Laszlo Bock
Laszlo is the founder and Co-Director of the Berkeley Transformative CHRO Leadership Academy and a member of the Board of the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences. He founded, scaled and sold two companies (most recently to NVIDIA). Before that, he spent a decade as a member of the Executive Management Team at Google where he served as Senior Vice President of People Operations. His best-selling book, Work Rules!, has sold more than 750,000 copies with 100% of his book income donated to charity. He is an active investor and advisor in startups, with 55% of his portfolio companies going on to become unicorns and 80% having become unicorns or been acquired. Finally, he is also a documentary film and Broadway musical producer, with four Tony Award-nominated or -winning productions.
Laszlo was the founder and Chairman of Gretel.ai, the leader in synthetic data for AI (acquired by NVIDIA in 2025). He was also the founder, Chairman, and CEO of Humu, which used “nudges” to make people happier and more productive at work (acquired by Perceptyx in 2023). He has raised more than $150 million in venture capital funding.
From 2006 to 2016, Laszlo was the Senior Vice President of People Operations of Google/Alphabet, and a member of the executive management team. He grew the company from 6,000 to 75,000 employees while ensuring the culture remained innovative and robust. Laszlo co-led the creation of the field of “People Analytics”, the application of academic-quality rigor and Google-paced innovation to people management. He also co-led the development of the Google Job Search API, the only element of Google’s search engine developed outside of Google’s engineering organization. During his tenure, Google was named the #1 Best Company to Work for in the United States seven times as well as recognized over 150 times around the world as an exceptional employer. He was named “HR Executive of the Year”, “HR Executive of the Decade”, and elected to the National Academy of Human Resources. More than 150 of his team members have since become CHROs.
He is a sought-after speaker on workforce topics, AI, leadership and company-building. He has appeared on CNN, the Today Show, Good Morning America, NPR and the BBC; testified before Congress; and been quoted in and written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and Businessweek. He has worked with the Clinton, Biden and Harris Presidential Transition Teams and has been called on by various Presidential Administrations to provide counsel on workforce-related topics.