For high-performing individual contributors stepping into management at VC-backed and high-growth companies, and for the investors and organizations who want them to succeed.
Schedule a ConsultationTechnical depth, strong judgment, high output. Then they were promoted, or the company scaled around them, and the job changed.
Managing people requires a different skill set. Interpersonal dynamics become more complex. Emotion regulation becomes visible. Decisions carry more weight. The things that made someone excellent as an individual contributor are not often what makes them effective as a leader.
We work with leaders during the transition: a promotion, a funding round, or rapid growth. We also work directly with VC firms and growth-stage companies who want their leaders to succeed at this inflection point before it becomes a performance or retention problem.
Recently promoted or stepping into management for the first time, and the gap between IC excellence and leadership effectiveness is becoming real.
High capability but struggling to prioritize, delegate, and protect time. Reactive instead of deliberate. Team performance is suffering as a result.
Interpersonal tension within the team or with senior leadership. Something is off and it is affecting trust, communication, or output.
The same issues keep surfacing. A smart, capable leader is not stuck because of effort or intelligence. There is a pattern worth understanding.
We work with a small number of leaders at a time. The work is personal, high-touch, and designed for people who are serious about closing the gap between where they are and where they need to be.
Based on the Hogan assessment: a precise map of strengths, blind spots, and derailing tendencies under pressure, grounded in data rather than self-perception.
What changes at the leadership level, which skills transfer and which work against them, and how to build the competencies management actually requires.
The ability to understand and manage their own presence, build relationships that matter, and create conditions where their leadership is actually felt.
Practical skills for increasing team engagement, output, and cohesion, with less effort and more clarity about what actually drives results.
The difference is not just credentials. It is depth of training, access to honest conversations, and the ability to work at the level where leadership patterns actually live.
Doctoral-level training in human behavior, motivation, and development. This is the science of how people actually change, not coaching methodology.
Leadership challenges are rarely just strategic. Psychologists work at the level where patterns actually live: identity, interpersonal dynamics, behavior under stress.
We create the conditions where a high-performing person can receive difficult feedback, sit with real data about themselves, and do something useful with it.
Self-awareness without behavioral change is not useful. Every session connects directly to what a leader is doing in the room and how their team experiences them.
A data scientist was promoted to lead a newly formed team during a critical period of company growth. He was technically exceptional and trusted by the founder. What he lacked was the leadership infrastructure to match his new responsibility.
“This is exactly the kind of support I needed. [Wes and Louiza] have been game changers for me.”
Between us, we bring decades of clinical training, executive-level coaching experience, and firsthand knowledge of what it takes to build and lead in high-stakes environments.
Louiza holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and has spent her career at the intersection of high achievement, interpersonal dynamics, and organizational change. Her graduate research at Stanford focused on the psychology of high performers. She grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and competed on the US National Chess team. She is based in the Bay Area and San Diego, and she leads our client relationships and business development.
Wes holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and has spent more than ten years working with founders and senior executives on leadership, self-awareness, and performance. He has worked with leaders through the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Hero’s Journey Foundation, and Wise Mind Leadership. He has also spent more than twenty years as a founder himself. His focus is on the relationship between self-understanding, purposeful vision, and leadership.
The transition from individual contributor to manager is one of the highest-risk inflection points in an early-stage company. It is also one of the most under-resourced. We work with VC firms to provide this support systematically, across their portfolio, so that the leaders their companies depend on are prepared before the cracks appear.
Talk to Us About Your PortfolioWe offer a complimentary consultation call to assess fit. No commitment, no pitch. Just a direct conversation about what you are navigating.
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