leadership-development
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Jahn Surette and the Virtue of Knowing More Than One Playbook
She built a career by moving sideways as often as upward, learning call centers, procurement, transformation and global operations. Now the founder of JM Surette Advisors argues that breadth is not a lack of specialty - it is a specialty of its own.
Julie Kantor and the Invisible Glue Holding Work Together
The New York business psychologist has spent more than two decades studying what makes people work well together. Her answer is less about office attendance than the human connections leaders can no longer leave to chance.
Kevin Rockmael Has Spent a Career Marketing the Thing Education Cannot Buy: Trust
Across Kaplan, Guild, Sounding Board and now Proctorio, the fractional CMO has kept returning to one difficult brief: make institutions more useful, more credible and more open to the people they routinely overlook.
Dillon Nugent’s Long Bet on Human Connection
After a career spanning advertising, SaaS mergers and three CMO seats, Dillon Nugent has arrived at Billtrust with a stubbornly simple thesis: growth works better when the numbers still sound human.
Amy Buechler Built a School for the Part of Startups Nobody Puts on the Pitch Deck
After nearly five years inside Y Combinator, Amy Buechler turned a thousand founder conversations into a practical curriculum for leading when the map runs out.
Alison Moore Built Her Career on the Next Screen. Now She’s Betting on the Room.
After helping television, publishing, music, and philanthropy find their next audience, Alison Moore is taking on a more intimate design problem: how senior women build power together when the old career ladder no longer fits.
Tracy Saunders Knows the Job Market’s Unwritten Rules. Now She Teaches Women to Rewrite Them
After two decades recruiting leaders for Google, Amazon, Cisco, and fast-growing technology companies, Tracy Saunders changed sides of the hiring table. BossmakeHer is her answer to a quiet career problem: accomplished women making consequential moves without the inside information employers already possess.
Ian Gover Built Three HR-Tech Companies. His Latest Bet Is an AI Coach That Shows Up Before the Awkward Meeting
After 25 years in workplace technology, Gover stopped asking whether AI could replace a human coach. He asked what it could do for the millions of managers who never had one.
Rajkumari Neogy Is Teaching Leaders to Read the Room Beneath the Room
The CEO of ibelong has spent three decades following a stubborn question through Silicon Valley: what changes when leaders treat connection as part of the operating system?
Sarah Kissko Hersh
Sarah Kissko Hersh is a public relations and communications leader with more than 25 years of agency and brand experience, and the founder of Type A Consultancy, a communications and leadership practice based just outside New York City. A Top 2% LinkedIn creator with a following in the tens of thousands, she works as a PR coach, trainer, and fractional communications advisor, helping executives and teams get unstuck, tell simpler stories, and communicate with clarity and kindness.
Jamie Bryan
Jamie Bryan is the co-founder and CEO of Sayge, a New York-based platform that democratizes 1:1 professional coaching, taking a perk once reserved for executives and making it available to employees at every level. After 13 years running relationships for global brands at agencies like Ogilvy and Digitas, a single life-changing coaching experience in 2016 sent him in a new direction. He launched Sayge in 2017 under the banner 'Coaching For The Rest Of Us,' and has since built it into a company that has delivered tens of thousands of coaching sessions across dozens of organizations, raising $1.7M in seed funding in 2021.
Lauren Dwyer
Lauren Dwyer is Vice President of Executive Education & CEO Programs at the American Bankers Association in Washington, D.C., where she designs and runs the conferences, schools and leadership programs that shape how bank CEOs and senior executives learn their craft. A Penn State graduate with an MBA, the CAE and AMA-CPM credentials, she has spent two decades inside trade associations - building rooms where industry leaders sharpen each other.
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.
Parker Mitchell
Parker Mitchell is the co-founder and CEO of Valence, the New York company behind Nadia, billed as the world's first enterprise AI coach. He spent two decades before that building Engineers Without Borders Canada, the charity he co-founded out of the University of Waterloo in 2000, and advising Fortune 500 leaders at McKinsey. In 2025 Valence raised a $50M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Nadia deployed across companies like Delta, Experian, Kraft Heinz and General Mills, having logged more than a million coaching conversations.
Tom Griffiths
Tom Griffiths is the CEO and co-founder of Hone, a live, cohort-based talent development platform that trains managers at companies like Indeed, ConocoPhillips, and Aramark. Before Hone, he co-founded daily fantasy sports company FanDuel and ran product for a decade as Chief Product Officer, helping pioneer a new category and grow it into a billion-dollar business with millions of users. A Cambridge computer scientist who left a machine learning PhD in Edinburgh to chase a startup, he now builds technology that teaches human skills.
Will Foussier
Will Guillaume Foussier is the co-founder and CEO of AceUp, a Boston-based AI-powered team-transformation and leadership-coaching platform he launched out of the Harvard Innovation Labs. A former financial analyst who credits an executive coach with rerouting his own career, he set out to democratize coaching - turning a once-exclusive C-suite perk into a data-driven service deployed across more than 100 enterprises including LVMH, L'Oreal, IBM, BNP Paribas and John Deere. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and EHL, Harvard and Techstars alumnus, he raised a $22.5M Series A in 2024 and runs the company on the conviction that everybody deserves a coach.
Heather Conklin
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.
Nellie Wartoft
Nellie Wartoft is a Swedish technology entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Tigerhall, a Change Activation Platform that helps Fortune 500 companies drive organizational transformation at scale using AI and social learning. She moved from a small Swedish village to Singapore at 18 with a one-way ticket, spent 4.5 years as a top billing recruiter at Michael Page, then built Tigerhall from scratch into a platform operating across 32 countries, backed by Sequoia Capital and Monk's Hill Ventures with over $10 million in venture capital. Before her tech career she was a Swedish national champion in skeet shooting and air rifle.
Mark Atkinson
Mark Atkinson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mursion, an AI-powered immersive learning platform that blends live human performers with artificial intelligence to create realistic practice simulations for professional development. An Emmy Award-winning television producer turned serial edtech entrepreneur, Atkinson has spent over two decades building technology ventures at the intersection of human capital development and innovation. Before Mursion, he co-founded Teachscape, a pioneering video-based teacher observation platform that became central to the Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching project. Under his leadership, Mursion has grown to serve more than a third of Fortune 100 companies, delivering 18 million-plus minutes of simulation-based training across healthcare, education, corporate, and hospitality sectors.
Katie Kirsch
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.