I do my best work at the inflection point: you've got wiggles of product-market fit, you're building a real executive team for the first time, and the job just changed underneath you. Yesterday you were building the product. Today you're building the organization that builds the product.
I work with startup founders, CEOs, and their executive teams. Usually venture-backed, usually B2B software, usually somewhere between ten and a few hundred employees.
What I bring
Most coaches have studied startups. I've been a startup CEO twice (and a COO once). I've hired and mis-hired executives, navigated a co-founder split, and had board meetings that went sideways (and ones that went great). When you describe what you're going through, I'm not guessing what it feels like.
That experience doesn't mean I'm here to replay my own playbook. It means I understand the weight of your decisions well enough to help you think more clearly about them, and then actually make them.
How it works
I don't follow a curriculum. I meet with clients over Zoom or phone, usually every two weeks, and sessions are about whatever's most alive. Some weeks it's a hiring decision. Some weeks it's a conflict with your co-founder. Some weeks it's "I don't know what I'm doing and I'm not sure anyone should let me run a company."
I've been coaching since 2020. I work with 15-20 clients at a time and have coached over 50 people for more than 1,500 hours.
If you'd like to learn more, get in touch. For tactical answers, see my Coaching Logistics page (Fees, Cadence, etc.).
How I think about coaching
My job is to help you become a better decision maker, a better leader, and ultimately build a more successful business. That's the outcome. Everything else is method.
Most coaching has an either/or problem. Pure "ask questions" coaches never give you an answer, even when you're a first-time CEO who's never seen what a good board meeting looks like. Pure advisory coaches give you the playbook, but you never develop the capacity to figure things out yourself.
I do both, but the order matters.
Every session, I'm running a three-step sequence. First, I read what's actually happening (not just the problem you walked in with, but what's underneath it, too). Is this a structural problem (your org design is creating the conflict), an interpersonal problem (you can't give hard feedback), or a personal one (your identity is threatened by hiring someone smarter than you)? Second, I stay with what I've found before reaching for a solution. This is the step most coaches skip, and it's where the real work happens. Third, I offer the intervention that fits: sometimes a question, sometimes a framework, sometimes direct advice from my own experience.
The answer is rarely the bottleneck. Your capacity to use the answer is the bottleneck, and that capacity only develops if someone slows down long enough to help you build it.
I'm not going to relieve a symptom and move on. When you bring me a problem, I'm going to help you fix it and understand why it happened, so we're not fixing the same thing six months from now.