Building a high-growth company is one of the most exhilarating things you can do with your career.
It can be a time of tremendous personal and professional growth.
Are you learning fast enough? Are you ready for the next phase?
My career as a startup operator spanned multiple IPOs, six years as an executive in a public company, acquisitions, scaling, great product launches and the occasional failure. I've coached hundreds of leaders in tech for over a decade plus Let's talk!
HIGH-GROWTH LEADERSHIP
EXECUTIVE COACHING
Who I Am
I’m a leader, a mentor and coach with decades of experience in fast-moving software startups.
I have built and scaled teams, executed full company pivots, shipped great products, and worked through two successful IPOs.
I was a key early member of three startups that became successful public companies, and a fourth that was sold for $250M+.
What I Do
I coach Founders, CEOs and execs of high-growth tech companies, typically Seed or pre-Seed to Series C (and sometimes beyond).
The span of my coaching work is broad, covering the difficult practicalities of leadership (board meetings, org structures, hard decisions etc etc) and the deeper work of how the job pushes on personal beliefs, biases and patterns.
It’s rare that real change happens without attention to both over the course of an engagement.
Why I Do It
I find the combination of creativity, high stakes and constant change in tech genuinely exhilarating. I get a thrill from being a part of building beautiful things and brilliant teams.
The moments when everything clicks are magic. When leadership, teamwork and creativity come together to build something great. When people are working above the best they could imagine.
I would love to help you get there!
EXPERIENCE
BACKGROUND
A classic progression from computer science degree (Cambridge, England) to startup engineer to executive.
About ten years away from the industry exploring life: a mindfulness practice, serious surf travel, a commitment to yoga, improv, theatre and writing. And raising a son in San Francisco.
Twelve years coaching tech leaders in SF and worldwide, combining the learning from both previous lives.
STARTUPS
Two IPOs, multiple full-company pivots, massive scale-ups, the occasional downturn, some terrific successes, a couple of epic failures. My roles included VP Engineering, SVP Product, office of a public company.
I have strong pattern recognition around what happens in fast-growth tech companies. My clients don’t have to explain the stress before a Board meeting, the difficulty of layering a valued employee, the joy of shipping something great. I get it, and the coaching moves forwards quickly from there.
LIFE
The reasons why we find high growth situations hard are often buried quite deep. Why is a certain conversation so difficult? What is it about uncertainty that is so stressful? Why are some decisions easy, and some almost impossible?
The tools I gathered in my various explorations help in coaching: mindfulness for clarity, improv for presence, surfing for being an endless beginner. But more importantly, my life path allows me to pay strong attention to the person in front of me, not just the role.
COACHING
In the past decade my clients have included hundreds of leaders. building everything everything from classic SaaS to robotics, FinTech, gaming, marketplaces, biotech, and, yes, flying cars.
Their backgrounds have been equally varied: Harvard dropouts, later career executives, brilliant engineers becoming founders, CEOs growing their company from 30 people to 500. My clients are from the USA, India, Australia, Eastern Europe, Israel and elsewhere - all looking to build their product and their company and make their mark.
More about my coaching style here.
Right now, much of my coaching is helping clients navigate the AI transition, which is moving incredibly quickly (far faster than the early days of the internet), and upending almost everything.
Software
The fundamentals of software development haven’t significantly changed in fifty years.
In 2026 that's no longer true.
The journey from idea to working product has changed from an costly, unpredictable adventure to a series of rapid, small-team iterations.
The impact is profound and lands suddenly, everywhere at once: roles change, timescales compress from months to days, hard-earned skills suddenly seem irrelevant (maybe? we don’t know yet).
This is unknown terrain which is shifting very, very quickly.
My coaching is a place where clients can face the immediacy of the change and decide what matters to them and their organization. What are the opportunities, the risks? How do you act, now, in the midst of uncertainty (because certainty isn't arriving any time soon).
Business
AI hits clients differently depending on company stage, and my coaching emphasis shifts accordingly:
AI native. Building from scratch, free from legacy, inventing org and process models from the ground up. There's no playbook for how a new AI-native company should work. Coaching here is partly co-creation - playing in uncertainty, encouraging experimentation and quick, clear evaluation. It's open-field running: you get to build the company you want, the way you want it.
AI in transition. Established companies, early to AI, but carrying legacy customers, business and culture. This is organization and culture change, which means storytelling, influence and decisive reworking. In short: leadership. I work with my CEO, exec and Founder clients to support their courage and conviction to make the big changes without compromising their values.
New to AI. Established companies realizing that AI is coming for them anyway. Somebody has to sound the klaxon and wake the organization up. The work here is communication and influence at scale. I work with founders, execs and CEOs to grow the skills they already have to the level needed to get a whole organization to see what's happening, and act.
People & Culture
This is happening at a scale and pace that's genuinely unprecedented (amazingly, the arrival of the internet looks boring by comparison). The idea of a yearly plan is hopelessly out of date. Roles that have been stable for decades - product, engineering leadership, design - are warping and reshaping in front of us.
At the same time the upside is enormous: a serious role in shaping the future, real change, business possibilities at a scale we haven't seen before.
All of this feels exhilarating, exhausting and destabilizing (and, yeah, at times, scary). It pushes on identity (who am I in this new world?), FOMO (“we’re growing at 60%, but that’s not enough”), anxiety (I was successful, will I be next year?).
The personal impact is real. I provide a space where my clients can be open about how these forces are affecting them personally, where they can develop resilience and strength.
COACHING THROUGH THE AI TRANSFORMATION
MY CLIENTS
A few of the terrific companies I have worked with recently, and some recommendations. You can see a longer list of companies and additional recommendations on the clients page.
COACHING NOTES
These notes discuss issues that come up frequently in coaching.
Sign up to receive these, along with links and articles from many writers on leadership and management, in the Human Forces newsletter.
GET IN TOUCH
Get in touch, and let's schedule a phonecall to discuss what you're looking for!