Speaker's Profile

Melissa Danielsen is an proven entrepreneur with a track record of building and scaling impact companies from the ground up. Fueled by her personal experiences, she identifies unmet needs and seeks out innovative solutions and passionate teams to achieve remarkable results in the market. Melissa Danielsen’s brother Josh wasn’t supposed to make it past childhood, born with developmental disabilities, epilepsy and later diagnosed with brain cancer; he passed away suddenly at age 29. Growing up on a small rural farm, Melissa’s family – like the one in five families across the country with disabilities – especially struggled to find quality care and support. When Josh passed away 15 years ago, Melissa and her sister left their careers and built a successful Medicaid company providing disability services in rural communities. After being acquired in 2019, they built Joshin—a groundbreaking tech solution revolutionizing support for disability and neurodivergence by taking fragmented services into a single connected platform. Best Buy, was the first enterprise company to offer Joshin as an employee benefit – and other major brands have followed. The need is huge: 30% of adults are neurodivergent (ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia) and 20% are disabled, yet only 3% of employees are comfortable self-disclosing to their employers. Melissa is on a mission to remove the stigma and empower human potential.