A Letter from Our Co-Founders – Today, we’re proud to share that Sounding Board, Inc has raised $30M in Series B funding!

Christine and Lori - Founders of Sounding Board

From day one our vision at Sounding Board has been to develop the world’s most impactful leaders – by delivering access to executive level coaching earlier in a leaders career when they need it most. Having started off as coach and coachee ourselves, we had a vision of scaling leadership coaching to managers and leaders of all levels in a way that was impactful and measurable.

Today, we’re proud to share that Sounding Board, Inc has raised $30M in Series B funding!

We welcome our new lead investor, Jazz Venture Partners, who are joined by existing investors Canaan, Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures and Correlation Partners. Jazz’s thesis is to “Unlock Human Potential” – and they share our vision of leadership coaching to do just that. We’re also thrilled to welcome Gaingels, Engage and an all-star panel of female investors passionate about coaching: 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). As female founders, we have a passion and commitment to support and amplify diverse leaders and voices – from the work we do at Sounding Board to living our values on our cap table as we scale.

Having just announced our Series A funding earlier this year, our rapid growth is a testament to the shift we’re seeing across the global workforce. In the past year we have seen demand explode, with ARR growing over 350% year over year, several Fortune 1000 logos, and sequential growth for the past seven quarters. We also tripled the number of employees while maintaining a strong culture of collaboration and teamwork.

In the earlier stages of the pandemic, there was a huge shift to remote work and concern for how to develop leaders virtually. Today, it’s expected to see one third of employees working remotely in 2022. CEOs and HR leaders have realized how urgently they need to develop new skill sets in their teams to meet modern business challenges. One of the biggest struggles has been the ability to manage and lead teams effectively, especially in a virtual world. This has not only led to record levels of employee burnout and stress, but also unprecedented attrition and turnover known as the Great Resignation.

In these times, virtual leadership coaching has emerged as a go-to-model for talent development. The introduction of technology into the space has not only made access to coaching scalable, but also measurable. Sounding Board’s personalized approach, blend of skill development and real-time application lends itself well to times of rapid change. We’re thrilled that many of our customers like Bill.com, UserTesting and Chime have IPO’ed and scaled while highlighting their commitment to leadership as a core driver of their success.

We invested our Series A in the development of an industry-leading Coaching Management System (CMS) designed to deliver scalable leadership coaching, as well as global expansion of our best-in-class managed coach network. Enterprises can now use the same platform to manage, measure and scale all coaching programs and engagements, leveraging Sounding Board’s AI coach matching algorithm, automated workflows, and digital tools such as our Agile Leadership Roadmap™.

With our Series B round, we will accelerate our investment in data, reporting & science on the product & technology side, building towards our vision of becoming the coaching enablement platform for the world’s largest enterprises. We’ll continue to invest in our go-to-market teams to partner closely with new and existing customers to further deploy coaching across their orgs. And you’ll see us start to partner more broadly across the leadership and HR ecosystem to bring our innovative platform to more and more leaders.

This wouldn’t be possible without the incredible team we have been lucky to work with, our amazing coaches, our partners and investors, and of course, our customers and the leaders we are privileged to coach.

We are excited for the future of Sounding Board, and the growth that’s coming. Also, we’re hiring! Join us in our mission to develop the world’s most impactful leaders.

Sincerely,

Christine Tao & Lori Mazan

A Letter from Our Co-Founders - Today, we’re proud to share that Sounding Board, Inc has raised $30M in Series B funding! 1

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We Develop The World's Most Impactful Leaders

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.