workforce-development
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Patti Betts Learned to Sell the Experience Before She Sold the System
Before healthcare partnerships and enterprise software, Patti Betts spent nearly a decade selling weddings at the San Diego Zoo. The scenery changed. Her working idea did not: people commit when an ambitious system begins to feel personal.
Jacob Slayton Turns Secondhand Goods Into First Chances
The Bakersfield native went from commercial banking to the hidden logistics of Goodwill. Now he is opening stores, building steadier jobs and making a practical case for giving both people and products more time.
Bilal Hasan Is Marketing a Karachi Tech Company by Building the Room Around It
Kamsoft’s chief marketing officer has turned a broad brief into a public practice of team-building, student access and industry diplomacy. His most revealing metric is not a campaign number, but a workforce that he says grew from 23 people to more than 120 in four years.
Cassey Gibson Is Turning Sawdust Into Software
The INNERGY CMO grew up sweeping a pattern-maker's floor. Now she sells software, education and a larger idea: the trades deserve better stories about themselves.
Wendy Parrish Has Spent a Career Closing the Distance Between Learning and Work
From mechanical engineering to online college research to virtual job simulations, Wendy Parrish has followed one durable question: how do you help people see a practical next step?
Lisa Armstrong Makes Industrial Marketing Feel Human
Her career has moved through controls, filtration, smart homes and MRO supplies. The connecting thread is a practical idea: marketing earns influence when it improves the customer’s work.
Jodi McPherson Is Turning the First Rung of the Career Ladder Into Paid Work
After three decades in education technology, the Work Simplr founder is rebuilding early-career experience around a practical idea: give students real projects, pay them, and make the work count.
Mark Kasdorf Left the App Economy to Build a Heat-Pump Workforce
After bootstrapping a mobile studio to $25 million and selling it to Accenture, the serial founder chose a harder interface: houses, crews and the stubborn shortage of skilled labor.
Byron Auguste Wants Employers to Stop Hiring the Résumé
The economist behind STARs has spent a decade arguing that talent is abundant, but the signals employers trust are badly designed. His fix begins with a deceptively practical question: can this person do the work?
Norm Sowards Has Spent a Career Making Invisible Infrastructure Matter
From circuit breakers and predictive maintenance to NASCAR and the next generation of electricians, the ABB executive's work turns technical systems into stories people can use.
Samuel Bottum
Samuel Bottum built a marketing career around a practical idea: a durable brand begins with the people who know the work. At Snap-on, that has meant linking product innovation, customer insight and technical education across one unusually varied career.
Sara Leoni
Sara Leoni is the founder and CEO of Ziplines Education, a Bay Area career accelerator that partners with 30-plus universities to deliver industry-recognized certificate programs in fields like AI, project management, and digital marketing. A former Division I softball player at UNLV and ex-CEO of the $50M course-materials company Rafter, she raised a $6.4M Series A in 2023-2024 to help close the digital skills gap and has helped more than 20,000 adult learners retool their careers. She frames learning as a zipline: intimidating, exhilarating, and continuous, with a clear start and a clear landing.
Karen Lithgow
Karen Lithgow is the Chief Marketing Officer of Goodwill Industries of South Florida, the Miami-based nonprofit that employs roughly 3,600 people and reports annual revenue near $196 million. She arrived at Goodwill after a corporate and consulting career that included brand and marketing roles connected to P&G, Disney, ADT and Western Union, followed by partner-level brand strategy and interim CMO work at the consultancy Chameleon Collective. At Goodwill South Florida she oversees marketing for an unusually wide portfolio: a chain of donation centers and thrift stores, an e-commerce operation, and Blue Box Solutions, the organization's B2B manufacturing and logistics arm that produces tens of millions of dollars of military apparel each year. Her public message centers on a single idea she has stated plainly - focusing on abilities rather than disabilities.
Onney Crawley
Onney Crawley is the Chief Marketing Officer of Goodwill Industries International, where she leads brand management, creative, digital, public relations, consumer insights and corporate communications across roughly 3,300 stores and hundreds of job service centers. A University of Michigan MBA, she built a career growing billion-dollar brands at General Mills, Kellogg, Mars/Wrigley, Sears and Serta Simmons Bedding before turning her marketing firepower toward a 122-year-old mission brand and its unlikely rise as a Gen Z thrift obsession.
