Envoy ‘Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop’ Making The Workplace Safer For People To Come Back

Larry Gadea, the CEO and founder of the $1.4 billion market valuation unicorn workplace app, Envoy, had a circuitous route to success compared to other Silicon Valley tech leaders.

As a young child he had to flee communist Romania with his family. He was smuggled out in the backseat of his parents’ car, lived in Germany, then moved onto Ottawa, Canada. His parents held Master’s degrees and had great careers in Romania, but they were forced to start all over again. They worked difficult blue-collar jobs. His mother cleaned houses, and his father picked berries.

Larry Gadea strived to build a better future for himself and his family. He joined Google as a software engineer, and later moved to Twitter to become one of the first fifty employees of the social media site. He noticed that there were many people coming and going into the fast-growing office, and couldn’t tell who worked there or were guests, clients, business partners or friends of employees.

To get a handle on the increased flow of unfamiliar faces, Gadea did what came naturally, he built an app. He designed a ‘visitor’ program to ‘sign-in’ folks and keep track of who is entering the building.

It was successful, and Gadea launched a business around the visitor app.