It started with what was possible.

In 2020 nothing could be made. Crews were unavailable, budgets had gone, and no two people were supposed to be in a room together. It was the worst year in a generation to start a company, which is when this one started.

Pete Carroll and Audrey Cavenecia came at it from opposite ends of a working life, a football field and a career that started in entertainment, went into training and development, and came back out as both. What they shared was a conviction that most people are carrying more than anyone has thought to ask them for, and that the right question in the right room puts it in the open. Audrey proposed building a company around that. Pete later told Forbes it was her expertise and vision that made it possible.

The plan was documentaries. The first would follow Pete while keeping him mostly out of frame, pointed instead at the people he wanted an audience to meet. It went into rooms at William Morris and it stalled there, along with everything else that needed a crew and a budget that year.

What was left was sound. Audio could be made in separate houses, on money that existed, by a team that was not allowed to gather.

Amplify Voices partnered with Cadence to publish Conversations from the Heart. It released in June 2021 with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cory Booker, Van Jones, Rachel Maddow, Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach among the early guests.

The company learned in public, the team got better, and production came in house. Everything since has been made there.

The show worked, commercially and critically. It also taught the company something about the medium it had just entered. What moved a podcast in that market was a famous name, and the people most worth amplifying were not famous. They were extraordinary and ordinary at the same time, which is the hardest thing to market and the most worth publishing.

So Audrey moved the company toward business rather than consumers. That decision turned out to matter more than the awards.

Learning and development has no shortage of expertise and very little storytelling. Amplify Voices had the opposite problem, and the two fit.

When OpenSesame signed the company, they had no audio training in their catalog at all. Amplify Voices licensed the podcasts as leadership training to find out whether it would work. It did. People took to learning in a conversational voice rather than an instructional one, and the feedback showed what to build next.

That became the courses. Audio microlearning, two and a half to five minutes, engineered the same way every time. Audiobooks arrived the way the podcasts did, with a founder’s voice going first.

Audrey Cavenecia is the founder and Chief Content Officer of Amplify Voices. She started in entertainment, left it for training and development, and spent years learning how to change what people actually do at work. Then she put the two together and built a media company that used storytelling to build brands, with clients across luxury, biotechnology and sport.

That sequence answers a question people ask about this catalog. A brand strategist would not know how to train a hospital system or a manufacturing floor. Someone who spent years inside learning and development would. She writes and leads the majority of the courses in the catalog.

Her father was an automotive painter who built businesses out of his craft. He was excellent with his hands and hit a ceiling that skill alone could not carry him past, because nobody had ever taught him the part that comes after the work is good.

She understood that properly during two years off grid, driving across land she had never seen, learning to diagnose an engine because there was nobody else to do it. Hands in it, listening for what was wrong, making the next move without knowing every move after it.

That distinction runs through everything the house publishes. Building happens between you and the work. Growing happens between you and everyone else.