There is a specific mile marker somewhere on the Camino de Santiago - the ancient pilgrimage route threading across northern Spain - where a young product executive from VMware stopped walking and started building what would become BetterUp. He had tried therapy. He had tried life coaching. He had tried the Landmark Forum. None of it stuck. The Camino did.
Alexi Robichaux was 25 when VMware acquired Socialcast, the Series B startup where he was a product manager, and handed him a director's badge at a Fortune 1000 company. He sat in board meetings surrounded by executives twice his age and felt, by his own description, like "the court jester." Public speaking made him physically ill. He knew enough to know he was struggling, but not yet enough to know what to do about it.
That gap - between knowing you need to grow and actually having access to the kind of coaching that makes it happen - became the entire premise of BetterUp. In 2013, Robichaux and co-founder Eduardo Medina launched the company on a single conviction: that personalized professional coaching shouldn't be a perk reserved for the C-suite. It should be available to anyone who works.
