TEDxDuluth speaker Katie Mednick blends sharp entrepreneurial instincts with a grounded, reflective approach to leadership. After founding and selling a successful railroad tech company, she is now building a spiritual self‑care and meditation app while using value-based leadership as her compass for what comes next.​

From Railroads to Tech Exits

A year ago, Katie was the CEO and founder of a SaaS company serving the railroad industry, a space she freely admits is “super old school.” Her company, Rail Tasker, focused on people safety and compliance – helping railroads manage training, certifications, and on‑the‑job checklists through modern software tools.​

The path there was anything but linear:​

• She started as a solo consultant under the name Spark Training Solutions, using her background in instructional design and regulatory affairs to help railroads tackle complex training regulations.
• She reinvested consulting revenue into the first software module – a simple on‑the‑job training checklist – without knowing if it would grow beyond that.
• Before the first module was finished, three of the largest railroads signed contracts, and the product expanded as customers asked, “Can you solve this problem too?” on their employees’ iPads.​

Looking back, Katie says that if she had fully understood how big the undertaking would become, she might have hesitated. But by following “the breadcrumbs of a good idea” one step at a time, she built something far larger than her original vision.​

Knowing When to Let Go

Katie grew up watching both grandfathers run their own businesses and initially promised herself she would never start a company after seeing how hard it was. When she did eventually find one, she also quietly promised herself something else: to be willing to let go while things were good, not just as a last resort.​

She imagined potentially selling around 2027 or 2028, but a strategic buyer approached much earlier: a global railroad software vendor eager to enter the North American market. What convinced her to say yes was not just the financial offer, but alignment:​

• The buyer had about 50 employees – large enough to be established, small enough to feel human.​
• She respected the acquiring CEO and felt strongly aligned on values.​
• She believed both her employees and customers would be well cared for and that the acquisition made strategic sense for everyone involved.​

For nearly a year, she held two realities at once: fully committed to leading her company day‑to‑day, while also preparing emotionally and strategically to let it go if the deal was right. That process required courage, self‑trust, and a belief that she could reinvent herself even before she knew exactly what the next chapter would be.​

Alumah and the Inner Work of Leadership

After the sale, Katie didn’t step away from tech; she redirected it. Her new company, Alumah, is a spiritual self‑care and meditation app rooted in the very practices she relied on as a leader. An early “MVP of the MVP” launched in late December, and she hopes to have the fuller MVP live around the time of the TEDxDuluth event.​

Alumah is, in her words, “close to my heart” and an extension of the inner work she did to lead well:​

• Ongoing self‑reflection on how her personal growth affected her ability to support her team.
• A weekly relationship, for over five years, with a therapist‑coach who helps her see blind spots and navigate challenging decisions.
• Using her core values as a practical filter for choices, especially under pressure.​

For Katie, leadership and personal growth are inseparable; Alumah is her way of sharing tools that helped her with others who are navigating demanding roles and lives.​

People First, Community, and Growth

Katie’s leadership philosophy is built around three simple, memorable values she wrote down even before hiring her first employee: people first, participate in community, pursue growth.​

These values show up in how she:​

• Prioritized cultural fit and long‑term care for her employees and customers when evaluating a buyer.
• Talks about success as something built with teams and clients, not by a single “visionary” founder.
• Acts on feedback from trusted people who will tell her what she needs to hear, not just what she wants to hear.

She also credits her education for shaping this view. At Metro State, she designed her own undergraduate degree in managing a diverse workforce, combining gender studies, ethnic studies, management, and sociology. Later, she earned a graduate degree in training and development from UW–Stout, focusing on how people learn and how to design effective learning inside organizations. Those threads—equity, learning, and systems—eventually converged in her work as both a founder and a leader.​

Embracing Change Without a Master Plan

One of Katie’s most relatable traits is her honesty about not having a tidy master plan. She followed what interested her – diverse workforce studies, training design, regulatory work in railroads – and only later saw how those pieces fit together.​

She describes an early TEDxDuluth idea she had called the “paradox of success”:​

• To succeed, you often have to go “all in” on an idea.
• At the same time, you must stay flexible enough to pivot, admit you were wrong, and change course when reality teaches you something new.

Standing “ten toes down” while also riding the wave, as you put it together, is the skill—being committed without wearing blinders. That philosophy shaped her company’s evolution, her decision to sell, and even her approach to writing her TEDxDuluth talk, which she originally drafted just for herself as a way to reflect on what she had done and what she wanted to share.​

What to Expect at TEDxDuluth

Katie’s TEDxDuluth talk will dig into value-based leadership – how it actually looks in practice, why it doesn’t always match the usual leadership stereotypes, and what it means to “live yourself into new ways of thinking” rather than just think your way into new habits. She will also use vivid analogies from railroading to illustrate her ideas, connecting a very old industry to very current questions about growth, change, and integrity.​

Her hope is that people leave not just inspired, but equipped: more willing to follow the breadcrumbs of a good idea, more confident about letting go when it is time, and more grounded in values that can carry them through whatever their next chapter looks like.Link to the full interview here.