workplace-culture
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Brittany Wong Is Marketing the Moment When Work Feels Human
Across two decades and several software categories, Brittany Wong has built a career around a stubborn question: how do you turn an abstract promise into a habit people can actually feel? At Bucketlist Rewards, that question now lands on recognition itself.
Chris Fudge Is Betting the Workplace on One Small Signal: I Saw What You Did
After three decades crossing marketing, sales, service and coaching, the Achievers CMO has arrived at a plainspoken thesis: culture is built in the moments when useful work becomes visible.
Achievers Quit Selling Coffee Mugs - and Built the Recognition Machine HR Teams Can Copy
The Toronto company began with branded swag until one customer punctured the premise: nobody works harder for a coffee mug. Its second act turned appreciation into a daily data stream - and offers HR leaders a useful playbook, with sharp limits.
Bucketlist Turned a Million-User Side Project Into the Employee Recognition Habit HR Can Actually Measure
The consumer app had more than a million users. The better business appeared when employers kept asking for something else: a way to turn everyday appreciation into a system people would actually use.
Workhuman
Workhuman turned two decades of thank-you notes into a data business. The Irish-American company behind the 'thank you economy' now reaches 8 million workers and mines their gratitude for what HR software usually misses.
Emily Mikailli
Emily Mikailli is the CHRO and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Signifyd, the commerce protection platform based in San Jose, California. A former lawyer who traded the bar for the tech industry, she has led People and Culture at Signifyd since 2016, scaling the company's global workforce nearly 5X in headcount and over 25X in annual recurring revenue across offices in San Jose, London, Belfast and New York. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, she is known for a candid, human-centric approach to building teams and serves as Vice Chair of the board at Parisi House on the Hill, a nonprofit supporting mothers and children affected by addiction.
ibelong
ibelong is a San Francisco-based consultancy that helps organizations build inclusive, resonant workplace cultures using a neurochemical framework grounded in affective neuroscience, relational neurobiology and epigenetics. Led by CEO and epigenetic coach Rajkumari Neogy, the company translates the brain science of trust and belonging into practical programs - immersive courses, leadership coaching, compassion circles and layoff (RIF) support - aimed at reducing conflict, burnout and turnover. Formerly known as iRestart, ibelong has worked with leaders at more than 175 startups and enterprises.
Ethena
Ethena is a New York-based compliance and workplace-culture training platform that turns the most-dreaded items on the corporate calendar - harassment prevention, code of conduct, cybersecurity, DEI - into short, well-written, mobile-friendly lessons people actually finish. Founded in 2019 by Roxanne Bras Petraeus and Anne Solmssen, it pairs legally vetted content with microlearning, Slack/email nudges, an ethics hotline, case management and AI-built courses, serving customers like Netflix, Zendesk, Carta and Figma.
Roxanne Petraeus
Roxanne Bras Petraeus is the co-founder and CEO of Ethena, a New York compliance-training startup that turns the most ignored hour at work, the annual harassment course, into something people actually finish. A Rhodes Scholar, Harvard ROTC graduate, and U.S. Army combat veteran who deployed to Afghanistan before consulting at McKinsey, she launched Ethena in 2019 with engineer Anne Solmssen and has raised roughly $50 million, including a $30 million Series B in 2022, to make compliance modern, funny, and forgiving rather than fear-based.
Emtrain
Emtrain is a San Francisco-based workplace CultureTech company that pairs video-based microlearning with a behavioral analytics engine. Founded by employment lawyer Janine Yancey, it sells respect, inclusion, and ethics training to more than 800 organizations - including Netflix, Yelp, Dolby, and Live Nation - while quietly mining every learner click for early signals of cultural risk.
Janine Yancey
Janine Yancey is the Founder and CEO of Emtrain, a San Francisco-based AI-powered compliance training and workplace culture analytics platform she founded in 2006. A former employment lawyer and first-generation college graduate, she built Emtrain to replace lecture-style compliance check-boxes with cinematic, skills-based learning backed by behavioral data. The platform serves 800+ enterprise clients including Netflix, Yelp, and Chevron, has raised $18M in funding, and is known for its proprietary Workplace Color Spectrum and culture benchmarking engine drawing on 25 million employee sentiment data points. Yancey famously predicted the #MeToo movement in a 2016 Medium article - months before it went global.