About Me 🧛♂️
Vlad Gyster Cofounder and CEO of Airbo. We help over 700 companies engage their employees in benefits and culture. Previously founded the Emerging Technology Practice at Willis Towers Watson.
Vlad Gyster
Cofounder and CEO of Airbo. We help over 700 companies engage their employees in benefits and culture. Previously founded the Emerging Technology Practice at Willis Towers Watson (when it was Towers Perrin).
Best way to stay in touch is connect on LinkedIn
Email me: [first name].[last name] at gmail.com
I’ve been in the HR and benefits tech since 2005. I’m using this space to share industry learnings that others could benefit from.
My Filter
I think it’s important to filter what a person says through their life experience, so here’s a little bit about me:
I got a pretty specialized degree in Healthcare Management from University of Connecticut. It just so happens that the state has been an insurance industry mecca for a long time, so I had an easy onramp into a very insular and hard to understand industry.
I spent the first 5 years in a “Real Job” of sorts at Willis Towers Watson, where I founded the emerging technologies practice in 2007, back when Facebook was a hot new thing and companies didn’t know what to do about it (at the time, it was called Towers Perrin, then Towers Watson).
In 2011, I really wanted to build products instead of just speaking about them. I struck out to do my own thing, and started H Engage, a gamified chatbot that drove engagement in corporate wellness. It was a crash course in how to build products in the benefits space. I bootstrapped the company, and our tech ended up being adopted by enterprises like Yahoo!, McDonalds, Campbell Soup, Michelin and many other F500s.
H Engage was a pretty thrilling learning experience. But the technology was heavy on services and hard to scale. In 2015, I turned down an acquisition offer, packaged the repeatable parts of H Engage into Airbo Labs, and moved to LA to surf and figure out how to build something truly scalable.
In 2020, we felt like we’d built it. We dropped the Labs and started scaling. Today, we’re used by over 700 companies around the country, from 50 to over 100,000 employees.
In 2021, we took on a small amount of money, mostly so we could work with some strategic investors.