Dear Founder,
I believe you shouldn’t have to choose between your company and your life. I believe personal development drives business outcomes, that authenticity makes for more effective leaders, and that you can achieve your business goals and live the life you want to live.
The founder’s journey can carry us to rarified heights of personal and professional success, joy, and purpose. Or it can alienate us from the parts of life we hold most dear and, ultimately, destroy us.
Like most founders, I saw the promise of success, wealth, and fame when I started my first company, and it didn’t take long to experience the downside too. The stress it put on my relationships, the risk to my financial and physical health, and the many small compromises I made in the name of “work,” over and over, until I didn’t recognize the life I was living.
Anyone who hasn’t been there won’t really understand.
For fifteen years as a founder and CEO, I felt like getting the job done required me to present only the most polished, hyper-competent version of myself and my company, at all times. So I kept my struggle hidden and played the role of the perfect CEO.
I saw what the outside world wanted of me and did my best to make my insides match. And it “worked.” I built, scaled, and eventually exited my company. But it cost me dearly. In the name of success, I nearly lost myself.
You may think you’re alone in this. As a coach, I see it in nearly every founder I meet.
There’s a reason for that kind of polish in some moments (fundraising, recruiting), but over time I saw how my need to look competent got in the way of my learning and growth. How it stifled innovation, created rifts between the leaders of my company, and eroded my confidence.
And I began the process of coming home. Thanks to many wonderful coaches, teachers, and mentors, I learned to do the work. To unlearn all the ways I’d built a life that didn’t serve me, all the ways I’d sacrificed myself at the altar of unimportant things. I summoned the bravery to lead as myself, rather than the person I thought my employees and investors wanted.
For the better part of a decade, I’ve been coaching founders, to give them a place to do their work. A place to drop their armor, discover who they truly are as a leader, and unabashedly bring that person to their companies and their lives. To help founders consciously and systematically build their companies to suit the life they want, not the other way around.
It didn’t take long before the founders found me. Founders from around the globe, including those leading some of the fastest-growing companies in tech. General partners from some of the world’s most successful venture funds. Each reaching out with their own struggles and achievements, their own masks of competence hiding real, vulnerable human beings, and their own goals to use their lives for the greatest good.
My coaching is dedicated to the idea that conscious attention and persistent effort on the areas that matter, plus a great deal of bravery when it counts, can change a life.
And changing the life of an entrepreneur can change the world.
I hope you’ll join me.
Ryan