Our Story
Work should be a place where people grow, not just produce.
We believe in a future where work is a place where people do great work and become better at being themselves in the process. Where professional growth and personal growth aren’t separate tracks—they’re the same track. That’s the integration that comes from Good Authority.
For too long, our industry has put happy talk around that concept. We say we care about people. We talk about culture. Then when push comes to shove, it’s just about the numbers, and people and humanity get left behind. We throw occasional workshops and summits to “reset the culture,” but nothing sticks.
Because in practice, the only person left standing to even attempt to help is their manager—who is radically under-resourced, undertrained, and often under-experienced. We’ve set managers up to fail. Employees feel the brunt of the pain. And managers feel caught in the middle—conflicting priorities from above to drive results but “do it nicely.” The conflict feels irresolvable.
Until you understand what it means to manage with the kind truth.
Jonathan Raymond is the author of Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For and the creator of The Accountability Dial—a coaching framework used by over 100,000 managers at companies like Panasonic, Amazon, Okta, and TikTok. He was named one of Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers.
Before founding Good Authority, Jonathan served as CEO of EMyth, the pioneering small business coaching company, where he led the organization through a transformation of its coaching methodology. He holds a law degree from NYU School of Law and a B.A. from Binghamton University—but it was 20+ years of working with leaders at every level that taught him what actually works.
The core insight came from working directly with CEOs and founders: they didn’t want open-ended coaching conversations. They wanted to know what to do. Not because they were afraid of tough questions—they were simply too busy for reflection sessions in a fast-paced environment. And they rarely had structured 1:1s, so the methodology had to find other ways in.
Today, AI is making everyone more like those CEOs. Moving fast, juggling more, needing input quickly. Not opposed to a deeper conversation once in a while—but that should be the exception, not the default. Ren has a bias for action. That’s what makes it fundamentally different from every AI coaching tool on the market: it’s accountability infrastructure, not a therapy session.
The Team
Small team, big mission
We’re a distributed team of builders who believe the working relationship is the most underleveraged force in business.
From book to methodology to AI
It started with the book. Good Authority laid out a different philosophy of leadership—one built on the idea that accountability isn’t punitive, it’s an act of care. That the conversations managers avoid are exactly the ones their people are waiting for.
The book became a methodology. The Accountability Dial gave managers a shared language for the five stages of every accountability conversation. Tens of thousands of leaders learned it through workshops, coaching programs, and organizational partnerships.
But one-to-one accountability doesn’t scale. The best human practitioners can work with a handful of leaders. The methodology reached hundreds of thousands, but the moment-to-moment accountability—helping someone find the right sentence before a hard conversation, following up when they don’t, naming a pattern before it becomes a problem—that was still available to very few.
That’s why we built Ren. Accountability infrastructure that lives in Slack and Teams—proactive, opinionated, and in the flow of work. It learns context, figures out the next most important thing, and surfaces it with a bias for action. Not a therapy session. Not a generic AI. The culmination of 10 years of learning what actually changes how people work together.
What Drives Us
Real accountability has teeth. Now it scales.
We believe the manager relationship is the single biggest lever in any organization. Not culture decks. Not perks. Not even strategy. How a manager shows up in the moments that matter—that’s what determines whether people stay, grow, and do their best work.
We believe accountability should be private, personal, and opt-in. Ren never reports to HR. It never shares what a manager says. Trust is the foundation—without it, nothing else works.
And we believe AI should make humans more human, not less. Ren doesn’t give managers scripts. It helps them find their own voice. That’s the difference between compliance and real growth.
See what Ren can do for your team
10 years of accountability methodology, available to every team member—starting today.