salary-negotiation
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The Recruiter Who Went Rogue for Women in the C-Suite
Tracy Saunders spent two decades placing executives for Google, Amazon and Cisco. Then she flipped the model - and built a discreet network that gets senior women hired, paid and promoted without the noise.
Teal
Teal is a Miami-based AI-powered career platform built for job seekers rather than recruiters. Founded in 2019 by former WeWork executive David Fano, Teal bundles an AI Resume Builder, Job Tracker, job board, Chrome extension, AI Interview Coach, and offer/salary tools into one workspace that helps professionals find, apply for, and land jobs they actually want. The company has grown to roughly 4 million members, has helped facilitate hundreds of thousands of interviews, and has raised about $19 million in venture funding, capped by a $7.5M Series A in January 2025.
Jess Ramos
Jess Ramos is a data analytics educator, LinkedIn Top Voice, and founder of Big Data Energy - a media and education brand with 500,000+ followers across platforms. With an MSBA from the University of Georgia, she turned a corporate analytics career (peaking at $153K at Crunchbase) into a thriving solo business after being laid off in 2023. She runs a Substack newsletter with 45,000+ subscribers, teaches SQL to 50,000+ students via LinkedIn Learning, and has brand partnerships with IBM, AWS, Snowflake, NFL, and Claude (Anthropic). Her origin story - doubling her salary 110% in 11 months - became a viral moment that built her community of data professionals seeking real, human-centric career guidance.
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie, known online as patio11, is a writer, software entrepreneur, and strategic advisor at Stripe who spent two decades bootstrapping software companies in Japan before becoming one of the internet's most influential voices on fintech, career development, and software business strategy. He writes Bits about Money, a deep-dive newsletter on the plumbing of financial systems, hosts the Complex Systems podcast, and co-led VaccinateCA - America's shadow COVID vaccine location infrastructure that likely saved thousands of lives. With 4.7 million words published since 2006, his essays on salary negotiation, software marketing, and financial infrastructure have shaped how a generation of engineers and entrepreneurs think about building and getting paid.