About us

We started Rypple because people kept telling us how much they disliked their performance reviews. Everything else we do these days is immediate and social. But work — and particularly performance management — is lagging behind. So we set out to build a solution that people would actually find useful.

Our mission is to create delightful software that helps people advance their careers, teams achieve their goals faster, and companies retain their top performers.

Rypple combines the best qualities of social software with a new approach to performance management—one that empowers managers and their teams to learn faster and perform better. We based Rypple on 50+ years of behavioral science, focusing on what really keeps people passionate about their work.

A feedback-driven culture

Our unique product and culture have been winning over the hearts and minds of people at some of the greatest companies out there. Our product development and design leadership has held senior roles at some of the world's leading technology companies and start-ups, including IBM, Mozilla, IMVU, Salesforce, Aardvark, Saba, Ariba, and ADP.

At Rypple, we're always experimenting and constantly learning. We have a healthy disregard for the “impossible” and “the way things are done.” We practice what we preach. We have regular 1:1 meetings to coach each other. We thank people for great work. We give feedback all the time. And we do quarterly performance summaries with Loops.

We work hard and like solving big problems. We play hard, because we like hanging out with each other. We enjoy fine wine, modern art, attempting to rock climb, competitive soccer, rock concerts and usability testing. We're based in Toronto, San Francisco and Atlanta.


  • Meet the Rypple Team

    • John Wookey

      What I do: Lead the team that’s delivering a new category of enterprise software, based on the social enterprise.

      What I did before: I’ve spent 25 years building enterprise software across ERP, CRM and numerous industry applications at places like Ross Systems, Oracle, and SAP.

      What I do for fun: Hike and camp in the Sierras and spend time with my family.

    • Daniel Debow

      What I do: Lead the vision and market strategy for Rypple.

      What I did before: I've spent 10 years in business software, co-founding Workbrain, which was acquired by Infor and Rypple, which was acquired by salesforce.com.

      What I do for fun: Play music on my bass, read, and hang out with my family.

    • David Stein

      What I do: Grow the business and make our customers wildly successful with Rypple.

      What I did before: I've spent 15 years in software building and growing companies; first as a co-founder of Workbrain (acquired by Infor), then as co-founder of Rypple, recently acquired by salesforce.com.

      What I do for fun: Spend time in the country with my family, play golf, watch movies and dabble in wine collecting.

    • Woodson Martin

      What I do: Define the products.

      What I did before: 20 years in the IT industry managing products, marketing, people, and operations. Lived and worked in Europe twice.

      What I do for fun: Sailing and anything involving a toolbox.

    • Brian Zotter

      What I do: Lead the engineering team.

      What I did before: I’m a veteran of both Salesforce and start-ups and want to use technology to change the way people work.

      What I do for fun: I enjoy raking bunkers and searching for errant tee shots on (sometimes) the golf course.

    • Steve DeBacco

      What I do: Focus on increasing our market share among a base of thought-leading clients while building out a direct sales team and partner ecosystem.

      What I did before: I served in key executive roles at several successful technology start-ups including Workbrain and Ariba.

      What I do for fun: Running, playing tennis, and torturing myself on the golf course.

    • Ryan Dewsbury

      What I do: Imagine how to use software to build lively interaction systems between people.

      What I did before: Development for startups including Aardvark and Social.IM. Personal projects including Gpokr, Kdice, and Easy Message. Authored Google Web Toolkit Applications book.

      What I do for fun: Spend time with my two daughters and work on farming skills.

    • Jesse Goldman

      What I do: Lead Customer Success. My mission is to ensure every customer has an outstanding experience with Rypple.

      What I did before: I was an early contributor at Endeca, and played a number of leadership roles, including in professional services, sales engineering and marketing. I helped lead Endeca's expansion into Europe.

      What I do for fun: I’ve got a high-spirited thirst for knowledge of scotch whiskey. I’m an active member of the Toronto Symphony's Young Leadership Council, and enjoy playing piano. I played outfield for the Canadian Junior baseball champions and am an aspiring golfer.

    • Marcus Gosling

      What I do: Design.

      What I did before: Studied industrial design and interaction design. Consultant at IDEO. Co-founded IMVU, a successful social entertainment startup. Joined Rypple in late 2010. Teaching, advising startups.

      What I do for fun: Build and ride shiny, lightweight bicycles.

    • Maksim Ovsyannikov

      What I do: I build the future.

      What I did before: I spent most of my career building social software that is used by some of the largest organizations in order to improve business productivity and employee performance.

      What I do for fun: I take pictures with fancy cameras.