Gary Apito
Gary Apito is the Chief Executive Officer of Rouxbe, the online culinary school that has trained more than one million students across 180 countries. A career culinary-education operator, he spent seventeen years helping build the French Culinary Institute and International Culinary Center in New York before moving into online learning, joining Rouxbe in 2016 and rising from VP of Operations to COO to CEO. His focus is scaling professional-grade cooking instruction through high-definition video as traditional brick-and-mortar culinary schools close worldwide.
Joshua Richards
Joshua Richards is the Chief Executive Officer of Boundless Learning, a Boston-based online program management and edtech company spun out of Pearson. He rose to the top job in January 2025 after serving as the company's Chief Product and Technology Officer and helping steer its transition into a standalone business. With more than two decades in technology and education, Richards leads a company serving roughly 17,000 learners across 150+ countries and having launched more than 450 online programs, focused on driving learner success through personalization and helping universities and institutions reach new audiences.
Ariel Quinones
Ariel Quinones is the co-founder and co-CEO of Ironhack, a global tech bootcamp he launched in Madrid in 2013 with Gonzalo Manrique after the two met at Wharton. Raised in a Puerto Rican family of educators, he spotted a mismatch he could not unsee: youth unemployment above 50% in Spain sitting beside hundreds of thousands of unfilled tech jobs. Ironhack was his answer - short, intensive, outcomes-obsessed training that has since graduated thousands of career-changers across campuses in Europe, the Americas, and beyond. He now leads from Miami, preaching a gospel of ruthless focus on student outcomes and over-delivering on what people expect.
Nat Ware
Nat Ware is an Australian economist and social entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of Forte, a New York-based company that finances education, reskilling and healthcare at zero cost to individuals or governments. An Oxford PhD and Rhodes Scholar, he invented the Forte (Financing Of Return To Employment) mechanism, where governments repay training costs only out of the additional income-tax revenue that newly employed graduates generate. He earlier built 180 Degrees Consulting into the world's largest consultancy for nonprofits and social enterprises. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and three-time TEDx speaker, he calls his approach trickle-up economics.
Maria Popo
Maria Popo is the president and CEO of SCTE, a subsidiary of CableLabs, and the first woman to hold the top job at the cable industry's standards and training body. A self-described lifelong learner who started as a customer service rep and trained at a trade school, she rose through technical and executive roles at 3M, 3Com, Ambit Microsystems, Foxconn and Ubee Interactive - where she helped bring the first generations of cable modems to market - before earning a master's in Learning Design and Technology at Stanford. She now runs SCTE's global network of 60-plus chapters, retooling how the broadband industry trains and certifies its workforce for the AI era.
Noah Freedman
Noah Freedman is the co-founder and CEO of Nucleos, a public benefit company that builds secure, tablet-powered learning systems for people inside U.S. jails and prisons. What started as PortableCloud - an offline education project for under-resourced schools in India, Zimbabwe and Kenya - pivoted hard after an incarcerated colleague showed Freedman that the same digital divide existed inside American corrections. Today his Achieve DXP platform handles the roughly 95% of mainstream e-learning that prisons can't otherwise allow for security reasons, tracking courses and credentials so people can walk out with a path to a job. A Princeton public-policy grad who ran global e-learning software at Stanford's Graduate School of Education, Freedman has turned a quiet conviction about second chances into a working business that's free for the facilities that use it.
Ruchir Shah
Ruchir Shah is the founder and CEO of SkillCat, a mobile-first training platform that has taught more than 300,000 people to enter skilled trades like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and appliance repair. A Rice-trained energy engineer with a Stanford MBA, he started building animated industrial simulations after researching the BP oil spill and concluding that bad training kills. His first company, LearnToDrill, trained 25,000 oil and gas workers for clients like Halliburton and BP. When COVID threw skilled workers out of jobs while contractors begged for help, Shah pivoted to SkillCat to bridge that gap with simulation-based, $10-a-month trade education. He also runs the GRIT Foundation to introduce trades careers to underserved youth, and once spent a summer doing stand-up comedy in New York.
