AI Revolutionizes Leadership Development: The Evolution of New Level Work (Letter from the CEO)

The Journey from Idea to Innovation: How New Level Work Came to Be

In the spring of 2016, I found myself standing at a crossroads, ready to embark on a new venture. I didn’t have a specific project in mind, but I was guided by three core principles: creating a direct social impact, leveraging my strengths, and ensuring our solution would resonate with the market.

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The Seed of an Idea

The first principle was about giving back. I’ve been fortunate in my career and felt a deep desire to create something with a meaningful social impact. Second, I wanted to build on my strengths because doing what you’re good at isn’t just fulfilling—it’s effective. Lastly, I knew that finding a true product-market fit was crucial. I had seen too many startups fail due to a lack of alignment between their product and the market’s needs.

With these principles in mind, I turned to those who knew me best—my closest colleagues. I asked them what they considered my greatest strengths to be, and the response was unanimous: people management. To validate this, I sent a survey to 20 former direct reports, asking if they would recommend me as a manager using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) question. The result was a perfect 100 NPS.

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Discovering the Opportunity

This feedback led me to dive deeper into the realm of people management. What I found was a wealth of research underscoring the critical role of managers and the significant room for improvement in this area. Studies revealed that one out of two employees would leave a job due to a poor relationship with their manager. Gallup reported that only about 33% of employees are engaged at work, with disengaged employees costing the economy about $1.9 trillion in lost productivity annually.

Reflecting on my own experiences, I remembered how my mother’s daily complaints about her boss during my middle school years cast a shadow over our family life. It became clear to me that improving managers’ abilities could have the profound social impact I was seeking.

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Validating the Market

With the idea aligned with both my desire for social impact and my personal skills, one question remained: How could we achieve product-market fit?

I had some initial ideas for tech-based products, but I knew better than to rely solely on my judgment. I conducted a market study, using focus groups and in-person interviews with employees and managers. The outcome was clear: No current technology was perceived as capable of sustainably changing managerial behavior. Only expert one-on-one coaching had that potential.

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Building the Foundation

To explore this further, I reached out to two friends, Wendy Hanson and Will Corley. Wendy and Will were executive coaches who had coached Google’s Direct Sales Organization through its hypergrowth from millions in sales to billions between 2001 and 2009. We offered free coaching in exchange for recording the sessions. Leveraging my network of executives in the tech industry, we soon had dozens of participants. Reviewing every recording, I identified the basics of what we needed to build. However, it also became evident that without scalability, this business model wouldn’t attract venture capital.

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The AI Revelation

This realization led me to explore the potential of Artificial Intelligence. I began studying the status of AI and realized that, while it wasn’t ready to replace coaches, it could analyze data, identify best practices, and provide feedback to coaches, helping them improve. However, this required high-quality data, which in turn necessitated high-quality coaches.

This realization defined our positioning. Around the same time, BetterUp was transitioning from a marketplace to a B2B coaching provider, focusing on “mental fitness” and using life coaches to “democratize coaching.” In contrast, our need for high-quality coaching led us to set rigorous standards: Our coaches required at least five years of coaching experience and ten years of leadership experience in a corporate environment.

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Growing the Vision

We bootstrapped our coaching business, growing the team to about 100 coaches, acquiring over 150 customers, and learning a great deal along the way.

In 2019, we began recording our coaching sessions—with the prior approval of both our corporate customers and participants—and entered a partnership with Harvard Business School. Professor Ting Zhang is now leading a study on the effectiveness of coaching using our recorded sessions.

That same year, we identified an opportunity to expand into manager training. We collaborated with Yelp to develop and deliver a foundational two-month course called Essential Conversations, which has since been taken by thousands of people. We’ve since developed dozens of other courses, which, combined with our coaching, make for a compelling market offering.

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The AI Revolution

In 2020, I connected with one of Google’s early engineers, who introduced me to Zia Syed, an AI expert. Zia joined our advisory board, providing insights on AI’s potential in coaching. Initially, he believed AI wouldn’t be ready to coach for some time but could help coaches enhance their skills.

However, in the summer of 2022, Zia’s perspective shifted. He informed me that new AI models were nearing the capability to coach and work alongside human coaches. We immediately began investigating, and when OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of 2022, we hired experts in prompt engineering and began developing our first bot.

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Looking into the Future

Since then, we’ve created a suite of five bots that work together to debrief 360 assessments, set learning goals, coach individuals toward those goals, role-play scenarios, and deliver the over 40 leadership courses we’ve developed since 2019.

As we continue to innovate and grow, I’m excited about the journey ahead. New Level Work began with a simple idea rooted in a desire to make a difference, and it has evolved into something truly special. 

Thank you for being part of this journey with us.

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