talent-development
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Tobi Tungl Makes Marketing Earn Its Place in the Room
The CTI chief marketing officer began by pulling cable and commissioning systems. Two decades later, he is still testing every message the same way: does it work in the real world?
Anju Abel Built a Career on the Part of Staffing Spreadsheets Miss
The LanceSoft CEO arrived in New York with optimism, built her way through the machinery of contingent work, and now argues that the industry’s most useful technology is still a human connection.
Ruth Harper
Ruth Harper began by teaching people how to read maps. Now she helps a global workforce company navigate the two forces redrawing work itself: artificial intelligence and the green transition.
Naveen Rajdev
After four years at AWS, Naveen Rajdev returned to enterprise services with a wider brief: connect brand, market development and the people living with technological change.
Chris DeAppolonio
Chris DeAppolonio is the CEO of Evil Geniuses, North America's oldest esports organization. A sports-business lifer who wrote his 2008 NYU master's thesis on the coming rise of professional gaming, he spent a decade in traditional sports marketing before crossing into esports as a team president and innovation chief. He now runs EG on a data-first, 'Moneyball' philosophy, pairing proprietary analytics and AI with player development to scout undervalued talent and chase championships.
Ilana Walder-Biesanz
Ilana Walder-Biesanz is the founder and CEO of National Math Stars, a nonprofit that finds mathematically extraordinary children as early as second and third grade and gives each of them a decade of mentorship, advising, and funding worth more than $100,000. A child prodigy herself who took college courses at 13 and finished her undergraduate degree at 19, she pairs an engineer's rigor with a theater critic's flair. Before building National Math Stars she was a product manager at Yahoo, a Bain consultant, a Gates Cambridge Scholar, a Fulbright researcher of German opera staging, and a working opera critic. In December 2025, Jeff and Lauren Sanchez Bezos named her one of five recipients of a $5 million Courage & Civility Award.
Alexi Robichaux
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.
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.
Bogdan Apostol
Bogdan Apostol is the co-founder and CEO of Nestor, a San Francisco-based AI-powered people intelligence platform that helps enterprises build skills-based organizations. A Romanian-born computer scientist with a PhD in Computer Vision from Gheorghe Asachi Technical University, he founded Nestor in 2018 after being accepted into Y Combinator's S18 batch. Before writing a single line of product code, he conducted over 400 customer discovery calls. Nestor has raised $6.07M in funding, serves 10,000+ employees worldwide across F500 companies, and has earned 67 G2 badges including a perfect 10/10 for quality of support.
Iliana Montauk
Iliana Montauk is the Co-Founder and CEO of Manara, a social-impact edtech platform that connects software engineers from the Middle East and North Africa with global tech jobs at companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon. A Harvard grad and Fulbright Fellow who speaks five languages, she built Gaza's first startup accelerator before co-founding Manara with Laila Abudahi in 2020. Backed by Y Combinator, Stripe, Reid Hoffman, and Paul Graham, Manara has trained engineers who achieve 86% job placement within five months, and in 2025 inked a $3.6M AWS partnership to upskill 2,500 engineers in cloud and AI — on a mission to reach 1 million learners by 2027.