Faana · Co-founder · 2025 to now
Helping founder-led companies grow well
For companies where what worked at the last stage isn’t working at this one
Faana works alongside founders and CEOs on growth when the company hits a real inflection point. That growth comes from three places: culture, how people experience the company from the inside; customer, how the market experiences it; and community, the connection and value the company creates beyond the transaction. Faana is a transformation company building stronger leaders, healthier companies and more connected communities. Autumn Manning founded it and leads it as CEO, and I’m her co-founder, leading the platform that supports the work.
With Autumn Manning and the Faana team
The partnership
A fractional executive
Autumn Manning joins the leadership team after a kickoff workshop and moves critical work forward from the inside.
The short version
The problem
All at the same time
Too much still routes through the founder, the leadership team isn’t moving as one, the best people are running hot, and something feels off that the founder can’t quite name.
What we do
Find what’s constraining growth
Autumn and the leadership team then build one growth strategy and align the company behind it.
Where it is now
Early adopters
Companies that partner with Faana at this stage can use its platform and help shape what we build on it next.
Who Faana is built for
Faana’s work is for founder-led and owner-operated companies where growth has outpaced the organization, and for those facing a major change, such as new leadership or an acquisition.
- Culture
- Customer
- Community
Growth
What a partnership looks like
The partnership is the core of what Faana offers. The platform, a workshop for early-stage teams and the community Faana is launching are all meant to support it.
A partnership opens with a kickoff workshop of about two and a half hours with the leadership team. One of the workshop’s exercises compares what the company says matters with what its routines reward. By the end, the team has agreed its top three priorities and set a date for the first progress review.
After the kickoff, Autumn is retained ninety days at a time and works with the company through founder conversations, working sessions with the leadership team and progress reviews. The growth strategy she builds with the founder and the team sets the order of the priorities and who owns each one.
The kickoff also settles how much of Faana’s platform a partnership uses. When leaders need more support, Faana pairs them with experienced coaches and advisors from its network.
One of the workshop’s exercises compares what the company says matters with what its routines reward.
Who’s behind it
Autumn Manning, Faana’s founder and CEO, is a behavioral scientist and operator. She co-founded YouEarnedIt and ran it as CEO, then served as interim President and COO of Cratejoy. As a Partner at Motley Fool Ventures, she advised early-stage founders on building the go-to-market and the organization they needed to scale.
For accelerators and university programs
The workshop for founders and early-stage teams is separate from the kickoff, and it helps them align their people and work on their go-to-market strategy. One question it asks is whether the team can explain the company’s mission and strategy without the founder’s help. Autumn and the Faana team can deliver it to an accelerator cohort or a university program. In the community Faana is launching, experienced leaders will also mentor and advise founders and early-stage builders.
One question it asks is whether the team can explain the company’s mission and strategy without the founder’s help.
The community Faana is building
Faana’s community is launching first in Austin and Arkansas, and companies will sponsor its events. Within it, Faana is building a program that will give rising leaders mentors and employers to call on.
Who it will bring together
- Experienced leaders who will mentor and advise
- Founders and early-stage builders
- Rising leaders
- Companies that will sponsor its events
One community
so good leadership reaches beyond one company or one generation
How Faana got here
Faana began in 2021 with workshops where leaders and teams talked through what was strengthening or constraining their ability to grow. The patterns from those workshops became the start of a repeatable method for finding where a company is strong and what has to change.
In 2023 Autumn left venture investing and founded Faana’s partnership practice to work directly with founders and leadership teams. I came in as the technical partner in April 2025 to build the platform behind her method, and we became co-founders that June.
From the first workshops to now
- 2021 Faana’s first workshops, whose patterns became the start of its method
- 2023 Autumn leaves venture investing and founds Faana’s partnership practice
- 2025 I join to build the platform and become Autumn’s co-founder
- Now Launching the community
My part
I said yes to Faana because of Autumn: her track record and the way she reads people and companies. I’d also seen growing companies break on people problems that strategy and software miss. At Hideaway Report, a luxury travel publisher where I was VP of Technology, most of the turnaround came down to building a culture where teams shared data and talked to each other. In my own companies, too much ran through one person, and sometimes that person was me. Faana was the chance to turn what Autumn sees inside companies into tools and data, and to keep bringing engineering, product and the business together when they’d otherwise pull in different directions.
I led the architecture of Faana’s platform, and with another engineer on the team we built it. It brings a company’s people and the work done with them into one place, from assessments to recordings. Its AI assistant works from the company’s own material and changes a record only after a person confirms it.
When a company’s problem turns out to be technical or about AI, I take that part on.
Next, we’re building a predictive diagnostic, designed to watch strength and trust across a company’s teams and to warn its leaders early when pressure is mounting.
Built
The platform today
- A company’s people, assessments, notes, recordings and reports in one place
- An AI assistant that works from the company’s own material
- Records change only after a person confirms, and every AI change can be undone
In development
What we’re building next
- A predictive diagnostic designed to watch strength and trust across teams
- Early warnings to a company’s leaders when pressure is mounting
Everything on the right is in development and not yet in use.
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Kreneon · Technical lead · 2026 to now