Michael Papay

CEO of Waggl and former CEO of Fort Hill Company, HR Technology pioneer and frequent author for Fast Company. Enjoys coaching his daughter's soccer team, hobby winemaking, and exploring this amazing country with his family in their Airstream.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/papay3
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Papay3
Sausalito, California, United States
Member since May 24, 2018

Co-founder & CEO of Waggl - helping organizations thrive and employees dance at work. Quote_down

About

Education

1998 Babson , BS , Finance & Entrepreneurship

I am a(n):

Entrepreneur

Companies I've founded or co-founded:

Fort Hill Company, Waggl

Companies I work or worked for:

Genesis Health, Fort Hill Company, Waggl

Achievements (products built, personal awards won):

Multiple Brandon Hall HCM Awards, Bay Area Great Place to Work Company, INC, 5000 Best Place to work award, Have lead teams that have built disruptive HCM platforms that have been used by 1,000 of companies and Millions of people

If you're an entrepreneur or corporate innovator, why?

Loving building great products, great brands, and amazing cultures

My favorite startups:

Waggl (of course), Slack, DocuSign, AirBNB

What's most frustrating and rewarding about entrepreneurship/innovation?

The most rewarding thing is to be able to create and build something that didn't exist which offers meaningful purpose to its employees and creates significant value to its customers.

What's the No. 1 mistake entrepreneurs/innovators make?

Spending too much money chasing product-market fit -- if your product is referred to as 'neat' or that it 'can be used for anything', you still have some work to do on product market fit.

What are the top three lessons you've learned as an entrepreneur?

- It takes a lot of time and passion to build one of these 'overnight successes'
- How important culture and employee experience is to building a successful start-up
- Alignment and focus is how you go fast

Full bio

Michael is a technology entrepreneur with almost 20 years of experience building and leading Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses within the discipline of Human Capital Management. Michael has been a co-founder and CEO of two HR Tech companies and the most recent venture, Waggl, is transforming the way organizations get actionable insights from their employees. A sample set of the clients who have counted on the solutions Michael's teams have created include GE, Honeywell, Cisco, Sony, HP, Agilent, Home Depot, Oracle, eBay, Yahoo!, Pfizer, Kaiser Permanente, Stanford University, Agilent, Genentech, Deloitte, Morgan Stanley, IRS, and Standard Chartered Bank. The products Michael and his teams created have improved the performance and engagement of thousands of organizations and millions of employees around the globe. Michael believes that respect and transparency lead to a more connected and engaged workforce and the best ideas and input can (and should) come from anywhere in the organization. Michael attended Babson College, the nation’s #1 school for entrepreneurship and graduated with a B.S. in business Finance & Entrepreneurship.