Eskalera Appoints Goldman Sachs Executive Dane E. Holmes as Chief Executive Officer

Eskalera, the next-generation employee experience platform, announced today the appointment of Dane E. Holmes as the company’s Chief Executive Officer. Holmes will join the company in early 2020 after nearly 19 years at Goldman Sachs, where he served as Head of Human Capital Management and was a member of the firm’s Management and Partnership Committees. Tom Chavez will move from Chief Executive Officer of Eskalera to Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors. 

“We are delighted to have someone of Dane’s caliber and experience join the Eskalera team,” said Eskalera’s Executive Chairman Tom Chavez. “With our early market momentum and Dane’s leadership, we’re excited for our next phase of growth, which is all about helping companies tap their people potential by recognizing and removing biases, systematizing inclusion, and optimizing their talent against revenue and growth objectives.”

Holmes is uniquely qualified to lead Eskalera, a company designed to meet the ever-changing needs of Human Resource professionals both now and into the future. Founded with the belief that culture is an organization’s primary source of enduring competitive advantage, Eskalera enables large and medium-sized enterprises to transform HR from processes centered on compliance and administration to intelligent systems that systematize inclusion and harness employee talent. Today Eskalera is helping companies in the Fortune 500 tech and financial sectors improve employee engagement, productivity, and revenue through a combination of AI, data science, and evidence-based methods for Diversity & Inclusion.

“The Eskalera Employee Experience Platform enables both human resource practitioners and business leaders to unlock their teams’ productivity and deliver meaningful employee experiences that ultimately drive the business,” Holmes stated. "My goal is to accelerate this evolution. I believe Eskalera has the right technology, team, and starting conditions to help companies of every size and type to drive stronger results through people.”

The company’s flagship product, Eskalera Engage, uses artificial intelligence to analyze a company’s diversity and inclusion practices alongside core HR data and unstructured employee sentiment. It puts actionable insights into the hands of HR practitioners to mitigate cognitive and systemic bias across every stage of the employee lifecycle and to pre-empt errors of exclusion before they spiral. As CEO, Holmes will continue to scale the platform to better serve global brands, grow the team, and build new products to meet the unique talent challenges confronting executives in the U.S. and beyond.

While at Goldman Sachs, Holmes worked in four different divisions over the last 19 years – from Human Capital Management and the Executive Office to Investment Banking and Finance. Holmes earned a BA from Columbia University, and serves as chairman of the Board of Directors for the Ron Brown Scholar Program and Vice-Chairman to the Board of Directors for StoryCorps.

Eskalera is one of six companies in super{set}, a startup studio that builds and funds enterprise-ready companies. super{set}’s co-founders Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya are enterprise tech veterans who previously launched and sold two startups, Krux and Rapt, to Salesforce and Microsoft respectively for $1.2 billion. 

About Eskalera
Through a combination of AI, data science and evidence-based findings on implicit bias and Diversity & Inclusion (D&I), Eskalera enables large and medium-sized companies to transform their HR operations by improving employee engagement, productivity and growth. By capturing, processing and analyzing data from easy-to-use mobile and desktop experiences, companies on Eskalera gain a real-time view of the atmosphere of their employee base across levels and functions, leverage those insights to drive measurable business results through people and enable their employees to succeed in competitive, fast-moving markets. Eskalera is based in San Francisco, CA. To learn more, go to eskalera.com.

About super{set}
Co-founded by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya in late 2018, super{set} funds, forms and builds startup technology companies. Super{set} engages deeply in the design and operations of its companies less as a traditional venture capitalist, more as a ‘player-coach’ with capital. All of super{set}’s portfolio companies are data-driven companies: they generate, capture, analyze and protect data to transform enterprise operations and to deliver on the promise of AI, machine learning and data science. To learn more, go to superset.com.

Contact Information

Maggie Philbin

Vice President

VSC for Eskalera

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