Tim Eisenhauer

I've started three companies, sold one, and written a book about why people hate their jobs. Before any of that, I was an electrician's apprentice who quit after being told to jump into a six-foot-deep mud hole.

I went back to school, got a $10/hour IT internship at a beauty company, built them an intranet on my own time, and they fired me. Then they presented my work to upper management as their own. That experience taught me more about employee engagement than any business book ever could.

In 2008, Vivek Thakur and I co-founded Axero Solutions. We built Communifire, a social intranet platform used by companies like Toyota, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, TED, and Edwards Lifesciences. We ran it fully remote from San Diego with employees and customers from around the world. We sold it a few years later.

I never planned to build an intranet company. We started Axero as a software dev shop and built Communifire because we needed a way to collaborate with our own team. Then customers started using it internally and suddenly we were in the intranet business. I still don't know if that's the simulation winking at me or just how my brain works. I keep solving my own problems and finding out other people have the same ones.

Along the way, the company started growing, and I noticed the same absurd dysfunction from every terrible job I'd ever had creeping back in. So I wrote Who the Hell Wants to Work for You? Mastering Employee Engagement — partly to figure out how to stop it, partly because I'd been collecting these stories for years and they needed to go somewhere. It was praised by HR leaders and executives at PepsiCo and Campbell Soup (of all places), featured in Fortune, Forbes, TIME, and Entrepreneur, and hit bestseller on Amazon.

Now I'm building Apaya, and the pattern continues. I don't love social media. Nobody does. But every business needs it, and doing it consistently is a grind most small businesses can't keep up with. So instead of complaining about it, we built something that handles it automatically.

I'm based in Pennsylvania. I write about marketing, AI, and the things I build to avoid doing things I don't want to do.