Hi there, I’m Nataly.
I’m a keynote speaker, best-selling author, entrepreneur, and self-taught artist.
For more than two decades, my life and work have revolved around one idea:
REINVENTION.
Helping people grow through change, break through internal limits, and step into the work and life they know they are capable of creating.
My first real education in reinvention began when I was 13
My parents and I came to the United States as refugees from the former Soviet Union. (That’s me on the left in the photo with the spectacular 80s haircut.)
I spoke almost no English, had a thick accent, and quickly became a target for kids at school.
I became determined to erase my accent and found the best teacher on TV. Her name was Sam, and she was a happy American teenager on the show Who’s the Boss? (played by Alyssa Milano). I would watch the show and repeat the words Sam said while looking at a mirror so I could mimic her motions.
I did this for a year and my English got better. In a few years, my accent was gone. I defied linguistic theory which says you can’t lose your accent after the age of 11. I was very proud of this.
Discovering My Love of Building Through Failure
After graduating from college I joined McKinsey & Company in New York. It was an incredible opportunity: smart colleagues, fascinating work, and exposure to big ideas.
But eighteen months in, I felt the pull to build things myself.
So I left to join a startup.
Six months later the company collapsed in the dot-com crash.
The next two startups I joined failed as well.
It was a rough few years, and at the time it felt like a string of mistakes.
In hindsight, it was the beginning of my lifelong obsession with building things—and helping others build meaningful work and ideas.
Eventually that path led me to venture capital, where at age 25 I became the youngest and only female Managing Director at a New York firm.
One of my investments was a tiny email marketing company called Constant Contact. You may have heard of it—it eventually became a billion-dollar company.
Building companies, chasing success
Over the next decade I built companies, launched products, and helped entrepreneurs grow their ideas.
My husband Avi and I started a publishing company that was later acquired by Penguin.
I founded Work It, Mom!, which grew into one of the largest online communities for working mothers before we eventually sold the business during the financial crisis in 2008.
I also worked on building consumer technology products at Microsoft’s innovation lab in Cambridge and later at a mobile startup that was acquired by PayPal.
From the outside, my career looked impressive.
Inside, I was running on adrenaline and ambition, constantly pushing forward and rarely pausing to ask whether the way I was working was sustainable.
Creating HAPPIER
Around that time I became fascinated with research on gratitude and its impact on happiness and wellbeing.
I was skeptical at first, but I decided to try it. I was desperate to feel better.
I started a simple daily gratitude practice and quickly noticed something surprising: my mindset, energy, and perspective began to shift.
I became convinced that small emotional habits could have a powerful impact on how we experience life.
So together with a small team of awesome humans, we created Happier — a mobile app designed to help people build gratitude and positive emotional habits.
What began as a small idea grew far beyond anything we imagined.
The Happier app became the most popular gratitude-sharing platform in the world, helping hundreds of thousands of people develop daily habits that improved their wellbeing and outlook on life.
But while Happier was helping so many people, I was quietly ignoring my own limits.
After two decades of relentless work and pressure, everything finally caught up with me.
I experienced a severe burnout that nearly ended my career.
I had to lay off my team and face difficult conversations with investors. The weight of responsibility was immense.
People used to call me a powerhouse.
At that point I could barely function.
More than anything, I felt like I had failed the American Dream I had worked so hard to achieve.
That moment forced me to confront a difficult truth:
Success without alignment eventually breaks you.
I knew I needed to change how I lived and worked, even though I had no clear idea what that change would look like.
Discovering a different path
It was in that uncertain space — when I no longer knew what the path forward looked like — that the most meaningful reinvention of my life began.
For the first time in my life, I allowed myself to explore parts of myself I had ignored for years.
One of them was creativity.
I started painting.
Admitting to myself that I was an artist felt terrifying and liberating at the same time.
But embracing that part of myself changed everything.
Painting didn’t just help me recover from burnout.
It unlocked a level of aliveness and fulfillment I had never experienced before.
It also taught me something profound about reinvention.
Reinvention isn’t about becoming someone new.
It’s about becoming more of who you truly are.
That realization reshaped my life and my work.
I wrote the best-selling book Happier Now and began sharing the practices and research behind emotional fitness with audiences around the world.
My second book, The Awesome Human Project, expanded that work to help people build the inner strength needed to navigate uncertainty and thrive through change.
Over time, these ideas evolved into the framework I now teach globally:
REINVENT•ABILITY™
A mindset and action system that helps people grow through change, break through internal limits, and take meaningful action even when the path isn’t clear.
My work today
Today I work with leaders, founders, and organizations at pivotal moments of growth and change.
Through keynotes, mentorship, and leadership programs, I help people:
• break through internal limits
• grow through uncertainty
• step into their next level of work, leadership, and impact
My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and many other publications.
But the thing that matters most to me is much simpler.
Every day I wake up knowing I am building a life and work that reflect who I truly am.
Helping others experience that same sense of alignment and possibility is why I do this work.
MY WORK HAS BEEN FEATURED IN 100s OF MEDIA OUTLETS, INCLUDING:
We’re all more than our official bio, right? Here are some of my other “ands”…
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I had always wanted to paint but didn’t allow myself to do it because it felt indulgent and wasn’t part of taking care of my family or fueling my career.
Oh, how wrong I was!
Allowing myself to express myself creatively doesn’t just fuel my joy — it has made me better in every aspect of my life, as a mom, wife, daughter, speaker, author, coach….
Every single human being is creative and activating you to tap into your creative self is a core aspect of everything I do.
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I came to the U.S. as a refugee when I was 13. That experience has shaped a lot of who I am and I’m grateful for it, although it was really difficult.
By the way, my Russian name is Natasha, but I changed it to Nataly to fit in better… except I spelled it in a unique way that stands out.
Lesson learned:
Don’t try to be anything you’re not.
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This is a scientifically-proven fact, just ask my husband and my daughter, my FAVORITE awesome humans!
We have a family competition for who is the funniest and while there is often a lack of consensus, our efforts at making each other laugh are fierce.
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I always wear yellow when I speak (OK, 95% of the time).
I have a disproportionate amount of yellow in my closet.
The cover of my first book, HAPPIER NOW, is yellow.
Did I mention I love yellow?
It brings me joy and I hope it brings you joy, too! (Science says it’s a color that fuels positive emotions, in case you’re wondering.)
YOUR DAILY DOSE OF INSPIRATION
