<p>Steve Sonnenberg's father made plaques.</p>
<p>Markups of 300 percent. Shipping costs that dwarfed the item itself. A catalog of forty options when employees actually wanted millions. And a fundamental disconnect between what companies spent on recognition and what employees actually received — or wanted.</p>
<p>In 2011, Steve Sonnenberg was thirty years old, married, and had four children all under the age of five. He had started a business in college — WholesaleMatch, an e-commerce tools company — and built it to a multimillion-dollar valuation over the better part of a decade. It was his. He'd made it from nothing.</p>
<p>"I had no money. I had four kids. I had nothing left."</p>
<p>"I remember walking on a trail and thinking: if I fight this, I'm going to lose my family. So I started over."</p>
<h2>The Pivot Machine</h2>
<p>His original concept was straightforward: take his father's industry knowledge and move it online. Companies could order awards and plaques through a website. Cleaner. Faster. Better than the existing order forms and phone-in processes that dominated the recognition business.</p>
<p>Each pivot was an admission that the last idea wasn't quite right. And each one kept the company alive while Steve figured out what it was actually supposed to be.</p>
<p>The real insight came when he started thinking about the problem differently: not as <em>awards</em> but as <em>rewards</em>. Not a company buying plaques for years of service, but employees earning points for good work, then redeeming those points for things they actually wanted. The recognition industry wasn't just broken in how it fulfilled orders — it was broken in what it offered employees in the first place.</p>
<p>Steve brought in his cousin Mike Sonnenberg, a back-end developer, and a Qualtrics colleague named Tanner Runia to help build the platform. The idea was simple: employees earn points, redeem them for anything on Amazon. Millions of products. No markups. Fast shipping.</p>
<h2>Built It Anyway</h2>
<p>"They weren't interested," Steve says. "We were too small, too unknown."</p>
<p>From 2011 to 2015, Steve worked at Qualtrics during the day — a deliberate choice, he says, to learn how to sell to enterprise organizations. He took the job because Qualtrics had a world-class sales force, and he needed to understand how the sausage was made. Then he came home, put in time with his kids, and worked on Awardco from around 7 p.m. until past midnight, every single night.</p>
<p>His wife. Manually placing Amazon orders for employees who had redeemed Awardco points. She was the fulfillment system. And it was enough to keep clients happy — and keep the company alive — while Steve continued making the case to Amazon.</p>
<p>In 2015, Amazon Business was founded. The company reached out to Sonnenberg, inviting him to present at Amazon headquarters. This time, they were elated by the proposal.</p>
<p>The automation changed everything. What had been a manual, wife-fulfilling process became a seamless integration — employees could now redeem points directly for anything on Amazon Business, with no markups and no shipping costs, fulfilled directly through Amazon's logistics network. It was everything Steve had promised from the beginning.</p>
<h2>The Long Way Up</h2>
<p>Awardco grew, but steadily. The company added clients — real ones, enterprise organizations that needed a better way to recognize employees. The pitch was clean: you're already spending money on rewards programs. Our program actually works. Your employees get things they want, not things they'll throw away.</p>
<p>The business model worked because it solved real problems for both sides. Companies got measurable engagement data, simplified administration, and no markup on reward items. Employees got access to millions of products — everything from electronics to experiences to practical household items — with the freedom to choose what they actually wanted rather than accepting whatever the company decided to give them.</p>
<p>By 2021, Awardco had six million users. It raised a $5 million Series A. Then a $65 million Series B. In May 2025, the company closed a $165 million Series B round, crossing a billion-dollar valuation. Total funding raised: $235 million. The company had nearly 600 employees, with operations across the United States and internationally, integrated with Amazon in the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Japan, India, Canada, and wherever else Amazon operated.</p>
<h2>The Superpower</h2>
<p>And he thinks his superpower is something anyone can do.</p>
<p>It's a line that sounds like a cliché until you understand the context. Beginning is not the hard part for most founders. The hard part is beginning after you've already failed — after you've lost everything and have four kids and an empty bank account and a reputation you have to rebuild. Beginning when you have resources is easy. Beginning when you don't is the actual skill.</p>
<p>Confidence isn't something Steve Sonnenberg had to manufacture. It was the thing that got him through the years when there was nothing else to lean on — no funding, no proof, no validation from the market, just a belief that the thing he was building would eventually work, and a willingness to keep working until it did.</p>
<p>"Anything I've ever done, it's been successful, but it's failed first. It's the consistency of keeping it on the track."</p>
<p>Not because a startup disrupted it. But because a founder who had nothing figured out that the industry never could: people don't want to be recognized with things they'll throw away. They want to be seen. And the best reward is the one they actually chose.</p>