#StartupsEverywhere: Gloria Folaron, Co-founder, Leantime
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Transforming Work Management with AI
From her lived experience, Gloria Folaron identified a significant gap in support for neurodivergent individuals in the workplace, particularly in project management. She co-founded Leantime, where she is developing accessible work management solutions that promote motivation, connection, and engagement for all employees. We sat down with her to discuss open-source models, navigating the grant system, and more.
Tell us about your background. What led you to Leantime?
My background is a little unconventional. I started as a nurse before I later transitioned into product management. At Leantime, our core focus is building work management systems that are accessible for neurodivergent individuals. Whether I was working as a nurse or in a startup, I saw neurodivergence everywhere. It’s an issue that often goes unaddressed in the workplace, yet it significantly impacts the workforce. In fact, the most recent statistics I reviewed showed that 53 percent of tech workers identify as neurodivergent.
There is clearly a gap in terms of the conversations we're having at work, and the products that exist in the space to help people stay motivated, feel connected, and engaged in their work. These products are built under the assumption that people all work the same way. I drew from my work experiences and began asking, how can we bring these elements together to close the gap?
What is the work you all are doing at Leantime?
We are in the process of developing our own neurodivergent motivation model, combining the main mainstream research from science and academia with lived experiences. Some of the features we are preparing to release are geared toward building routines, reframing individual tasks into goals, and understanding how they relate to the work.
One of our features is task sentiment, where individuals rate tasks using an emoji scale ranging from a red angry face to a unicorn. Our current baseline allows users to prioritize tasks based on how they feel about the work. The next step is leveraging this data to assign tasks to people based on their interests, without needing to navigate complex team dynamics.
Do you open source your software at Leantime? Why did you decide on this path?
My technical co-founder has always existed in the open source space. He had been around the code for a long time, and was already sharing in the open source space. When we started, we were specifically looking at how to make project management more accessible. Right now there are very complicated tools that companies have to pick apart piece-by-piece to figure out and then extremely simple, inefficient tools. There is no middle ground. So when we started, we were looking at how to make project management accessible at that middle level. This spurred us to be in the open source space, because it gives accessibility to people from a data sense in that they have ownership over what they're building. They have the ability to add insight. They can contribute code back, and it's a different type of accessibility, which is really at the core of what we are doing at Leantime.
What challenges have you faced when navigating the grant system and what recommendations would you give policymakers to improve the process for startup founders?
The other thing I would highlight is the complexity of the grant system from a cognitive accessibility standpoint. I live in the academic world and worked in pediatric research, so I've been on the institutional review board side of things and understand how grants work from the clinical perspective. For the average startup founder, the grant system is exceedingly difficult to navigate. If I didn't have any of that background, it would be completely inaccessible to me.
It’s also not easy to find the right people to pay to help navigate the system, and those that are available are often expensive for an early-stage startup to afford. Even the smallest technology shifts in the way the platforms are supported and offered, might suddenly make grant applications more available to people who might not be able to get access to them otherwise.
Another challenge is the language used on grant pages. When individuals read through the grants, some emphasize the need for a very specific partner. However, after speaking with someone on the grant side, it often turns out that the requirements aren’t as strict as they appear online. If you're not part of that ecosystem, it’s difficult to know these nuances, making the grant system harder to navigate.
Have you partnered with academic institutions for grant funding? If so, what has that process been like?
We’ve partnered with academic institutions, but that brings its own challenges, as universities often want to own the intellectual property (IP) associated with their grant applications. We have an open source level of IP for the software and our own provisional patent application out for our motivational side, and navigating IP issues as a startup can be tricky and costly, especially with legal fees. As much as I would love to be partnered with and working with research universities, I have to go more of a private route due to the risk of an IP challenge right now.
Are there any local, state, or federal startup issues that you think should receive more attention from policymakers?
One thing that comes to mind is the general accessibility of funding from a policy perspective. A simple yet impactful step would be passing a national law to require firms to report demographics, similar to recent legislation passed in California. That is a small lift for firms to determine out of all of their investments, how many of them are founded by diverse individuals.
At the end of the day, we can’t fix what we can’t see. Requiring those kinds of metrics would at least allow us to see more clearly the problem we all know is out there, and hopefully lead to more funding for more types of founders.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
Engine works to ensure that policymakers look for insight from the startup ecosystem when they are considering programs and legislation that affect entrepreneurs. Together, our voice is louder and more effective. Many of our lawmakers do not have first-hand experience with the country's thriving startup ecosystem, so it’s our job to amplify that perspective. To nominate a person, company, or organization to be featured in our #StartupsEverywhere series, email advocacy@engine.is.
