Forage is excited to announce we have brought on four exceptional talent leaders to our Advisory Board, including current and former talent leaders from Peloton, Visa, Walt Disney, Gilead Sciences, Capital Group and Goldman Sachs. As we enter our next stage of growth, and help companies reimagine the way they inspire, engage and hire talent, our Advisory Board will serve as a critical beacon of counsel, knowledge, and support for Forage in our pursuit of our mission.
Announcing our Advisory Board!
Forage is on a mission to give everyone the tools to meaningfully advance their careers, for free. We are doing this by building the world’s most valuable open-access collection of workplace training, curated in collaboration with world-leading companies such as SAP, BCG, JPMorgan, Citi, KPMG, Electronic Arts, and others. Nearly 2 million students have enrolled in training (or as we call it, ‘virtual job simulations’) acquiring the skills and confidence to pursue careers that align with their passions.
We have a team of super-powered humans who work tirelessly to build a product that gives students access to our incredible open access courses. We’re supported by our incredible board and investors, who are always ready with advice and guidance to make sure we’re on track to maximize the impact of our courses on the student community. Together, we’re creating the largest and most accessible platform for leading companies to inspire, engage, and hire the next generation of emerging talent.
Now, we have the next piece of the puzzle: this month, we’re very excited to announce the launch of the Forage Advisory Board. We’ve brought together five of the brightest minds in the world of talent to help us achieve our mission to change the world of recruitment forever.
Helping us identify our blindspots
One of our team values is ‘We don’t do BS.’ We believe the only way to create a successful product is to be honest with ourselves about the challenges we face and focus our energy on solving the biggest, hardest problems first. But this is really difficult when we’re heads down focusing on building our product – we needed to find a way to ensure we were constantly checking our blind spots.
We formed our Advisory Board to help us do just this. Our goal was to bring together a group of exceptional and experienced talent leaders who could help us peer around the corner of what the future of talent looks like. We wanted to attract fiercely independent, ambitious, pioneering leaders in the space who would challenge our assumptions to make sure we’re truly innovating and provide us with honest and unbiased feedback on our product and our strategy. We’re confident we have done that with these appointees!
Advisory Board mandate
Our Senior Leadership Team meets with the Advisory Board on a quarterly basis. In these meetings, we update the advisors on our progress over the last quarter, and we spend time exploring new ideas for product and strategy, or workshopping one or two core challenges we face. Individual advisors also meet with the Senior Leadership Team on an ad hoc basis to help us ensure that our product roadmap, go-to-market framework, and overall strategy are aligned with our mission.
Based on their specific areas of expertise, our advisors will contribute to and provide feedback on our thought leadership pieces, and provide insights into the future of work and early talent recruitment.
Advisory Board members
Our current Advisory Board members are:
Mariana Garavaglia, Chief People and Business Operations Officer @ Peloton: Mariana has been Peloton’s Chief People and Business Operations Officer since 2019. In her role, she is responsible for scaling Peloton through Systems and People. Prior to joining Peloton, Mariana was at Amazon for 11 years, holding various positions in General Management, Operations, and HR leadership roles throughout her tenure. Mariana has also worked in public education, where she held various Bilingual Education roles for Title-I schools in Texas. Mariana holds a BA from the University of Oklahoma and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. She serves on the Tuck School of Business MBA Council and sits on the Board of Directors for Wiley, an education and publishing company.
John Renfro, Former SVP & CHRO @ Capital Group and Disney: John has spent his career driving the people dimension of business strategy, and is the former Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Capital Group. He led the company’s worldwide human resources organization and was responsible for driving its global human capital strategy, and served on the Board of Directors of the Capital Research and Management Company. Prior to joining Capital Group, John held positions as Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at AECOM, Vice President of Human Resources for Hewlett-Packard Company, and Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at The Walt Disney Company, and at Gateway Computers.
Michael Ross, Former CHRO @ Visa and former Chief Talent and Rewards Officer @ Hewlett-Packard: Michael is doing his part to drive disruption in the field of Human Resources through his roles in academia and as an investor in next generation HR software. This includes teaching a new course on the Future of Work at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, serving as an advisor to several HR technology companies, and as a founding member of the Executive Advisory Board of Silicon Valley-based SemperVirens Venture Capital. In his most recent operating role, Michael served as the CHRO at Visa Inc. from 2013 to 2018. Michael joined Visa from HP where he was the Chief Talent and Rewards Officer. Prior to HP, he worked in Merrill Lynch’s Human Resources Division in New York and London. Additionally, Michael was Managing Director of Compensation & Benefits at Morgan Stanley.
Katie Watson, Former Executive Vice President Human Resources @ Gilead Sciences: Katie is a global Human Resources leader with 25 years of experience across life sciences, technology, and investment banking. She spent 17 years at Gilead Sciences, where she led the Human Resources function and partnered closely with the CEO and Board of Directors on strategies to enable organizational growth, establish an engaged workforce, and create a mission-based culture that aligns with the company’s core values. She is a sought-after advisor to executives and C-suite teams on HR matters and was named one of SF Business Times’s “Most Influential Women in Business 2017.”
We will look to fill one more spot on the Advisory Board by the end of 2021.
For more information, please contact Anna Prell, Chief of Staff.