Todd Zipper
Todd Zipper is a longtime education-and-technology operator now running Axio Education, a Scottsdale-based agentic AI learning platform that turns static coursework into adaptive, personalized pathways. Before Axio he spent more than two decades building and scaling online-education businesses: he led The Learning House to its 2018 sale to Wiley, then ran Wiley's global education and talent operations as an executive vice president overseeing more than $300 million in annual revenue. He hosts the higher-ed podcast An Educated Guest and holds a CFA charter alongside degrees from Penn and Columbia.
Uzoma Orchingwa
Uzoma 'Zo' Orchingwa is a Nigerian-American social entrepreneur and the co-founder and co-CEO of Emerge Career, an AI-powered workforce development and reentry company that partners with governments to train and place justice-involved and low-income people into high-paying, AI-resilient skilled trades. He previously co-founded Ameelio, a technology nonprofit that broke open the exploitative prison communications industry by offering free letters, calls and education to incarcerated people and their families. A Yale-trained lawyer and Cambridge criminologist who moonlit as a DJ, he has been named to MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35 and Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business.
Anne Rascón
Anne Rascón is the Executive Director of the Better Health Better Pay Collaborative (BHBP), a nonprofit that stitches together two systems that rarely talk to each other - healthcare and workforce development. She works to connect Medicaid members and Managed Care Organizations with education, training, and employment so that better jobs lead to better health. Her career spans the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including national workforce training programs and advisory work with the U.S. Department of Labor, large employers, and workforce boards. In 2023 she helped launch the Florida Self-Sufficiency Council with Simply Healthcare and Florida's 24 workforce development boards.
Steve Gilman
Steve Gilman is the co-founder and CEO of OneRange, a New York-based AI-powered upskilling platform that lets employees discover, get approval for, and buy the learning resources they need, with companies paying only when people actually learn. Before software, Gilman was drafted by the Detroit Tigers out of Yale and then served as a Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer working counterproliferation missions out of US embassies in Cairo and Abu Dhabi. He frames OneRange as importing the world-class skill-development methods of pro sports and the military into the corporate world, and the company now works with 25-plus enterprises including Google, Wasserman, and Caylent.
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.
Tigran Sloyan
Tigran Sloyan is the Co-Founder and CEO of CodeSignal, the AI-native skills platform transforming how the world hires and develops talent. Born in Armenia and educated at MIT in Mathematics and Computer Science, he co-founded CodeSignal in 2015 after witnessing first-hand how resume bias blocked talented people from being seen. The company has raised $90M+, counts Google, Meta, Netflix, and Anthropic among its clients, and is on a mission to #GoBeyondResumes - replacing credential gatekeeping with verified skills.
Radha Basu
Radha Ramaswami Basu is the founder and CEO of iMerit Technology, a leading AI data annotation and services company that employs over 7,400 people worldwide - 52% of whom are women, and 80% from underserved communities. With 40+ years in tech spanning Hewlett-Packard (where she built the India software center into a $1.2B operation), Support.com (which she took public on NASDAQ), and now iMerit, she sits at the intersection of AI infrastructure and social impact. She co-founded the Anudip Foundation in 2005, which trained 120,000+ youth from low-income households - and it was those same graduates who became iMerit's first annotators. Today iMerit powers AI pipelines for autonomous vehicles, healthcare imaging, and generative AI at scale.
Jennifer Carolan
Jennifer Carolan is co-founder and general partner at Reach Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm she helped build from the ground up to become the most active dedicated edtech investor in the US. A former K-12 history teacher in Chicago who spent nine years learning venture capital at NewSchools Venture Fund, she has since deployed four funds totaling over $500M across 100+ education technology companies. Her portfolio has produced five unicorns including ClassDojo and Handshake, and she continues to teach at Stanford while backing the entrepreneurs she believes are removing the obstacles standing between people and opportunity.
Kesha Cash
Kesha Cash is the Founder and General Partner of Impact America Fund, the largest VC firm in America run entirely by a Black woman. Based in Oakland, California, she manages $65 million across two funds, backing technology-enabled startups that serve low-to-moderate income and overlooked communities. Her portfolio includes Esusu (a fintech unicorn), Mayvenn, SoLo Funds, and CareAcademy. A former Wall Street analyst who grew up on a farm in South Carolina and was the first in her family to attend college, Cash draws on lived experience of economic inequality to identify billion-dollar opportunities that traditional investors routinely miss.