Who is Christine Tao?  

Christine Tao is the CEO/Co-founder of Sounding Board, a VC-backed startup bringing personalized, continuous leadership development to the $40B+ leadership & training industry. Prior to co-founding Sounding Board Christine was a Senior Vice President of Developer Relations at Tapjoy, a venture-backed, leading mobile advertising platform. She led the growth of Tapjoy’s network business from $0 to over $100 million in revenues in less than 3 years.  She has also advised several venture-backed startups including Flyby Media (acquired by Apple), Immersv & Comprendi. Prior to that she led e-commerce partnerships and strategy at YouTube. Christine holds an MBA in Marketing & Operations from Wharton and a BA in Business Administration from UC Berkeley. 

Show Highlights 

• Christine shares her experience growing up in a family business and how that has influenced her professionally and how she operates as the CEO/Founder of Sounding Board.   
• Christine shares the importance of thinking big when starting a business and making sure there is a strong sense of purpose for the employees to believe in and subscribe to.  She gives her dad credit for this thinking.   
• Christine talks about the importance of providing employees with purpose and opportunities for growth. This is important right now because there is a war for talent and you want to attract the best talent.   
• Christine explains her personal journey that led her to start Sounding Board.  
• Terri talks about her experience working with an executive coach and how valuable the experience has been for her.   

• Sounding Board is all about democratizing coaching for employees throughout the organization so that they can grow and scale at a rate they aren’t able to do on their own.   
• Christine turns the tables on Terri and asks her for one of the major takeaways from working with a coach.  She responded in how she recommends approaching working with coaches.   
• Terri shares how her experience working with a coach helped her not only professionally but personally as well.  The work she did applied across her life.   
• Christine talks about how coaching has shifted and how Sounding Board uses tech to scale coaching.   
• If Christine could wave a magic wand, she would change people’s assumptions and have them come into conversations thinking the best of the other person or people in the conversation.   

• Bonus questions (new):  Christine’s recommended founder resource is the podcast The Startup Chat.   

Terri’s Key Takeaway 

Dream big and ask for what you want.   

References in the Podcast 

• Sounding Board:  https://www.soundingboardinc.com/ 
• Tapjoy:  https://www.tapjoy.com/ 
• Women’s Startup Lab:  https://womenstartuplab.com/ 
• The Startup Chat (podcast):  https://thestartupchat.com/ 

Contact 

Christine can be reached via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/christineptao/.   

You can follow Terri on Twitter at @terrihansonmead or go to her website at www.terrihansonmead.com or on Medium:  https://medium.com/@terrihansonmead.  

Feel free to email Terri at [email protected]. 

To continue the conversation, go to Twitter at @PilotingLife and use hashtag #PilotingYourLife.