Michael Tennant

Michael Tennant is the founder and CEO of Curiosity Lab, a venture studio and consultancy that teaches empathy as a practical skill. He is the author of The Power of Empathy: A Thirty-Day Path to Personal Growth and Social Change (Chronicle Books, 2024) and Abundance: A Guided Journal for Living a Full Life (2025). He created The Five Phases of Empathy, the model behind the book, and has taught it at NASA, IDEO and Johns Hopkins. In 2022, Curiosity Lab received an investment from Pharrell Williams and the Black Ambition Prize.

In 2017, Michael founded Curiosity Lab, and in 2018 he created the viral conversation card game Actually Curious, which is designed to bring people closer together and teach tools for empathy. It has been featured by the New York Times, Oprah and the TODAY Show. Michael's long-term ambition is to turn teaching empathy into a thriving ecosystem that advocates for diversity, mental health and well-being through products, content, workshops and technology.

Prior to founding Curiosity Lab, Michael served as the head of branded content in the US for PHD Media, an Omnicom Agency, where he helped the agency win Ad Age's 2017 Media Agency of the Year, leading content strategy and execution for brands like Google, Delta Airlines and the Volkswagen portfolio. Prior to that, he led branded content for the Coca-Cola company and various brands in the P&G portfolio. Michael began his career in youth entertainment, where he held various content, marketing and partnership development roles for MTV and VICE.