workday
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Vanessa Danziger Has Been Asking What People Would Do Since the Sixth Grade
Long before she marketed workforce technology, Danziger won a science fair by studying how children make ethical choices. The same curiosity now runs through a career built around people, data, and purpose.
Deb Wolf Knows What to Build When the Playbook Runs Out
Across 35-plus years in technology marketing, she has learned to prefer the difficult middle: the moment when a promising company needs a system, a team, and an honest answer about what comes next.
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.
Angela Stark Knows the Brand Is Only as Strong as the Work Behind It
After nearly three decades shaping enterprise technology brands, Angela Stark has arrived at a smaller, faster company with a very large question: can disciplined marketing help turn hourly jobs into good jobs? Her answer begins with clarity, connection and a willingness to do the unglamorous miles.
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.
Alex Yakubovich and the Business of Removing Friction
After two acquisitions and years inside enterprise software, the Levelpath CEO returned to the same deceptively hard problem: making necessary work feel easier to do.
Terrell Marshall
Terrell Marshall is the founder and CEO of Passage (YC S24), a San Francisco startup building an AI co-pilot for customs brokers and trade compliance teams. Before Passage, he worked on AI products used by more than a billion people at Google, including Google Photos, Google Payments, and Hotels Search, and was a software engineer at Workday. He co-founded Passage with Aditya Nadkarni, a college friend with whom he also holds a patent for an AI physical therapy platform. Passage automates the manual data entry and email correspondence that customs teams spend hours on, pulling data from commercial invoices, bills of lading, and packing lists to pre-fill entry filings and validate compliance.
Pankaj Goel
Pankaj Goel is the co-founder and CEO of Opkey, a no-code, AI-driven test automation platform used by more than 250 enterprises to keep cloud ERP systems - Oracle, Workday, SAP, Salesforce, Coupa - from breaking on every quarterly update. He founded Opkey in 2016 after spending a decade running Crestech Software Systems, and before that worked on the automation teams behind Adobe InDesign and Illustrator. In August 2024 Opkey raised a $47M Series B led by PeakSpan Capital.
Charlie Stigler
Charlie Stigler is the co-founder and CEO of Tenor, a San Francisco startup building voice-AI role-play simulations that let managers rehearse hard conversations and get instant feedback. He first made his mark at 16 by writing SelfControl, one of the earliest open-source distraction blockers for the Mac, downloaded by millions. He dropped out of Columbia to become a 2012 Thiel Fellow, founded the video-learning company Zaption (acquired by Workday in 2016), led engineering teams at Workday, and landed on Forbes' 30 Under 30 in 2016. Off the clock he is a steel sculptor with the Flaming Lotus Girls, a competitive punner, and a songwriter.
Alex Bradford
Alex Bradford is the co-founder and CEO of Rain, a Santa Monica fintech that lets hourly and frontline workers tap wages they have already earned before payday instead of turning to payday loans or overdrafts. A former McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and SAC Capital analyst with a Stanford degree and a Harvard MBA, Bradford launched Rain in 2019 after spotting that payroll and timekeeping systems had finally opened their APIs. The company plugs into employers' payroll and HCM systems (including a native Workday integration), has connected millions of workers and distributed more than $2 billion in earned wages, and has raised capital from investors including QED, Invus and Prosus. Bradford's pitch is personal: he grew up with a single mother in the 1980s and built Rain to kill predatory lending and give workers control over their own money.
Tod Sacerdoti
Tod Sacerdoti is a two-time founder and prolific seed investor. He built BrightRoll into a video ad-tech powerhouse that Yahoo bought for $640 million in 2014, then reassembled the band to start Pipedream, a developer integration platform that Workday acquired in early 2026. As a general partner at Flex Capital he has backed 400-plus companies at the seed stage, including Chime, Vercel, Replit and Mercury.
Zain Aziz
Zain Aziz is the Founder and CEO of Atom, a San Francisco-based enterprise cloud and digital transformation company. A former Marine and Harvard alumnus, he built Atom in 2020 to tackle the gap between how people live and how enterprises work - delivering cloud transformations across HR, Finance, Sales, and Supply Chain in 26 weeks or less. Atom has raised $15.8M in total funding, including a $6.8M Series A in October 2022, and serves clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies across 6 continents with ~220 employees.
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.
Adeyemi Ajao
Adeyemi 'Ade' Ajao is a Nigerian-Spanish serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist who co-founded Base10 Partners, the first Black-led VC firm to surpass $1 billion in AUM. Before building Base10, he sold Tuenti (Spain's dominant social network) to Telefónica for ~$100M and co-founded Identified, acquired by Workday. In 2023, he became the first Black investor ever named to the Forbes Midas List, and his fund's portfolio includes Nubank, Figma, Instacart, and Rappi. His contrarian bet on automating the 'Real Economy' — logistics, food, healthcare, retail — has generated over $3 billion in portfolio returns.
Carl Eschenbach
Carl Eschenbach is a technology executive and investor who scaled VMware from $30M to $7B as President and COO, led transformative growth investments at Sequoia Capital including Zoom and Snowflake, and served as CEO of Workday. A former Division I wrestler inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, he brings a competitive blue-collar work ethic to Silicon Valley's boardrooms, serving on the boards of Palo Alto Networks, Aurora, Snowflake, UiPath, and Zoom while counseling executives on his "4 C's" leadership framework.