Nebraska

How a Nebraska-based HR Entrepreneur is Personalizing Employee Benefits

An interview with Adriana Cisneros Basulto, an Omaha-based entrepreneur, Google for Startups alum, and co-founder of Maxwell, an employee benefits platform.

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2 min read

At the end of the day, we all want to feel valued by our employer. That’s what inspired me to start Maxwell.

My path to HR wasn’t linear—I began by building and managing financial products. I vividly remember the magical feeling of receiving benefits that truly addressed my needs as a new parent, like flexible work arrangements and childcare support. It made me feel valued and more productive.

After a decade in corporate HR, I saw how challenging it is to make employees feel cared for. Benefits are often expensive, time-consuming to manage, and don’t resonate with employees. Many don’t understand their options, or the offerings feel irrelevant. I knew there had to be a better way. What if we could make it easier for teams to personalize the employee experience while maximizing the impact of their budgets and business results?

Maxwell empowers employers to offer rewards, recognition, incentives, or a defined budget for lifestyle benefits—like a gym membership or pet insurance—and employees choose how to spend it. We also consolidate traditional benefits into one user-friendly app, using behavioral science to boost engagement and employees’ awareness of their benefits. HR teams spend 10 to 15 hours a week answering benefit questions; if you can reduce even a few hours, that’s a huge time savings.

As Maxwell grows, we’re taking advantage of AI-powered tools for our workflow, too.

Just like a lot of HR teams, we're a small and mighty team, and we really value being capital-efficient. Google’s AI tools like Gemini allow us to do that for our own team.

Adriana Cisneros Basulto, co-founder of Maxwell

I use Gemini a lot to help me write blog posts and newsletters. It’s super intuitive. The biggest thing was learning how to generate prompts that deliver what I need, but Google’s prompt guide made it easy. For example, if I want to write an article about lifestyle spending accounts (LSAs), I’ll ask Gemini to help me create an outline. From there, I can add my expertise, but it’s super helpful not starting from scratch.

A tool I’m really enjoying is Google’s NotebookLM. At the end of the year, I used it to synthesize different studies on trends and 2025 predictions and then create a 30-minute Audio Overview. We plan to release one new episode on different topics every month.

Adriana Cisneros Basulto, co-founder of Maxwell

Maxwell has the potential to significantly improve employee retention and well-being. We saw this early on working with the healthcare industry, where high turnover impacts both costs and the quality of patient care.

A lot of my personal experience in HR was about helping people find better balance—whatever that meant to them. Hearing from employers that this is really meaningful to their employees and creating a difference in their everyday lives has been so rewarding.

Learn more about Maxwell