The company scaled. The founder has to scale with it.
Leadership consulting for founders moving from building a company to running one. Engagements are tailored, delivered by doctoral psychologists and typically run three to six months.
Leadership consulting for founders moving from building a company to running one. Engagements are tailored, delivered by doctoral psychologists and typically run three to six months.
Midjourney
Founders receive ongoing support around product, fundraising, and strategy. Far less attention goes toward developing the people leading the company.
As companies scale, the job quietly becomes a different job. The work shifts from building to leading. Interpersonal dynamics get more complicated. How a founder handles pressure becomes visible to everyone. Decisions start carrying more weight and arriving with less context.
Left unattended, these patterns can erode retention, culture, and performance, often when a growing company can least afford them. Leadership is a skill set that can be learned, yet founders are often expected to develop these capacities on the job while simultaneously running a growing company. Our work empowers the pace and magnitude of that development.
Headcount is climbing after a raise. The job is shifting from doing the work to leading the people who do it, and the friction is starting to show.
Highly capable, but the whole company waits on their input. Reactive rather than deliberate, and output suffers for it.
Tension with a co-founder, an early employee, or the board. Something is off, and it is eroding trust, communication, or execution.
The same problems keep resurfacing. A capable, driven founder is rarely stuck for lack of effort. Usually there is a pattern worth understanding.
From the Hogan assessment: a specific map of strengths, blind spots, and the tendencies most likely to derail them under pressure, grounded in data rather than self-perception.
Which instincts still serve them, which have started working against them, and how to develop what the growing role requires.
A better read on their own presence and its effect on others, the relationships that actually carry the company, and how to create conditions where their leadership is felt rather than announced.
Stronger communication, decision-making, and trust. A clearer understanding of the dynamics shaping team effectiveness and organizational performance.
Doctoral training in human behavior, motivation, and development. The science of how people actually change, rather than a coaching methodology.
How others experience a founder, where friction is forming, and what is likely to repeat if nothing changes. Making that visible is most of the work.
We are trained to tell a leadership problem from a clinical one, and we keep clear boundaries between the two. Few advisors can say that honestly.
Self-awareness on its own changes nothing. Every session connects to what a founder does next and how the team experiences it.
Across successive financing rounds, founders become steadily more likely to be replaced as CEO, and most of those changes are initiated by the board rather than chosen.
Wasserman, N. (2003). Founder-CEO succession and the paradox of entrepreneurial success. Organization Science, 14(2), 149–172.In a long-running Stanford study of high-tech startups, changes to the founder’s original model for hiring and managing people were more destabilizing than replacing the founding CEO.
Baron, J. N., & Hannan, M. T. (2002). Organizational blueprints for success in high-tech start-ups. California Management Review, 44(3), 8–36. Stanford Project on Emerging Companies.A meta-analysis restricted to randomized controlled trials, covering 37 trials and 2,528 participants, found a moderate positive effect on leadership and personal outcomes (g = 0.59).
de Haan, E., & Nilsson, V. O. (2023). What can we know about the effectiveness of coaching? Academy of Management Learning & Education.While founders often benefit from experienced mentors, advisors, and strategic guidance, the psychological and interpersonal dimensions of leadership often receive far less attention.
How a founder handles pressure, navigates relationships, and leads others becomes company culture and shapes performance and outcomes.
We provide tailored consulting that brings psychological depth, supporting individual leaders, co-founder relationships, and broader team dynamics. Engagements can be designed for individual founders or across accelerator cohorts and investment portfolios.
Talk to us about your founders
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, and is based in the Bay Area.
Wes holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and has spent more than a decade working with founders and senior executives on leadership, self-awareness, and performance, through the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Hero’s Journey Foundation, and The Wise Mind Institute. He has also spent more than twenty years as a founder himself.
We orient to your situation and take on one or two of the things currently on your plate, so you can judge the value for yourself before committing to anything.
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