Founders Everywhere: Joe Essenfeld
Joe Essenfeld is the co-founder & CEO of Fora, a communication intelligence platform designed for leadership teams, transforming data into strategic insights that enhance organizational effectiveness.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Fora is a New York–based AI company that puts an end to ineffective OKRs, unnecessary meetings, and siloed communication, filling a critical gap in the intelligent enterprise. Its Communication Intelligence platform pushes real‑time, C‑suite insights directly to users based on the actual conversations happening across the organization. By securely analyzing and enriching data from recorded meetings and chats, Fora delivers the clarity executives need to move faster, and it even updates both company‑wide and individual OKRs automatically with fresh context pulled from those discussions. Executives also receive concise highlights from meetings they missed, eliminating the catch‑up scramble and freeing time for strategic work.
Co‑founder and CEO Joe Essenfeld has over 14 years of entrepreneurial leadership. He was the founding CEO of Jibe for a decade, where he played a pivotal role in helping some of the world's largest employers navigate hiring challenges through the implementation of cloud-based recruitment software. When the company was acquired by iCIMS, he spent another 4 years in various C-suite positions. He was also the COO of Insomnia Cookies where he ran operations and development. He’s embarking on his next venture with co-founders David Small and Zach Elias to use AI to cater to the unique needs and challenges of corporate leaders in the executive landscape.
Tell us about Fora.
Fora's Communication Intelligence platform captures and processes your company's meetings and chat conversations, then delivers key insights, important meeting summaries, and updated OKR progress directly to your dashboard and existing tools. Executives no longer waste time reviewing presentation decks or searching through message threads. Instead, they get real-time awareness of what's important, all protected by enterprise-grade security measures that meet Fortune 500 standards.
What sets Fora apart?
The AI market is crowded, but we focus on the audience that truly lives or dies by clarity: the C‑suite and their Chiefs of Staff. Every design decision was validated with that group. By enriching conversational data and surfacing it in real time, rather than asking leaders to hunt for it, Fora gives executives back the bandwidth to think and act strategically.
Tell us about some recent milestones Fora crushed.
We launched our product today and our website is live! We’re asking people to apply for access, that way we make sure the use cases really align with what we are building.
We are announcing our $3.8 million raise. This larger-than-normal pre-seed round was necessary to ensure we were building an enterprise-level product with a thoughtful approach.
What drives you into startup battle day after day?
Much of my motivation stems from the desire to keep the opportunity to develop something I deeply care about. Starting with just an idea, a dedicated and skilled team, and early customers who trust our vision brings immense satisfaction and joy, outweighing the stress and hard work required to build a company.
I am user number one of Fora, and I’m always balancing what I love about the product with what the broader market wants. It is inspiring and exciting to build something that I personally enjoy using.
Any advice for other founders?
One principle we follow is to minimize assumptions about our users. When you are creating something from nothing, it is easy to think several steps ahead of what you believe users want. We build and test one component at a time before moving on. This approach has saved us a lot of thrash and capacity. I did not do that my first time around as a founder; it really seems to be working now. When you drink your own champagne, you get excited, but you still need to make sure it tastes good to everyone else.
Listen to Joe Essenfeld chat with Jenny Fielding on the Venture Everywhere Podcast: Fora for Thought. Now on Apple & Spotify and check out all our past episodes here.
