Starting Up: This founder is helping make business leaders all stars

Professional athletes are continuously learning and growing, and the Monark platform aims to digitally bring that same approach to leaders.

By Adam DeRose
September 17, 2024

Kelsey Hahn knows a thing or two about teamwork.

“From as early as I can remember,” the Calgary-based tech founder has been “obsessed” with teams and the dynamics that lead to a group of underdogs coming away with the win. As a young child, Hahn, as a “traditional Canadian stereotype, played hockey, and as a young adult, she studied sports teams as proxies for organizations.

“As an athlete, I have always wondered why athletes are so obsessed with growth and development and constant improvement, and in the workplace, that doesn’t seem to happen,” she said.

So in 2020, Hahn and Amanda Julian cofounded Monark, an AI-powered leadership development platform that helps facilitate continual leadership growth. Hahn and Julian have coined “LRM,” leader relationship manager, to explain its basic features: tracking direct reports and their progress, scheduling their next one-on-ones, tracking high-level topics leaders need to review with direct reports, and noting how each direct report best receives feedback.

“We are trying to create the same experience for [leaders],” she said. “Integrating all of these data points that we’ve just never really had a place to store data about our people.”

Monark has raised more than $3 million in funding from firms including Storytime Capital, The51, and Hootsuite founder Ryan Holmes’ LOI Venture, at a valuation its founders peg at $12 million. The company works with a number of Canadian manufacturing, transportation, and energy companies, and has its sights set on the US. Hahn also added that she’s aiming to raise a Series A round in early 2025.

Hahn began her work as an organizational psychologist, consulting with companies on leadership development: “really expensive, high-touch 360s; really lengthy manual reports…off sites [and] strategy sessions for executive teams.” She was practicing the work of leadership development in a way that she knew couldn’t yield the greatest impact.

Unlike in sports where athletes are constantly striving to become even better, in business, a position of leadership, she observed, is the goal; if employees improve enough to move into the ranks of managers and beyond, they’ve made it, and that growth slows.

“You think about how an athlete shows up to their role and how they approach getting better,” she said. “They are practicing all the time. They are analyzing data. They’re looking at game tape. They’re getting feedback. They’re… working with their coaches. They are just obsessed with data and performance.”

That’s why she designed Monark, a platform with all of the key pieces to good leadership development. Rather than that swanky once-annual leadership development retreat, clients can offer their leaders a mix of live, in-person trainings in group settings with longer periods of learning with multimedia-based microlearning and behavioral nudging.

The platform also leverages AI for practicing difficult conversations.

“We are trying to replace the things that we actually don’t need humans to support and deliver, so that we can prioritize the use of humans for the really needy, complex things,” she said.