New lead investor, JAZZ Venture Partners, is joined by Sounding Board’s existing investors Canaan, Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures and Correlation Partners. The female-founded company also added investors Gaingels, Engage, and an all-star panel of women business leaders passionate about the impact of coaching including Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry.com), Yvonne Chen (former VP Marketing of Udemy), Sukhinder Singh Cassidy (Founder of theBoardlist), and Tammy Aguillon (Area VP @ DocuSign), underscoring Sounding Board’s commitment to diverse leaders and voices.
John Spinale - Managing Partner at JAZZ Venture Partners
John’s a co-founder and Managing Director at JAZZ Venture Partners, an early stage venture capital firm focused on Human Performance Technology. With a career of over 20 years in the consumer and enterprise technology spaces, he’s built and led companies whose products have touched the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
“The key to unlocking human performance in the workplace is ensuring that each and every employee can live up to their full potential.”
About JAZZ Venture Partners
JAZZ Venture Partners invests in companies that extend the boundaries of human performance — improving how we live, learn, work, play, and experience the world. Our portfolio companies are unlocking human potential in health, mind-body wellness, accelerated learning and training, sports, entertainment, and the enterprise.
Daley Ervin - Managing Director at Engage
“At Engage, we work directly with our Fortune 500 partners to find areas where startups can have a material impact on their core businesses. With Future of Work and employee retention being one of the most topical areas for our partners and given the crucial timing in the war on talent, Sounding Board had a universal appeal from our corporate partners.”
About Engage
Engage is a corporate venture platform comprised of a leading research institution and 14 Fortune 500s in the Southeast that has joined forces to invest in startups building the future of the enterprise. Engage Corporate Partners include: Chick-fil-a, Coca-Cola, Cox Enterprises, Delta, Georgia-Pacific, Georgia Power, Georgia Tech, Goldman Sachs, Honeywell, Inspire Brands, Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE), Invesco, The Home Depot, UPS, and Wellstar.
Maha Ibrahim - General Partner at Canaan
Maha spots technology trends early and partners closely with her companies to drive growth and exits. She focuses on e-commerce and enterprise / cloud, and was one of the first investors to recognize the potential of social gaming. She was also the first investor in The RealReal (REAL) and sat on the company’s board through the 2019 IPO. A champion of women in technology, Maha is passionate about funding and raising the profiles of female entrepreneurs and is a founding member of All Raise. She is also a trustee for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Maha holds a B.A. in Economics and an M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT.
“Christine and Lori are incredibly talented leaders. Women are still woefully underrepresented in the startup ecosystem, but that’s changing. I’m proud to back Christine and Lori as they further accelerate their business and bring measurable coaching to enterprises.”
About Canaan
Canaan is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs with visionary ideas. With a diversified fund and over 200 exits to date, Canaan has invested in some of the world’s leading technology and healthcare companies over the past 33 years. Canaan’s focus areas include consumer tech, enterprise/SaaS, fintech, frontier tech, biopharma, digital health and medtech.
Karin Klein - Founder, venture capitalist, strategist
“From the early days, when Sounding Board was first starting to sign new customers, we were attracted to Christine and Lori's vision to bring leadership coaching to a broader group of employees. Today Sounding Board has incredible reach and impact – helping managers at high-growth startups and executives at major companies. And this is just the beginning of Sounding Board’s potential.”
About Bloomberg Beta
Bloomberg Beta is an early stage venture capital firm that invests in companies that make business work better, with a focus on machine intelligence.
Charles Hudson - Managing Partner at Precursor Ventures
Charles Hudson is the Managing Partner and Founder of Precursor Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm focused on investing in the first institutional round of investment for the most promising software and hardware companies. He invests in people over product at the earliest stage of their entrepreneurial journey. His investment strategy is pre-everything and he looks to find promising companies before there is much in the way of evidence. Charles holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.A. in Economics and Spanish from Stanford University.
“As employers have realized the value of providing high-quality coaching to their employees and teams, the need for a platform to manage and analyze all of the coaching activity happening within their companies has never been greater. Sounding Board is the very best platform for forward-thinking employees to manage the rollout and delivery of high-quality coaching programs.”
About Precursor Ventures
Precursor Ventures is a classic seed stage venture capital firm investing in long-term relationships with founders we believe in.
