What does it mean for a leader to "nurture?"
Team Letter | Alissa Christensen's Three Year Anniversary
August 9, 2026
Happy Monday, Alpaca! And Happy 3 Year Anniversary to Alissa Christensen!
As you know, great ideas are in full supply at our company. There’s an idea for a new product feature, resource, pack item, and team outing shared over every meeting, lunch, or walk.
In some places and on some teams, people will try an idea once and that will be that. But the greatest work at Alpaca, I believe, comes when ideas follow this plan:
1. We try an experiment with audacious autonomy
2. We evaluate it honestly
3. We nurture that idea into an improved and evolved version of itself
Nurture? Nurture.
Nurture isn’t a word we hear in startups very often. But when you look at its core definition, to nurture is to care for and support something as it grows and develops. To evolve our ideas and experiments at Alpaca, I know that we need a leader who understands nurture. Today, we’re celebrating Alissa Christensen’s third anniversary at Alpaca, and I know of few leaders who know how to nurture ideas and teams like Alissa does.
Last year, we saw an audacious experiement in Camp Alpaca (our crazy two week internship for educators!). From that one (big) experiment, I’ve watched as Alissa has nurtured and developed several evolutions of the work created there and turn them into lasting value in the company. Let’s talk about what this magnetic force of a leader has done in just one year:
The Alpaca Educator Team
Following Camp Alpaca last year, Alissa created an educator team that works behind the scenes to improve our product, build new resources, provide language translation, and help us dream up new ideas. Alissa quietly leads this team and because of it, we are publishing new resources every week.
The Little Wins Workshop
Alissa was a force of nature in the creation of the Little Wins Workshop, our first ever conference for school leaders. Her guidance and educator focus, combined with unrelenting hard work meant that the day of the conference, everyone wondered how a thing could just “go so smoothly” and and how a virtual conference “could be so engaging and fun.” That’s because Alissa (and many others at Alpaca!) took what they learned from Camp Alpaca last year and nurtured it into an evolving idea of how we can support and engage educators and leaders.
Evolving Customer Success
This spring and summer, Alissa has once again been quietly building the evolution of an important part of what we do — onboarding new customers. Since her 2nd anniversary last year, Alissa has onboarded 150 new customers at Alpaca, while supporting another 150 existing customers. This summer, she rebuilt the program, adding more opportunities to engage in the goals and intentions of the school leaders using our platform. And on top of all of that, she brought on another Customer Success team member, who she quickly brought up to speed on how we help new customers get set up, nurtured her finding her own style and voice, and then sent her successfully into the work of making sure every customer finds value in our platform quickly.
The Little Wins Library
This spring, Alissa nurtured an extraordinary project that I cannot wait to see launch (next week!!!). From the resources that she has created since her first year with us, we knew that there was an opportunity to create a new type of resource library for school leaders. True to form, Alissa took what she’d created initially with Alpaca Resources and nurtured its evolution. She is thoughtful about how our leaders find and use our resources. She is thoughtful about how they look and feel. She is thoughtful about the educators who help create them, and she nurtures each contributor’s work along. You’ll see it and feel it in every aspect of the new Little Wins Library soon!
Today, Alissa is doing important nurturing work at home - caring for her beautiful new baby girl Ruby and her inimitable and fantastic daughter June. But because she nurtured so many important ideas and projects this year, we’ve had a strong foundation to work with while she’s away. When she returns from leave, our team will hope to have brought her vision to life, to have worked as hard as she does, and to have nurtured our customers and our product and each other in the way that she teaches by example every single day.
Happy Third Anniversary, Alissa! Thank you for nurturing every little idea with such care and thoughtful intention. It shows in absolutely everything you do!
Love,
KB