Christine RenaudLinkedIn · 2026-06-12

☀️ **We're hiring a Marketing Director!!** ☀️ We've spent over a decade proving that the best part of an event isn't the keynote. It's the conversation two strangers didn't see coming. We started a company on a simple, slightly stubborn belief: that the most valuable thing we can offer each other is our knowledge, and the most human thing we can do is share it. Since then, we've watched thousands of people sit down across from a stranger at an event and walk away changed. A career unstuck. A problem solved in twenty minutes that had felt heavy for twenty months. That quiet "oh, I'm not the only one" that rearranges how someone sees themselves. NVIDIA, Salesforce, TED Conferences, SXSW, Atlassian, HubSpot, Cloudflare: they trust Braindate to turn networking into something people actually remember and come back for. Now we're looking for someone to tell that story louder. We're hiring a Marketing Director!! This is the person who will: → partner closely with our CRO to turn brand into pipeline → own demand generation, positioning, and content that sounds like us (human, warm, brave) → run the HubSpot engine without losing the soul of the message → show up at the events where our future clients already are You've probably done B2B SaaS marketing in the trenches. You understand long sales cycles and complex buyers. You can hold an executive conversation and a creative brief in the same afternoon. Most alive when you're building something. But mostly, you'll believe that marketing can be a transformative act. That you can take someone who thinks networking is nothing more than transactions, and turn them into a champion of connection and belonging. If that's you, we'd love to meet you. Apply here!! 👇 https://lnkd.in/ebEPVHFd

Christine RenaudLinkedIn · 2026-05-06

Two years ago, I stopped drinking. What surprised me is that sobriety taught me almost nothing about alcohol. What it taught me about was everything I'd been using it to avoid: the energy I didn't have at the end of the day to be the best mama I wanted to be for my daughters, the conversation I kept postponing, the gap between where things were and where I knew, in my gut, they needed to be. I'd been numbing the signals instead of reading them, which, in retrospect, is a spectacularly expensive strategy for someone who built a company on the idea that real learning happens when you actually pay attention. Creating the life I wouldn't have to numb away has been one of the more unglamorous and genuinely useful things I've ever done: for myself, for my family, and for my team. I'm not making a case for sobriety: that's a personal path and none of my business. But I do think about this a lot when I watch the women around me reach for whatever makes the hard thing quieter: the wine, the overwork, the endless scrolling, the back-to-back meetings that leave no room for anything to actually land. It's all the same move, really. And the question worth sitting with is whether what you're reaching for is actually helping you hold it, or whether it's making the signal that something's gotta change harder to hear.

Christine RenaudLinkedIn · 2026-05-22

Björk has sold 30 million albums. She owns every master. She finances each project from the revenue of the last. In 2011, she was the first artist in the world to release an album as a series of interactive apps. She co-founded a green technology venture fund. Thirty years of this, entirely outside conventional industry logic. When she made Fossora in 2022, she wanted the bass clarinets to breathe like fungal networks underground. The song "Mycelia" was composed so the notes would spread the way hyphae move through soil... outward, seeking, connected. Her wildness is the business model. Björk works from what Icelanders call öræfi: the great scarred interior of their island, where the earth dictates the terms. She lets the rhythms of crystal growth, tectonic plates, and mushroom networks shape what she creates. She trusts what arrives before the framework confirms it. Most of us were trained to leave that part of ourselves at the door. The instinct that shows up before the data. The hunch with no business case behind it. The rough edge we've been sanding down for years to earn a seat at the table. But the same intelligence that pulls tides and grows mycelium moves through us too. It knows, before any spreadsheet confirms it, when a partnership is wrong. When a hire is right. When something we've been told is brilliant is built on something hollow. Thirty years. 30 million albums. Every master owned. Just like the tides, Björk lets her Wild lead.

Christine RenaudLinkedIn · 2026-06-08

"I'm not an expert. I don't know anything special. Nothing that could interest anyone." That's the biggest hurdle we face at Braindate: amazing humans thinking they have nothing of value to share with the world. That's because we have been taught that there are the "have's" and the "have not's" of knowledge. There are the experts... and the rest of us. Let me tell you about Noel, my father-in-law. My father-in-law had leukemia about 15 years ago. He went through the whole thing: chemo, radiation, bone marrow transplant. Through the entire year of treatment, he refused to engage with stats or prognosis. His position was simple: whatever the survival rate was, he would be that statistic. He was right. Two years after the diagnosis, he went into full remission. At his one-year check-up, he met a young couple of newlywebs in the waiting room. The love between them was palpable... but so was something heavier. The woman, Lydia, had just been diagnosed with leukemia. The prognosis wasn't good. They were facing an impossible question: go through treatment and risk spending her remaining time in pain, or refuse it and live whatever was left as fully as possible. Noel sat with them. He shared his story: his fears, his mental battles, how he held onto the belief that he would make it. He talked about seeing his daughter give birth to his first grandson since his remission. He answered their questions as someone who had been exactly where they were and come through. He left moved, carrying them in his thoughts for weeks. A year later, Noel was back at the clinic for his annual check-up. Walking down the corridor, greeting the nurses he'd come to know well. Then he heard someone shouting behind him. He turned around. A man was running toward him, screaming: "YOU! YOU!! You are the man who saved my wife's life!" After their conversation with Noel, they had decided to go ahead with treatment. Lydia was in remission. Noel had no idea. No idea he had changed — let alone saved — someone's life. Simply by sharing his own experience, simply by answering a few questions. Just a man who, when cancer came for him, gathered everything he had to fight it. And won. We undervalue our inner brilliance. That's because we so rarely get to see the impact of the knowledge we've shared and the lives we've changed. But I am certain that somewhere, somehow, if someone could, they would run down a corridor, screaming your name in gratitude.

Christine RenaudLinkedIn · 2026-06-03

I run a global company in my second language. People hear the accent before they hear the idea. I learned English at school growing up. I was far from being bilingual when I started my master’s in education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. The school is famously international… but my program wasn't. Most of my classmates were native English speakers, fluent and fast, and I spent that first couple months a half-step behind every conversation. Translating in my head. Reaching for words that arrived a beat too late. Most of my classmates were very gracious, but I could feel what some of them assumed: that the woman who spoke slowly, who paused to find the right word, wasn't as sharp as the ones who didn't. I was. I just sounded like I wasn't. That year left something in me I wouldn't trade. Because now, in every room I lead, I watch for the person at the edge: the one who's translating, or processing differently, or not quite following the pace. And I try to make room for them to feel like they are valid, and worthy of airtime just like everyone else. I know exactly what it feels like to be in that seat. Being underestimated teaches you something fluency never will: that intelligence wears more than one accent. That people learn differently, think differently, arrive at brilliance by different roads. The smartest person in the room is often the slowest to speak. I love my language: my raw, colorful Québec French. And it turned out to be the reason I notice who's being left out, and the reason I refuse to leave them there.