About Sounding Board’s Series B Investors

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.

About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 1
About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 2
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.”

John Spinale - Managing Partner at JAZZ Venture Partners Tweet
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.

About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 3
About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 4
Daley Ervin - Managing Director at Engage
Daley is a Managing Director of Engage, where he focuses on enterprise investments, leads corporate partner relationships, and assists portfolio founders in partnership development and go-to-market strategy. Prior to Engage, Daley spent more than ten years leading four venture-backed startups on three continents. He was most recently Vice President of Business Development and Strategy for Amazon-backed Nucleus based in New York. Before that, Daley was GM and Head of North American Operations for Shanghai-based Student.com, and was founding team and GM of North America for YPlan based in London, which later sold to Timeout Group. He started his career as part of the International Expansion team at Airbnb and eventually led sales for North America. Daley is a Kauffman Fellow (Class 26), and he earned his bachelor’s degree in business and communication from Arizona State University.

“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.”

Daley Ervin - Managing Director at Engage Tweet
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.

About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 5
Canaan Partners Logo
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.”

Maha Ibrahim - General Partner at Canaan Tweet
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.

About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 6
About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 7
Karin Klein - Founder, venture capitalist, strategist
Karin Klein is a founding partner at Bloomberg Beta, an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in startups making work better. Karin currently serves on the board of directors for Paramount Group (NYSE: PGRE) and Regency Centers (S&P 500: REG). Prior to launching Bloomberg Beta, she led new initiatives at Bloomberg, oversaw Softbank’s venture team that reviewed new investments, and co-founded an educational training business for children. Karin has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is a summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the Annenberg School of Communications and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

“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.”

Karin Klein - Founder, venture capitalist, strategist Tweet
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.

About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 8
About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 9
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.”

Charles Hudson - Managing Partner at Precursor Ventures​ Tweet
About Precursor Ventures

Precursor Ventures is a classic seed stage venture capital firm investing in long-term relationships with founders we believe in.

About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 10

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.

About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 11

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.”

Yvonne Chen - Sounding Board Angel Investor Tweet
About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 12

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."

Deb Liu - Sounding Board Angel Investor Tweet
About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 13

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.”

Sukhindher Singh Cassidy - Sounding Board Angel Investor Tweet
About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 14

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.”

Tammy Aguillon - Sounding Board Angel Investor Tweet
About Sounding Board's Series B Investors 15

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!”

Jarah Euston - Sounding Board Angel Investor Tweet

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Sounding Board offers virtual and scalable enterprise learning solutions that are flexible enough to adapt to rapidly changing work environments. Powered by behavioral science and core leadership capabilities, our proven coaching methodology drives measurable business impact.

Niall MacGearailt

SVP of Finance
Niall MacGearailt leads Sounding Board’s finance division as the SVP of Finance and Operations. Niall earned a solid track record of improving P&L and operational expense management for leading companies such as Whirlpool, Logitech, Avaya and most recently Soraa, where he prepared the business for acquisition by leading hi-tech lighting company, Ecosense. In his role, he is responsible for building and leading the finance & relevant operations functions for the company.

Ron Buell

VP of Engineering
Ron Buell is the VP of Engineering at Sounding Board and an accomplished software professional with extensive experience in leadership, software engineering, project management, and product management. Ron has led the development of highly scalable systems and applications across a variety of technologies for companies including OpenFeint (acquired by GREE), Rdio (acquired by Pandora), Lyris Technologies, and Lotus/IBM Software Group. In his role at Sounding Board, Buell is responsible for all engineering efforts in developing, deploying, and maintaining the enterprise software platform and team for the company.

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.

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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.

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.