The Story of Rising Team: Building the Performance Platform Every Leader Wished They Had

The Story of Rising Team: Building the Performance Platform Every Leader Wished They Had

There’s a license plate holder somewhere in a drawer that says “Do You Yahoo?” Jennifer Dulski never put it on her car. When she started at Yahoo in 1998, the company was so cool that displaying the merch felt too show-offy. The Internet was young, Yahoo was exploding, and everyone who worked there was part of something electric.

But the real value wasn’t the brand cachet. It was watching a company grow from 400 people to thousands—and experiencing firsthand what makes high-performing teams work when everything’s moving at breakneck speed. That education would take twenty-plus years and stops at Facebook, Change.org, and other companies to fully crystallize. By February 2020, Jennifer knew exactly what tool she’d always wished existed.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jennifer Dulski, CEO and Founder of Rising Team, shared how she built the team performance platform that now serves everyone from Google engineers to Massachusetts probation officers. This is the story of what happens when someone who’s lived through Internet-speed growth decides to solve the problem that every leader faces but most accept as unsolvable.

The Pattern Recognition Years

Some founders start companies because they spot a market opportunity. Others start because they’ve personally experienced the same problem across multiple contexts and realize nobody’s actually solved it. Jennifer falls firmly in the second camp.

At Yahoo, during those rocket-ship growth years, she watched teams either gel or fracture under pressure. At Facebook, where she led groups and community, she saw what happened when you scaled to tens of thousands of people while trying to maintain culture. By the time she got to Change.org as president, helping scale that organization around the world for five years, the pattern was undeniable.

“I built this because it was the tool I wish I had as a leader of teams throughout my career. I always wanted something like this, and it never existed,” Jennifer explains.

What existed were expensive facilitators you hired for off-sites. Training programs that ate enormous budgets. Engagement surveys that measured problems without solving them. Team building exercises that felt more like obligations than opportunities. But nothing that gave leaders a scalable way to build deeply connected, high-performing teams.

The irony is that the cultures Jennifer experienced at Yahoo and Facebook shared something crucial that made these gaps more glaring. “The thing that they had in common, though, was really talented, passionate people who were very self motivated. Like in some of the companies I’ve worked at, we’ve had to spend a lot of time talking about sense of urgency and velocity and never, ever had to do that at either Facebook or Yahoo.”

When you’ve worked places where motivation isn’t the bottleneck, you start focusing on what is. Connection. Understanding. The kind of team cohesion that turns talented individuals into something exponentially more effective.

The Serendipitous Timing

In February 2020, Jennifer hatched the idea and started bootstrapping. She wrote the outline, began thinking about prototypes, started sketching out what a solution might look like. Then in April, she incorporated the company.

Two months into a global pandemic.

“When I first hatched the idea, the pandemic hadn’t even started. You know, I built this because it was the tool I wish I had as a leader of teams throughout my career. I always wanted something like this, and it never existed. And then the thing that I thought was important overnight became urgent to everybody because building more connected, engaged teams, you know, when everyone’s team was remote, all of a sudden everyone really needed a way to help them do that.”

This is the kind of timing that sounds too perfect to be true. But Jennifer’s quick to point out it was serendipitous, not planned. She’d identified the problem based on decades of experience. The pandemic just made what was important suddenly urgent for everyone else.

Rising Team’s core offering reflects that original insight: software that helps leaders run deeply connecting interactive workshops without needing expensive outside facilitators, plus a hyper-personalized AI coach that knows everything about the team and provides tailored advice about each member.

The Pivot That Unlocked Everything

The first version of Rising Team looked nothing like what exists today. Jennifer built it for managers to use one-on-one with each person on their team. Individual assessments, personalized tools, the kind of detailed development work that makes logical sense when you think about building high-performing teams.

“The very first version of the product was built mainly for managers to use one on one with each person on their team. And it had the same kind of set of assessments and tools that you could use, but it was meant to be done individually,” she recalls.

Then came the realization that changed the company’s trajectory entirely.