Wesley Barrow
Venture Partner, Correlation Ventures
Wesley has over 12 years of experience in the enterprise software sector as an entrepreneur and executive. Prior to joining us, Wesley was SVP and Head of New Business at Yext, where he led all go-to-market efforts through the company’s IPO in 2017. Before joining Yext, Wesley founded and was CRO of Nomi, a marketing and analytics platform for brick-and-mortar retailers which was backed by firms such as Accel and First Round, and subsequently acquired in 2014 by Brickstream Technologies. He also worked in key roles at Comcast, William Morris and Buddy Media, where he spearheaded the largest client partnerships before it was sold to Salesforce.com in 2012 to become the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
About Correlation Ventures:
Correlation Ventures is a new breed of venture capital firm, leveraging world-class analytics to offer entrepreneurs and other venture capitalists a dramatically better option when they are seeking additional capital to complete a financing round. Backed by leading institutional investors, Correlation has more than $450+ million under management.
Yvonne Chen
Yvonne Chen is a caring and passionate business leader and CMO. As the former VP of Marketing for Udemy, Yvonne worked at the intersection of edtech and the future of work, partnering with organizations around the world to address skill development challenges and learning opportunities. Over the last 15+ years Yvonne has operated in high growth environments scaling GTM teams at Localytics, Facebook, Google, and AT&T. Yvonne holds a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
“The most rewarding career experiences and the most impactful teams stem from great leaders. Investing in and providing better access to great leadership development will create more diverse and thoughtful organizations. I'm very excited to be supporting Sounding Board in creating the world's most impactful leaders.”
Deb Liu
Deb Liu is the CEO of Ancestry and co-founder of the non-profit Women in Product. She was formerly the VP of Facebook where she created Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Pay.
"I would not be where I am today without coaching unlocking my potential. Sounding Board is making that power available and accessible to everyone."
Sukhindher Singh Cassidy
Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is a leading digital executive and entrepreneur with 25+ years of leadership experience scaling and founding both b2c and b2b companies including Google, Amazon, Yodlee, StubHub, Joyus.and more. She is currently Founder and Chairman of theBoardlist, a premium talent marketplace for diverse executives, launched in 2015. Currently tBL has scaled to over 20k members and assisted in 2000+ board searches before raising seed capital in 2020. Sukhinder is also a Venture Partner at Acrew Capital, where she helped co-found the Acrew Diversify Capital Fund in Feb 2021, a growth equity fund that helps to diversify the ownership of leading tech companies and create equitable access to wealth creation for diverse leaders.
"Sounding Board represents the very best of leadership development, backed by enterprise-level coaches who can help them realize their potential and drive business impact.”
Tammy Aguillon
Area Vice President, Commercial Sales at DocuSign
For the last 15 years, Tammy has been in B2B enterprise sales at a number of hyper-growth companies, including Responsys (IPO, Oracle acquisition) and Xamarin (Microsoft acquisition). Currently, Tammy leads an organization at DocuSign focused on Manufacturing and Retail organizations.
Over the years, Tammy has experienced first-hand what amazing things can happen when Marketing, Product, the voice of the customer, and Sales are a fine-tuned orchestra. Add that to building sales teams with a supportive, winning culture and it’s a recipe for big wins, continuous learning, and lots of fun.
"The future of work and where it gets done is changing fast. In a remote, distributed, hybrid workforce, leaders more than ever need to understand how to support their teams and navigate professional and organizational changes. Leadership coaching is an essential component of that, and Sounding Board is leading the charge to empower and elevate leaders.”
Jarah Euston
Co-Founder & CEO, WorkWhile
Jarah Euston is co-founder and CEO of WorkWhile, an hourly labor marketplace that connects the best workers with shifts, perks, and benefits. She led the analytics and marketing teams at Flurry, an innovator in mobile app analytics acquired by Yahoo, where she was VP of Product. She cut her teeth as a consultant at BCG and as an hourly retail associate back in the day. She is passionate about helping women succeed and is the co-founder of the Wharton Alumnae Founders & Funders Association. She holds an MBA from Wharton and BS from New York University.
"Having been on the receiving end of valuable coaching from Christine, I can't imagine a better champion to bring the transformative power of coaching to more emerging leaders. I'm proud to be an investor and a customer!”
