Our Story
Before Tendful had a name, there was a feeling.
That something about the way we work isn't right. Not the work itself — the disconnect. The way we spend most of our waking hours in places where nobody asks how we're actually doing. Where "fine" is the only acceptable answer. Where people slowly stop being honest — first with others, then with themselves.
I felt it myself. I wasn't aligned. The work I was doing didn't match what I believed in. And once I saw it in myself, I started seeing it everywhere — in teams, in companies, in people who came home from work a little more closed than when they left in the morning.
I knew I wasn't the only one. I just didn't have proof yet.
The proof came from an unexpected place — a TEDx stage in 2012, where a man named Bob Chapman stood up and said what most business leaders are afraid to say: that the way we lead impacts the way people live. That when we genuinely care for people at work, it ripples home. That 79% of his employees said their work improved their marriages.
Chapman ran a $3.6 billion manufacturing company. Not a wellness startup. A factory. And he chose care anyway — before it was a trend, before anyone was watching. That took courage.
His talk didn't give me the idea. The feeling was already there. What he gave me was permission to believe it was possible.
Then one night, a word arrived.
I woke up with a quiet electricity — a sense that something had found me. Tendful.
I didn't know it was a real word. I just knew it was the name.
My friend Ketria, writing from her early morning contemplative practice in Houston, looked it up out of curiosity. "It's actually a word," she wrote back. "Oxford English Dictionary cites a pre-1697 text as the only evidence. It means full of tender care."
A word that disappeared 327 years ago — around the time we industrialized work and started calling people resources.
It came back. And it brought its meaning with it.
My name is Gunars. I'm from Latvia — a small country on the Baltic Sea where people are honest, winters are long, and silence is a form of respect.
I'm building Tendful from here. Writing the code. Designing the system. And honestly — it's one of the most exciting things I've ever done. Something real is taking shape.
This is not a side project. This is the work I'm here to do — for years, for decades, for as long as it takes.
There's no VC board behind Tendful. No growth-at-all-costs pressure. No Silicon Valley playbook. Just a person who felt something was broken, found a 327-year-old word that named it, and decided to build.
For leaders who want to see their people, not just manage them. For teams that want to trust each other, not just perform. For anyone who believes that the hours we give to work should mean something.