    • David Priemer

      What I do: Lead the corporate sales team, help onboard new Rypple clients.

      What I did before: Director Sales Operations at Varicent, Director Solutions Consulting at Workbrain.

      What I do for fun: I love cooking, playing hockey, and spending time with my kids.

    • Matthew Schulz

      What I do: Product Support and Quality Engineering.

      What I did before: Product Management, Professional Services, Product Support, Quality Engineering, Documentation, Partner Solutions, Development.

      What I do for fun: Relax with family and friends for a laugh, travel, ride my motorbike, snowboard and play games of any kind.

    • Nick Stein

      What I do: Drive the market. Communicate the vision, benefits, and path to becoming a Social Enterprise.

      What I did before: Investigative journalist at Fortune magazine, the CBC, and other national media outlets.

      What I do for fun: My obsession with great espresso has taken me to South America, Trieste, and even Vietnam. When I’m not at work or home with my kids, I can often be found on the golf course, hacking away.

    • Charmaine Abalajon

      What I do: Shout Rypple from the rooftops (aka Marketing).

      What I did before: After getting degrees in math and business, I worked at Fritolay, PWC, McCain, and TELUS.

      What I do for fun: Board Games, Salsa, Call of Duty, Happy Hour, TMZ, and Travel! Fun Fact: I once complimented the tie of the German Minister of Agriculture during Oktoberfest in Munich (it was lime green with little tractors)!

    • Alireza Bakhtiari

      What I do: Software development.

      What I did before: Graduate student in computer science at Laval University in Quebec.

      What I do for fun: I like photography and take photos whenever I get some free time.

    • Renato Bellia

      What I do: Deliver a great user experience that changes the way people work. I code in an agile environment that makes me re-think the way I code.

      What I did before: I delivered software solutions to industries like mortgage, house insurance, travel and tourism, heath care.

      What I do for fun: I ride my bike across the universe, spotting interesting places to have a good meal with friends, to drink a decent glass of wine with my wife, or to taste a different beer.

    • Nathan Bradshaw

      What I do: Java development, occasional IE wrangling.

      What I did before: Spent a non-custodial period with the Western Australian police service, wrote code for miners then moved to Canada and into medical research computing before happily landing with Rypple.

      What I do for fun: Unpaid service work for a 1 year old tyrant and occasional adventures in the snow.

    • Iurie Cangea

      What I do: Software engineering with a focus on architecture, scalable infrastructure, development process, and security.

      What I did before: Senior software engineer at Offermatica and Omniture, which was acquired by Adobe.

      What I do for fun: Contribute to open source projects, play guitar and piano, and hit the gym.

    • Venk Chandran

      What I do: Help our large and in charge clients get the most out of Rypple. Share their stories and success. Build relationships and learn from key users from across our client base.

      What I did before: Business Consultant for Asia-Pacific and Australia. Short lived radio host for CBC.

      What I do for fun: Play lots of music loudly and drink coffee. Life is too short for bad coffee. Nerd out on new technologies, businesses, and learn about empires that haven't been created just yet.

    • Erin Clark

      What I do: Sales and community.

      What I did before: Account executive at SuccessFactors.

      What I do for fun: Get creative in the kitchen and explore the city that I love, San Francisco.

    • Aaron Egier

      What I do: Drive product development for Rypple's mobile apps and integrations with third-party software.

      What I did before: Software and hardware design at Altera, Research in Motion (RIM), and several startups.

      What I do for fun: Run 10Ks and read science fiction.

    • Susan Emerson

      What I do: Work with prospective customers 24/7 to educate them on and delight them with the art of the possible with Rypple.

      What I did before: Serial high growth innovative software companies (Zuora, Workbrain, Commerce One...).

      What I do for fun: Yoga, running, reading, and soccer.

    • Meghan Gendelman

      What I do: Help our strategic customers get the most out of Rypple.

      What I did before: I have more than a decade of experience in talent development as a global training consultant focused on coaching, feedback, and team development.

      What I do for fun: I’m an avid traveler, and have explored 42 countries in the last 7 years.

    • Kelly Hoffer

      What I do: I'm our technical support manager and an advocate for our customers.

      What I did before: In a former life I was a wedding and event photographer.

      What I do for fun: I am an avid maker of pies.

    • Ash Howard

      What I do: Work with our enterprise clients to help them understand how Rypple will help their people.

      What I did before: Worked in the "SaaS" arena for many years and recently made a couple of babies.

      What I do for fun: Play with my family and squeeze friends in for dinners, while quaffing wine throughout.

