Laurel Adds World-Class Leadership in Product, Sales, and AI to Accelerate Our Expansion

Fresh off our $100m Series C fundraise, we’re thrilled to announce the addition of three powerhouse leaders to our team: Jiaona “JZ” Zhang, Emil Dyrvig, and Chris Jones.

Bringing Consumer-Grade Product Strategy to Enterprise Software

Jiaona Zhang, a renowned product leader with experience scaling iconic companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Webflow, and most recently, Linktree, joins Laurel as its Chief Product Officer. JZ teaches product management at Stanford’s School of Engineering and is known for her deep expertise in transforming products into delightful experiences for the consumer. Her talent will help Laurel bring more consumer-facing product innovation to the enterprise space, continuing to deliver intuitive, zero-input timekeeping experiences to professionals around the world.

Scaling Global Growth and Market Expansion

Emil Dyrvig, former Chief Revenue Officer at Templafy and Relesys, joins Laurel to lead Global Sales and Business Development. Emil opened and led Templafy’s US operations and helped scale the company from $5M to $50M ARR. Having started his career at P&G and Loréal before moving to Dropbox as one of the early EMEA hires, Emil brings a rare combination of global scale-up experience,expertise working with professional services firms and multinationals, and ability to build world-class GTM teams. At Laurel, he will lead go-to-market, international growth, and monetization strategy as the company expands into new markets and verticals. He’ll be especially focused on increasing the company’s EMEA and North America footprints. 

Building the Intelligence Layer That Maps Time to Business Value

Chris Jones, co-founder and CEO of DeepStructure.io and former co-creator and Chief Architect of Firefox OS, joins Laurel to oversee its most differentiating offering: the ability to track and understand work. Chris is an expert in enterprise AI architecture, with deep experience deploying production-grade LLM systems. Starting from his time in Berkeley’s Ph.D program, Chris has spent his career building things that others thought were impossible. He will guide the evolution of our digital footprint, or what we call True Time™—a unit of measure that, up until now, has never been realized: it captures time spent at work and how it delivers real business value to companies.

“If you want to build a generational company, you need generational talent,” said Ryan Alshak, CEO of Laurel. “JZ, Emil, and Chris are each world-class in their own right—and together, they give us an unfair advantage as we build the system-of-record for knowledge work.”

The announcement follows Laurel’s recent $100M Series C, backed by IVP, GV, and 01A, with participation from executives at OpenAI, Salesforce, and MetaMind. The company is seeing rapid adoption among enterprise professional services firms like Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton, and Crowell & Moring. Over the last year, Laurel grew ARR +300% at double-digit scale, increased usage by +500%, and now works with +100 of the top legal, accounting, and consulting firms across US, UK, EU, Australia, and Canada. With its expanded leadership team, Laurel is accelerating its mission to return time to professionals—and reshape how work is tracked, measured, and valued.