical School. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2023 (Consumer Technology), Yan has built a 181,000+ follower audience on LinkedIn by sharing brutally practical job search advice - including the URL hack that landed him offers at Meta and Microsoft. Simplify has raised $4.35M from Craft Ventures, Y Combinator, and Soma Capital.