Cadence was founded on a pattern that appears in every distributed organization: good managers create clarity, weak systems create silence, and employees pay the price when nobody can see the difference soon enough.
Former Head of People Operations at ACI Learning. Built and managed people systems for distributed technical teams before founding Cadence in 2025.
I spent years in People Operations building management systems from scratch — at a fast-growing company, with teams distributed across time zones, in an industry (technical training and certification) where the management chain was as important as the product itself.
What I kept discovering was the same pattern: the quality of someone's career experience was almost entirely determined by which manager they happened to get. The organization could have excellent values, a strong mission, and a good product — and still produce wildly inconsistent management outcomes, because the system depended on individual talent instead of structural design.
Some managers were natural coaches. They ran structured 1:1s, gave clear feedback, developed people deliberately, recognized consistently. Their teams retained well, grew well, and performed well.
Other managers, equally well-intentioned, ran inconsistent 1:1s, gave ambiguous feedback, forgot to recognize, and let ER issues fester until they became expensive. Their teams didn't perform as well — but more importantly, the employees in those teams were just as capable and just as deserving of good management. They lost the lottery.
I tried to solve this with training. It helped at the margins. I tried to solve it with tooling — we evaluated 15Five, Lattice, Culture Amp, HR Acuity, Fellow. All good tools for specific problems. None of them solved the underlying issue: there was no system that made consistent management the default.
Cadence is the system I wish had existed. It starts with the 1:1 — the actual conversation, not a form submitted afterwards — and builds out from there. Goals live in the 1:1 context. Recognition is tracked against a real accountability metric. ER cases open with full context. The Culture Scorecard connects those live workflows into one picture of organizational health, with core 9-box calibration live and predictive retention plus KVD workflows roadmap-labeled until verified.
We're not trying to replace HR. We're trying to give HR the operating plane that makes management actually happen by design, at scale, in the distributed world that most organizations are now permanently living in.
We're building for the People leader who's been managing six tools that don't talk to each other and wondering why they still can't answer basic questions: Is our manager population effective? Where are the ER cases coming from? Which management workflows are producing enough signal to act on today, and which should become roadmap instrumentation next?
And we're building for the IC who deserves to know where they stand — not find out in a surprise performance review that their manager had a different impression of their work than they did. The employee who deserves coaching, development, and recognition, regardless of whether they happened to get a naturally gifted manager.
The mission is simple: management by design, not by luck. We're going to see it through.
Cadence is built by a small founding team. We move fast, stay close to customers, and operate with a level of autonomy and ownership that's only possible at this stage.
Former Head of People Ops at ACI Learning. Built the management systems that became the blueprint for Cadence. Focused on product strategy, customer development, and the founding narrative.
Runs day-to-day Cadence operations and coordinates the go-to-market motion. Keeps the founding team focused and moving.
Leads the Cadence platform architecture and engineering. Previously built systems at scale for SaaS companies in the HR and collaboration space.
Leads sales, partnerships, and market development. Focused on building the go-to-market motion for the HR tech buyer — CHROs, VPs People, and CEOs at mid-market companies.
Translates the Cadence vision into messaging, copy, and thought leadership. Writes the pages, decks, and frameworks that make the product legible to the people who need it.
Builds the Cadence web presence and customer-facing surfaces. Focused on performance, accessibility, and making the product feel as good as it works.
Click a value to see how it shows up in Cadence and why it matters for distributed teams.
Every employee deserves consistent coaching, clarity, and follow-through, even when their manager is still developing those habits. Cadence turns the behaviors of excellent managers into a repeatable operating rhythm: structured 1:1s, visible goals, documented decisions, recognition, and the context leaders need to intervene before people disappear.
We're a distributed team — which means we've designed our own management practices around the same principles we're building into Cadence. We run structured 1:1s. We track goals transparently. We recognize across time zones. We're building the tool we use ourselves.
Cadence now routes self-serve evaluation through the live signup funnel, while roadmap and preview capabilities stay labeled before buyers treat them as current deliverables.
If you're evaluating tools for your organization right now, start a workspace and use the product and pricing pages to separate what is live from what is still roadmap.
Start a trial workspace →Start a trial workspace, run actual 1:1s through Cadence, and see whether the operating record gives managers and leaders better ways to act.