Christine Tao is the co-founder & CEO of Sounding Board, a Silicon Valley startup redefining how organizations develop their leaders. Her rapid career growth to executive management in the tech sectors of Silicon Valley became her inspiration for founding Sounding Board. As she began to manage larger teams and became responsible for revenue growth, it became clear that she needed a “sounding board” to coach her on the development of her leadership skills. After receiving valuable mentorship in leadership development, Christine was driven to make this coaching accessible to people at all levels. Traditionally, leadership coaching has only been available to C-Suite executives, but with the advent of Sounding Board’s most recent innovations, coaching has become available and affordable to all levels of an organization in order to rapidly scale and upskill employees at a critical time when companies are needing to escalate at a more rapid pace.
Christine achieved significant milestones that led to the acceleration of growth at Sounding Board and set the company on course for strong valuation for the future. First, she developed and supported the engineering and product leadership to create Group Coaching, a new product offering that has rapidly attracted new business and expanded the spend of existing clients wanting a more impactful leadership coaching program for teams. Additionally, Christine built the board of directors and advisory board for Sounding Board to include influential leaders and investors in the learning and leadership development industry. This helped to prepare the company to start fundraising to bring the company past its start-up level.
Since earning a Silver Stevie® Award in the 2021 Stevie® Awards for Women in Business for Female Executive of the Year, Christine has scaled Sounding Board in revenue exponentially, surpassing budgeted expectations. She hired heads of engineering and finance, and built out a strong infrastructure to design new products launching in early 2022. Additionally, Sounding Board’s coach network scaled rapidly to meet and exceed the demand from enterprise clients around the world.
Christine has also supported her team to transition from SMB-centric clients to Enterprise companies using Sounding Board’s services for their companies with 5,000+ employees. This development fueled revenue growth during the pandemic and completed a record of meeting or exceeding stated gross revenue goals. Additionally, she led the company’s efforts to create an innovative AI-enabled tech platform that is the first-to-market. This program is designed to coach leaders for measurable business impact.
As a female co-founder of Asian descent, Christine has broken several glass ceilings in not only completing a Series A funding round at a rapid pace, but also being part of the only all-female-founded, female-led, and all-female board of directors within the leadership development industry.
Christine Tao won a Silver Stevie Award for Female Executive of the Year in the 2021 Stevie Awards for Women in Business: Business Services – 11-2500 Employees.
Interested in submitting a nomination for the 2022 (19th Annual) Stevie Awards for Women in Business?
