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Marie Schneegans
Entrepreneur. On a mission to make people happier and more connected.
Marie Schneegans is an accomplished entrepreneur and CEO who co-founded Workwell, a platform designed to enhance the workplace experience for employees.1 Her entrepreneurial journey began after an internship at UBS, where she experienced feelings of loneliness and disconnection in a large corporate environment.14
Career Highlights
Workwell: Marie co-founded Workwell, an all-in-one workspace app that informs employees about events and services available in their workplace.12 The company raised $1.5 million in funding in 2016.1
Never Eat Alone: Prior to Workwell, Marie created an app called Never Eat Alone, which aimed to help employees connect for lunch.1
Current Venture: More recently, Marie has co-founded Motif, a company focused on advancing AI software engineering. They recently raised a $36 million Series A round led by Martin Casado at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).3
Leadership Style and Work Approach
Marie's approach to work and leadership is characterized by:
- Emphasis on work-life balance and wellbeing
- Focus on distributed team management
- Commitment to personal development and growth
She starts her day with physical activities like tennis, yoga, or Thai-boxing, and maintains a balance between focus time, wellbeing activities, calls, and personal development.1
Management Philosophy
Marie believes strongly in delegation and trusts her team implicitly. She works with a distributed team across multiple time zones, emphasizing asynchronous communication and using collaboration tools like Notion.1
Personal Growth
To handle the challenges of entrepreneurship, Marie:
- Maintains wellbeing routines
- Surrounds herself with mentors and coaches
- Regularly consults therapists
- Takes annual week-long breaks to disconnect and foster creativity1
Marie Schneegans continues to be a dynamic figure in the tech startup world, focusing on improving workplace experiences and advancing AI technologies in software engineering.
Highlights
ZipString, a Shark Tank toy is doing $50–100k PER DAY on TikTok Shop.
A weird little string-shooting toy. That's the kind of scale happening right now.
@jordantwestecom (e-commerce investor, founder of Social Commerce Club) just came on Thanks for Holding, and what he's seeing from brands scaling zero to 7 figures is wild:
- They sell to creators, not consumers
Your job isn't to convince the end buyer. It's to convince creators why your product deserves their audience over everyone else's.
- They calculate virality as media value
TikTok Shop CPMs run around $30. A billion impressions = tens of millions in earned media value, plus direct sales. Jordan's says it's like Facebook ads in 2014, most brands still don't get it.
- Operations matter as much as content
If your fulfillment can't handle 10K orders overnight, the algorithm isn't your problem. Backend infrastructure is the silent killer of TikTok Shop success.
- Live shopping is the next frontier
In China, live commerce is close to a trillion-dollar market. North America is 3–5 years behind. That gap is the opportunity.
And behind all of this, when a viral spike hits, someone still has to handle the flood of support tickets. "Where's my order?" "Wrong address." "Need to cancel." That volume scales with every creator you activate.
That’s the part we’re obsessed with at @14__ai
Go watch the full episode, and thanks again Jordan!
Flashback to rooming with @davefontenot at Mission Control in SF.
He nudged me into the Interact Fellowship (https://t.co/uwcLdb7wil), basically summer camp for tech kids who accidentally start companies. Grateful every day to be part of it.
What a crew! We hosted an Interact founders dinner this week with @xavierpladevall.
By the end of it, I was so full of off-the-record founder lore that I couldn't sleep.



