Cadence was founded on a pattern that appeared in every organization we worked with: management quality varied wildly, nobody could measure it, and the best employees left for companies where they happened to get lucky with their manager. We decided to change that.
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. The 9-box runs with intelligence and without bias-amplifying anchoring. ER cases open with full context. And the Culture Scorecard — the thing that makes Cadence structurally different — connects all of it into one picture of organizational health that no single-plane tool can produce.
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? Who are our key value drivers and are they at risk of leaving? Where are the ER cases coming from and could we have predicted them?
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.
Not values-as-marketing. The principles that shape product decisions, customer interactions, and how we run ourselves.
We don't believe organizations improve by asking managers to "be better." We believe they improve by designing systems that make better management the default. This is the entire thesis of Cadence, and we apply it to ourselves too.
We're an early-stage company with real customers and real limits. We won't oversell what Cadence can do today, paper over gaps with jargon, or claim certifications we haven't earned yet. The SOC 2 roadmap is honest. The beta pricing note is honest. We'd rather lose a deal than set up a customer to be disappointed.
We could add more features faster if we were building point solutions. We're not. The Culture Scorecard is only possible because we own all eight planes. We make product decisions based on whether they make the system more coherent, not whether they win a feature comparison checklist.
Every beta customer gets a direct line to the founding team. We hold weekly check-ins. We answer questions in Slack, not support tickets. We build on the patterns we see in real usage, not on what we think customers want. This is only possible at our stage, and we're taking full advantage of it.
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.
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We're running a private beta with a select group of organizations. Beta participants are getting early access to the full platform in exchange for honest feedback and close collaboration with the product team.
We're targeting general availability in late 2026. If you're evaluating tools for your organization right now, we'd rather talk to you during beta — you'll have more influence on the product and better terms.
Request beta access →Beta is by invitation. We're selective because we want to give every participant real attention. But if Cadence sounds like it solves a problem you have, reach out.