“What we realized and what was the huge unlock for the growth of the company was that doing this as a team would be more effective for two reasons. One is it saves a lot of time, you know, it’s much faster to get the whole team together in one meeting than to meet each person separately and the other is teams really crave this. They really want to know each other better. They want to feel more connected. And especially in hybrid and distributed work, they feel that strongly.”

That second insight—that teams actively crave connection—was the unlock. It wasn’t just about efficiency or saving managers time. People genuinely wanted to know their teammates better, to understand how they work, to feel part of something cohesive. Rising Team wasn’t filling a gap nobody noticed. They were addressing a hunger that everyone felt but most organizations had no structured way to satisfy.

The Learning Curve on Pilots

Early-stage companies make predictable mistakes. Jennifer’s was thinking activation mattered more than engagement. She offered unlimited teams for $1,500 for a short period, figuring the key was just getting people to use the product.

“A lot of people bought it, but then they didn’t really use it. There wasn’t really an incentive to get going with unlimited teams and so forth,” she explains.

The solution went against startup conventional wisdom. Instead of shorter, cheaper pilots to reduce friction, Rising Team now runs twelve-month pilots with several hundred people. The reasoning is surgical: you need statistically significant data to prove ROI. A handful of teams using the product for a few weeks generates anecdotes. Hundreds of people using it for a year generates the data that moves engagement scores, manager effectiveness ratings, and retention rates.

“That’s what gives you statistically significant data to prove that it’s working. And that’s what then gives people the reason to see the ROI and continue expanding,” Jennifer notes.

Bank of Hawaii became the proof point. They started with a pilot, rolled out to more of their organization, then deployed company-wide within six months. Years later, the data is definitive: engagement scores improve, manager effectiveness increases, and employee retention lifts significantly based on Rising Team usage.

The Future: Three Big Bets

Ask Jennifer about Rising Team’s vision for the next three to five years and she doesn’t talk about ARR targets or customer counts. She talks about three specific expansion vectors that will determine whether Rising Team becomes the tool every team on earth uses.

The first is AI evolution. “We offer what I believe is the best of both worlds, deep human connection, plus AI to help you remember all the things you’ve learned when meeting people,” Jennifer explains. That AI will expand beyond coaching into helping leaders write performance reviews, run one-on-ones, and handle all the adjacent work that comes from understanding teams deeply.

The second is moving beyond corporate settings into hourly and frontline workers. “We launched what we call mini kits, which are ten to 15 minutes long and can be done on mobile devices. And so we’re starting to move into factories and retail stores and bank branches,” she notes. The impact potential here is massive—Rising Team already works with Fortune 500 tech companies, school teachers, and government agencies. Adding frontline workers expands the addressable market exponentially.

The third is platformization. Rising Team is opening up their infrastructure so others can build scalable interactive workshops on the platform. Instead of being the only company creating this content, they become the foundation layer that enables an entire ecosystem.

“I believe that we can help every team on earth be more successful, more connected, and more engaged. And we’re starting to see that happen already because we have Fortune 500 tech companies, but we also have school teachers and government agencies. I have, like the Massachusetts probation officers use Rising Team, and they all see the same kind of results.”

The Legacy Question

Jennifer also wrote a book, “Purpose Driven,” and teaches at Stanford’s business school about scaling growing companies. When asked about the objective behind the book, her answer reveals something about how she thinks about building things that last.

“A book is a real legacy in a way that online writing isn’t. Not only did I write it, but I also recorded the audiobook. I thought of it as kind of a legacy, even for my children and for sort of the stamp I wanted to leave on the world.”

Rising Team carries that same long-term orientation. This isn’t a company optimizing for a quick exit or chasing whatever’s trendy in HR tech. It’s built on a problem Jennifer experienced personally across decades of leadership. The solution is informed by watching hundreds of teams succeed and struggle. And the vision is to reach every team on earth—corporate and frontline, tech companies and government agencies, anyone who needs their team to be more connected and effective.

The license plate holder from Yahoo might be sitting in a drawer somewhere, but the lessons from those explosive growth years are built into every aspect of Rising Team. Sometimes the best companies come from founders who spent twenty years learning exactly what problem needs solving—and then finally had the conviction to build the solution themselves.