    • Yvette Hu

      What I do: QA engineering.

      What I did before: I have more than a decade of software quality assurance experience at Teachscape, Sourceforge, and Collabnet.

      What I do for fun: I enjoy traveling with my family and spending time in my backyard gardening.

    • Justin Hypes

      What I do: Make the world part of the Rypple family.

      What I did before: Helped young startups grow into successful, thriving companies.

      What I do for fun: I rock, and I roll.

    • Lou Kamenov

      What I do: I drive technical operations and IT.

      What I did before: I spent close to a decade at Aeye, spearheading the design and development of distributed environments, computational clusters and elastic cloud infrastructure.

      What I do for fun: I enjoy canoeing and basketball and am an aspiring skier. An avid environmentalist, I have volunteered on many different campaigns, including animal rehabilitation centres and conservation organizations.

    • Gene Kim

      What I do: Code.

      What I did before: Worked for various creative agencies, start-ups and design boutiques throughout the Bay Area.

      What I do for fun: Practice Ralph Gracie Brazilian Jiu Jitsu

    • Alex Klen

      What I do: Build features, fix bugs, and do some all-around ninja-coding.

      What I did before: Software engineering student.

      What I do for fun: I play games and code my own games. "I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code."

    • Greg Lapouchnian

      What I do: I build new product features and improve existing ones.

      What I did before: I built web based software for RIM's Blackberry Enterprise Server.

      What I do for fun: Travel and soccer. I'm a big supporter of Toronto FC.

    • Irwin Liu

      What I do: Pave the path to massive growth at Rypple by riding the three horses of Content, Process and Product. No, I don't ride all three horses at the same time. I ride one at a time and switch between them quickly.

      What I did before: Prior to Rypple, I worked as a management consultant for big companies and was a pro bono advisor for tech startups.

      What I do for fun: I’m a tennis player, chess player, and an avid reader. I love all things geek.

    • Milton Mednick

      What I do: Focus on business development at Rypple.

      What I did before: I worked in Sales and Service for the Toronto Raptors and as a licensing manager for the Bob Marley brand at ABG.

      What I do for fun: Enjoy hitting the links, shredding powder and frequenting The Burger's Priest.

    • Kallin Nagelberg

      What I do: Application development, analytics, and product design.

      What I did before: I worked on the back end of some extremely high traffic web applications, including Canada's largest newspaper and an e-commerce platform powering the world's largest online flower shops.

      What I do for fun: I spend my free time monkeying around at the gym, gaming it up on my comfy sofa, or honing my sport-bike skills on the tracks of NorCal.

    • Vinoj Rajendran

      What I do: Help customers address all their questions and concerns. I'm like a modern day Dear Abby except I don't get involved in relationships, just Connections.

      What I did before: Programming online surveys for a market research company. I moved to Rypple shortly after my end of year performance review - paper was used, how archaic.

      What I do for fun: Rypple is my life and the middle name of my first born — if I had one. I also like to read.

    • Mike Shea

      What I do: Software developer on the Infrastructure team.

      What I did before: I worked at IBM Research, helping professors write papers about online games. I also had various jobs working on a system to automate porting Java applications between mobile devices.

      What I do for fun: I enjoy competing in dragonboat regattas, running the occasional marathon, and playing Magic: The Gathering. I am also a vegan.

    • Austin Tam

      What I do: Product management, bridging the gap between business and engineering.

      What I did before: Built web based scheduling solutions for big box stores and large enterprises.

      What I do for fun: Snowboarding, hacking, martial arts and long walks on the beach.

    • Tom Vepraskas

      What I do: Share current customer stories to communicate the Rypple value proposition to prospective new users.

      What I did before: Over the past 10 years I have worked with executives and HR leaders to implement and maintain benefit products that create a unique offering that enhances the quality of life for employees.

      What I do for fun: When I’m not hanging out with my loving wife, I love to get in the gym and mix it up with cardio, heavy lifting, and long swims. On the weekend it is very important to play a round of golf, or a game of soccer with friends.

    • Sachet Vora

      What I do: I am on my first co-op work term here. I started off with level 1 support and now I am on the production team.

      What I did before: School.

      What I do for fun: I like to swim and read (fiction usually) during my free time. I am new to Toronto so I usually spend my weekends exploring the city.

    • Alfred Yang

      What I do: Software engineering focused on making things simple, robust, and fast.

      What I did before: On the team of Tungle, which was acquired by RIM.

      What I do for fun: I was a varsity soccer player at the University of Waterloo and am a big fan of table tennis. I also love to cook on the weekends.