Who we are

We created FourthBox.org as a non-profit organization to provide mentorship and guidance to the next generation of leaders.

Our goal is to help founders and CEOs develop the skills, tools and strength to build the greatest companies they can.

We are committed to empowering a diverse range of founders across a wide-range of businesses.

—Marten Mickos
Clint Smith
Zack Urlocker

Guest Mentor: AnNa Binder

Anna is a world-renowned leader in the people and culture space and strongly believes that culture is a core driver of business success.

Anna serves as Asana’s Head of People Operations, a role she has held since May 2016. During her time at Asana, both Inc. Magazine and Fortune named Asana as a Best Workplace for four years in a row, and the company has been named a Best Place to Work in 2021 by Glassdoor. Prior to joining Asana, Anna was MuleSoft Inc.’s VP of People.

Binder received her MBA from IESE Business School, and holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Oregon. Binder also serves on the board of The Women’s Building in San Francisco.

Guest Mentor: Kelly Battles

Kelly Bodnar Battles has over 30 years of finance, operational and strategy leadership experience including serving as CFO at Quora, Bracket Computing (bought by VMWare), Alpha Medical and Host Analytics (Now Planful), Vice President of Finance at IronPort Systems (bought by Cisco), Chief of Staff to the CFO of Cisco Systems, and Director of Strategy and Corporate Development at Hewlett Packard. Kelly also worked as an Associate at both McKinsey and J.P. Morgan.

Kelly is currently on the Board and the Audit Committees of Arista, Genesys, Clari, DataStax and Alpha Medical, and has also served on the Board and as Audit Committee Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation. Kelly holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, both with honors.

What We Do

There are lots of tech gatherings if you want to learn the latest about LLM technology, or marketing optimization. What we do is different. We enable founders and CEOs to focus on the toughest problems. The problems they can’t share with their executive team or their board.

For CEOs who want to get real about real things, this is a unique and private bootcamp where we can work together on hard problems. By discussing them openly, with peers, without judgment, we enable leaders to develop new skills, try new approaches and lead to their full potential.

As operating executives with decades long careers, we’ve seen it all. Success, failure, near disasters, good cultures, bad cultures. What we have learned is that there are no easy answers. Sometimes the best thing you can do is have an advisor or mentor who can help you through those situations with compassion and guidance.

So bring your hard problems along with humility and a willingness to listen, learn and share.

Our goal is to give you the skills, mentorship and a support network to make you the best leader you can be.

Areas of Expertise

  • Managing distributed teams

  • Building a community-led business

  • Building brand

  • Performance marketing

  • Finding product-market fit

  • Scaling with product-led growth

  • Moving from product-led growth to inside sales

  • Scaling Enterprise Sales

  • Competitive product strategy

  • Pricing and packaging

  • International expansion

  • Preparing for M&A

  • Preparing for IPO

  • Open source business models (for software or AI)

  • Practicing openness / transparency

  • Building a strong company culture

  • and more…

Take the Leap