About Sounding Board Inc

We Develop the World’s Most Impactful Leaders

Sounding Board enables and scales complex leadership coaching programs with a scientifically designed Coaching Enablement Platform and a curated network of leadership coaches.
Seismic shift to remote work and an urgent need for leadership development drives $13.1M Series A funding for coaching platform Sounding Board
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"Sounding Board is a unified Coaching Enablement Platform and managed coach network that scales, manages and measures complex leadership development programs across the enterprise. Our AI-powered platform provides an agile learning environment, aggregated actionable data insights, and measurement in one place...”​

The vision of Sounding Board started with one high potential leader – a sales executive at Tapjoy named Christine Tao, who grew as fast as her company did. With a business degree at Berkeley, and an MBA at Wharton, Christine earned the best education but had never been taught the leadership skills to drive teams and business growth. Enter Lori Mazan, an executive coach who had earned a successful track record over 25 years building the leadership capabilities of Fortune 500 CEOs and the C-Suite of public and private companies. “Lori came to Tapjoy to coach our CEO, then coached me when I got promoted into the executive management team,” says Tao.

By up-leveling Christine’s leadership mindsets and practices to drive long-term behavior and actions, Lori’s coaching resulted in Christine having a greater organizational impact on business growth.

As Christine quickly climbed the corporate ladder in such a fast-growing startup, she realized how much impact her leadership coaching was having on her performance and business impact . Over Lori’s long career as an executive coach for C-level execs, the common lament she often heard was “I wish I had access to coaching when I was younger… I would have been so much more effective”. They shared a vision to make coaching accessible to leaders at all levels of the organization and how to break through the high-cost barriers that had made it impossible in the past. Their methodology of disrupting the coaching industry by moving to a cloud-based virtual platform was the basis for forming Sounding Board with the goal of democratizing coaching across the enterprise.

From vision to execution, Sounding Board’s level of technical innovation, “best-in-class” platform and coach management sets the industry standard for leadership coaching at scale.

About Us 1
Christine Tao
Co-Founder & CEO
About Us 2
Lori Mazan
Co-Founder / President & C.C.O.
About Us 3
Tommy Perkins
SVP of Sales, Partnership &
Customer Success
About Us 4
Piyush Gupta
Chief Product Officer
Leadership Team

Leadership is in our company DNA

Sounding Board has a passion for diverse people and thinking that drives innovative ideas and creative solutions. We embrace the richness of our global community and strive for equality in the development of all leaders.
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Proudly backed & advised by top tier investors, HR innovators and learning luminaries:

About Us 5
David Blake

Founder & Chairman Degreed

About Us 6
Jeff Orlando

CLO - Medtronic

About Us 7
Kevin Johnson

Former CEO - Udemy & Ebates

About Us 8
Mary Slaughter

Managing Director, People Advisory at Ernst & Young

About Us 9
Ed Miller

Former CEO of Novoed

About Us 10
Brett Queener

Former Chief Operating Officer
SmartRecruiters

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Company Values
Bring Curiosity

Listen deeply • Assume positive intent • Clear assumptions • Be open and receptive to other perspectives

Fully Engage

Show up • Share your time generously • Invest in what matters • Make meaningful connections

Take the Risk

Be willing to try new things • It’s ok to fail and be wrong • Stretch your range • Be vulnerable to build trust

Own Your Impact

Be open to feedback from others • Judgements can wait -- postpone judgement to stay open to new information • Commit to working through conflict

Continuously Evolve

Innovate • Bring creativity • Think outside the box • Engage in personal and professional growth • Fail and learn

Make It Happen Together

Collaborate to get things done • Work hard on behalf of the team/company • Create results through relationship

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We Develop The World's Most Impactful Leaders

From leading remote workforces, building productive teams, to improving diversity, equity, and inclusion, Sounding Board has virtual and scalable enterprise solutions that are urgently required to adapt to rapidly changing workplace environments.

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Christine Tao

Co-Founder & CEO Sounding Board, Inc.
Christine Tao is the co-founder & CEO at Sounding Board, a Silicon Valley startup redefining how organizations are developing their leaders. Her extraordinarily rapid career growth to executive management in the media, mobile and tech sectors of Silicon Valley became her inspiration for founding Sounding Board. As she began to manage larger teams and be responsible for growing revenues, it became clear that she needed a “sounding board” to coach her on the development of her leadership skills. That’s where her Sounding Board co-founder, Lori Mazan came on the scene. A seasoned executive coach focused on leadership development, Lori coached Christine on real-world leadership skills that had a direct impact on business outcomes. Based on her positive and impactful experience with leadership development, Christine was driven to make leadership development coaching accessible to people at all levels of the organization.
Christine advises several startups, is a budding angel investor and is also a Tory Burch Foundation Fellow, a foundation dedicated to investing in the success and sustainability of women entrepreneurs.
Prior to co-founding Sounding Board, Christine was a Senior Vice President of Developer Relations at Tapjoy, a venture-backed, leading mobile advertising & publishing network. She led the growth of Tapjoy’s publisher advertising business from 0 to over $100 million in revenues in less than 3 years. Prior to that she led e-commerce partnerships and strategy at YouTube. Christine holds an MBA in Marketing & Operations from Wharton and a BA in Business Administration from UC Berkeley.

