This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Nick Lombardino and Zach Blumenfeld, co-founders of CultureCon.
They created the workplace culture conference in 2017, and it’s since grown to more than 600 attendees at last year’s gathering. In addition to hosting annual events, the business provides online courses, consulting services and certification programs.
“It’s crazy, we’ve been doing this almost a decade ago,” Blumenfeld said. “Nick and I are both from Madison … We’ve purposefully kept CultureCon in Madison because we love bringing people from all over the world to our beautiful state, our beautiful city.”
The annual event has its roots in executive roundtable discussions hosted by Blumenfeld’s software company called ThirdSpace, which aimed to “pressure test” ideas on workplace culture.
“They would always run late because people would get so passionate about their people, their culture, and so I always thought like, maybe we could expand these into workshops or half-day events,” he said. “Software is great, but with such a humanistic challenge we’re trying to solve, software isn’t going to solve it altogether.”
Lombardino says the company has grown from an events business only to a platform for connecting people with “the tools and the inspiration to be a culture-shaper” within their teams.
“We want to be the company that gives them the practical tools and resources to make that happen,” he said.
CultureCon this year is hosting its inaugural AI Summit 2026 April 21-23, putting a spotlight on how the technology is impacting company culture and the workforce.
“If we want to use AI as an example, it’s like, a lot of these companies are navigating extremely fast-paced changes that are impacting all industries,” Lombardino said. “And so to successfully stay competitive and be productive and be innovative, you need a workforce that’s highly engaged.”
This year’s CultureCon 2026, part of the event series that began in 2017, is being held Aug. 4-6 at the Madison Concourse Hotel & Governor’s Club.
See the full list of WisBusiness.com podcasts.
See more in a recap from last year’s CultureCon, and see details on this year’s event.
Listen to the podcast, sponsored by UW-Madison:
