The long version

Operator first

I ran product and operations at three early-stage companies between 2009 and 2017 — a marketplace, a SaaS analytics tool, a consumer-health pilot that ultimately did not work. None of those companies are household names; one was acquired, one is still going, one folded. I learned how the inside of a Monday actually feels at the senior-IC and director levels — the loneliness of a hard call you cannot delegate, the specific texture of an end-of-quarter scramble, what it costs to lose a key person at the wrong time. None of that maps cleanly onto a coaching framework. All of it informs the work.

Coach second

I started coaching part-time in 2015, full-time in 2017. No ICF credential, no Hogan certification, no Center for Creative Leadership badge. I have read most of the books and disagreed with about half of them; the work I do owes more to ten years of running 1:1s with people who actually reported to me than to anyone else’s framework. I will not run you through a 360. I will not give you a personality assessment. I will not assign you homework you would not have done anyway. We will spend most of our time talking about the actual decision in front of you this week, and once a quarter we will step back and look at the pattern.

Who I work with

• Founders at seed through Series C, primarily in B2B SaaS, dev tools, and infrastructure
• Operators at director through VP level, primarily product, engineering, and operations functions
• Senior individual contributors in engineering, design, and product who are deciding whether to take the management track

If you are an early-career IC, a sales leader, or someone outside tech, the honest answer is that we are probably not the right fit — not because the work would not help, but because you would get more value from someone whose 1:1 pattern lookups draw on the rooms you are in. I will refer when I can.

Where to find me when we are not in a session

I write a quarterly essay on management work — the things I am noticing across the practice, what I am reading, the patterns I have seen ten times this quarter. Resources has the back catalog plus the two PDFs I keep emailing to people. I am on LinkedIn (rarely) and on Bluesky (more), and I run a small in-person dinner for founders in Portland once a month — talk to me at the intro call if you want in.