Lori Mazan

Co-Founder & CCO Sounding Board, Inc.
Lori Mazan is the Co-Founder and Chief Coaching Officer of Sounding Board, the preeminent global leadership development enterprise platform changing the face of leadership development through innovative technology for leaders at all levels of an organization. Lori is a seasoned executive coach who has guided hundreds of corporate executives through 1:1 coaching focused on business outcomes and developing critical leadership skills. Client companies advanced by Lori’s expertise include Fortune titans such as Chevron and Sprint as well as high growth and public companies like Intellikine, and Tapjoy, plus 10XGenomics, which became a public company in 2019 while top executives worked with Lori and the Sounding Board team.
Lori has spent the last 25 years coaching C-Suite executives to leadership excellence. Many of those public and private company CEO’s expressed that they would have liked this caliber of coaching earlier in their careers. Inspired by these experiences, Lori joined with Christine to launch Sounding Board as a feedback-driven, cloud-based leadership coaching platform that could maintain best-in-class leadership coaching while lowering costs to make it affordable and scalable for leaders at every level of their careers.
Before founding Sounding Board, Lori received her Masters’ in Adult Educational Psychology/Counseling from the University of San Francisco and a Bachelors’ in Psychology from the University of Virginia. Lori is an educator and has spent over 10 years as a professor of social psychology and group dynamics while acting as the interim Dean of Students at Holy Names University, She is certified by the industry’s gold standard, the Coaches Training Institute, and is a founding member of the Genentech Preferred Network of Coaches. Sounding Board is one of <3% of sole female founded startups receiving venture funding. In 2019 Sounding Board was selected as 1 of 7 startups (out of 100+ applicants) as part of SAP’s HR tech cohort, a group that represents the rising stars of the next-gen HR ecosystem.

Tommy Perkins

SVP OF SALES, PARTNERSHIP & CUSTOMER SUCCESS

Tommy is at his best helping clients think through complex challenges in order to create a positive impact on their organizations. He thrives when interacting with others whether helping his team succeed or working with clients to build long-term partnerships. He has extensive experience consulting with organizations on driving their employee experience, guiding organizations through change, and working to ensure organizations are moving the needle when it comes to their results.

Most recently, Tommy was a Client Services Leader overseeing some of GP’s most prized accounts on a global level. His responsibilities included overall client growth strategy, retention, and satisfaction. He represented all of GP Strategies’ major business lines including leadership, coaching, and engagement, digital transformation, outsourced services, and technology implementation solutions.

Before GP Strategies, Tommy spent several years with TTEC Digital (formerly rogenSI) where he led the sales team,  eventually becoming the regional Learning & Performance practice leader for North America. While managing the P&L and sales team he also led the largest global relationship for the firm (Deloitte Globally). During his time at TTEC, he focused on delivering blended learning solutions that incorporate technology and hands-on training. Before TTEC Digital, he spent several years dedicated to strength-based leadership disrupting the business landscape regarding performance management and employee engagement with thought leader Marcus Buckingham at The Marcus Buckingham Company / TMBC (now ADP).

Tommy has had the privilege of working with some of the most well-known global brands in professional services, retail, technology, and healthcare including Deloitte, Facebook, Microsoft, Bank of America, Novartis, Gap Inc., lululemon, and Intel. Several projects he led for Deloitte were Global GNPS, New Partner Pivot, NextGen Partner Program Deloitte China, Present to Win, the RPM project on performance management, and Unconscious Bias.

Tommy holds a BS in Health Sciences from Texas A&M University, and an MBA from Universidad del CEMA.

Piyush Gupta

CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER
Piyush Gupta is VP of Product and Technology at Sounding Board and champions the voice of customers and users with deep empathy. Piyush envisions Sounding Board to be the first window of coaching experience for professionals and leaders worldwide. His approach is deeply rooted in proven scientific research, modeling human behaviors, and data-informed insights to deliver mindset shifts and desired business outcomes for organizations at scale. He believes that a world-class UX is key to drive simplicity that will lead to millions of professionals to access coaching for their development. Piyush co-invented the world’s first ‘landmark intelligent driving directions’ technology that led Google to redesign their routing algorithms for the Asian markets. For the next decade, he led two disruptive FinTech companies to the market leadership positions and delivered two award-winning products that serve more than 70 million users worldwide. His teams filed 20+ patents while he himself authored three patents. He is an active startup investor and advises selected AI-driven startups on business and product strategy. He is the recipient of the World Summit Award, one of the most prestigious international honors for product innovators. In addition, he is a James Swartz fellow, the most prestigious fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University funded by the founder of the iconic venture firm, Accel Partners. Piyush holds an MS in Software Management from Carnegie Mellon University.
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From leading remote workforces, building productive teams, to improving diversity, equity, and inclusion, Sounding Board has virtual and scalable enterprise solutions that are urgently required to adapt to rapidly changing workplace environments.

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Our expert coaches combine top notch coaching, business acumen and organizational savvy to truly become your leadership “Sounding Board”. Sounding Board coaches are all industry certified and strongly vetted going through a 3 step qualification process and receiving ongoing supervision and development.

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