Cameron Yarbrough and the art of becoming replaceable

In August 2024, Cameron Yarbrough gave up the job around which founders so often build their public identity. Heather Conklin became CEO of Torch, the leadership coaching company he had co-founded. He moved to executive chair. The announcement contained an unusually revealing detail: he had hired her two years earlier with the possibility of this very handoff in mind.

A company devoted to developing leaders had reached a rather personal examination. Would its founder actually make room for one? Yarbrough had been calling himself a founder-coach, describing his responsibility as helping people grow into their next role. Here was a next role with his own name already on the door. The decision gave that philosophy a consequence.

The interesting part of his career is how many times he has had to reconsider what running a business requires. His first enterprise sold equipment for leisure and swallowed the time he wanted to spend enjoying it. Torch grew from conversations into software. Eventually, growth meant choosing a successor. The thread connecting those changes is a willingness to treat leadership as something he still had to learn.

Gone Surfing. Back at the warehouse.

Yarbrough and his early business partner liked surfing and snowboarding. They opened Gone Surfing with a pleasingly economical theory: sell the equipment, get discounts on their own gear, and leave plenty of time for the slopes and the water. Anyone who has mistaken ownership for freedom will recognize the flaw in that calculation.

He later recalled working 70 to 80 hours a week, particularly around the holidays. The discounts arrived; the free time did not. Customers could buy the equipment for their adventures while the founders remained occupied with the business of supplying it. Gone Surfing had become an excellent advertisement for somebody else’s afternoon off.

The company had a small exit in 2005. Yarbrough’s account of the experience is candid about the friction between its founders and his own contribution to it. Commercial progress had coexisted with a relationship he wanted to handle better. That distinction mattered: an exit can settle ownership without settling what someone has learned about working with another person.

His subsequent education took him toward the study of people and relationships. The later coach had already been an operator. He knew that having a plan and having the capacity to carry it out with other human beings could be separate achievements.

A friendship before a founding team

Yarbrough met Keegan Walden in graduate school. Their shared training included a communications laboratory known as T Group, where participants worked on relationships and communication. They spent a year and a half in that setting together. Long before they shared a company, they had spent time learning how they behaved around other people.

When Yarbrough moved into executive coaching, he invited Walden to join him. They referred clients to each other and collaborated until a consulting business began to take shape. Software followed a working service. Torch was founded in 2017 and joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 batch.

His work as a leadership facilitator at Stanford Graduate School of Business also helped inspire Torch. There, the subject was communication among people preparing to lead organizations. In his coaching practice, it was communication among people already leading them. The settings differed; the need to listen, receive feedback, and resolve disagreement kept returning.

His clients included Garry Tan, Steve Huffman, and Justin Kan. Famous clients make an efficient introduction, but the less glamorous part of the work explains the business: helping a person notice how their behavior affects the people expected to follow them. A founder’s résumé rarely supplies that answer.

The coach has a coach

Yarbrough’s own coaching relationship provides a useful complication to the expert portrait. After reading Kim Scott’s Radical Candor, he began using its ideas with executive teams. Then he pursued introductions to Scott herself. He recalled making three or four attempts before finally getting her on the phone. The professional listener wanted someone to listen to him.

He describes his preferred leadership culture through two requirements: empathy and accountability. Put them on separate axes and a deceptively simple map appears. A manager can understand people and still leave expectations vague. Another can demand results while overlooking the people producing them. Yarbrough wants leaders to develop both capacities.

That pairing gives his work a practical edge. Consider a missed deadline. The explanation matters, and so does the commitment that was missed. A useful conversation must make room for each. These are ordinary workplace situations, yet handling them well repeatedly is demanding. Coaching earns its place when it helps someone carry what they have discussed back into the next meeting.

“Since Torch’s inception, I’ve viewed my role as a founder-coach.”

Cameron Yarbrough · August 2024

A trophy, then a bigger operating problem

In 2018, Torch won the PITCH competition at Collision in New Orleans, ahead of 108 other entrants. The photograph catches Yarbrough with a trophy in one hand and the other raised above his head. A business built around listening had found a moment when it needed to be heard.

Public pitching and private coaching ask for different kinds of attention. The stage rewards compression: explain the company before the room moves on. Coaching leaves room for a person to revise an answer. Yarbrough’s job required him to move between those tempos, selling an idea whose value depended on sustained work after the sale.

Torch’s early-2020 merger with Everwise added mentoring and digital learning capabilities. A $25 million Series B followed in 2021, led by Obvious Ventures. In May 2022, Torch announced a $40 million Series C led by 137 Ventures. The company said revenue and employee count had more than doubled year on year.

Those milestones changed the demands on its founder. More customers meant more relationships to support, more staff meant more people to lead, and more capital meant more promises to fulfill. The very activity Torch offered its customers became necessary inside Torch. A coaching company has employees, priorities, and difficult decisions of its own.

The feedback has to leave the conversation

Yarbrough has argued that providing coaching alone is insufficient. Development needs to connect with an organization’s strategy, reach people consistently, and have its impact measured. A productive conversation can be a beginning. The employer also needs to know what it is trying to change and how the work will be supported afterward.

His interviews sometimes investigate that same problem from another direction. In a conversation with Michael Seibel, Yarbrough explored the difference between issuing instructions and creating conditions in which employees can act effectively themselves. Seibel called the first approach playing the CEO card. The attraction is obvious: the boss gets an answer quickly. The limitation is that the boss must keep being available.

Yarbrough’s writing also pays attention to smaller signals of authority. He once described a client who had enjoyed casual conversations with a senior vice president on video calls. Back in the office, the executive ignored her greeting in an elevator. They exited on the same floor and returned to very different desks.

His point was the effect of a leader’s ordinary behavior. An elevator ride can communicate something that a company presentation never intended. The episode is useful because it has no grand drama: a greeting, a silence, a changed impression. Leadership development must be specific enough to reach moments that small.

The parts of work that follow you home

Yarbrough’s enthusiasm for remote work has included a straightforward consideration: time with family and friends. He has also argued for deliberate opportunities to meet colleagues in person. In his view, those gatherings can be about building relationships and enjoying one another’s company, rather than squeezing another strategic planning session into the calendar.

His public writing makes that preference less abstract. After a week of parenting alone, he described days running from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., filled with tasks and meetings. He acknowledged how much delegating to his spouse had removed him from the details of his children’s learning. The account turns a familiar management skill into a household question: what do you cease to notice when someone else handles the work?

He has brought a similar question about responsibility to workplace inclusion. In Torch’s Justice at Work initiative, he emphasized the role of people with privilege in doing the work of change. His focus was on who should carry responsibility, a concern that extends beyond individual coaching sessions.

He also says he limits LinkedIn use to work and abstains from Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. A person selling the value of attention has chosen some boundaries around his own. For a founder with a public profile, there is a certain efficiency in declining several additional audiences.

Handing over the keys, keeping the question

Conklin’s promotion supplied a concrete answer to the succession question. As COO, she had overseen product and technology, customer success, and coach strategy and operations. Her responsibilities gave her experience across the company before she took its top job. Yarbrough remained involved through the executive chair role.

The handoff also changes how his earlier ideas read. Asking managers to build other people’s capacity is easy to recommend. Giving someone the authority to lead the company you founded makes the recommendation personal. There is an appealing lack of ceremony in the underlying test: identify a person, give them room to develop, and eventually let the title catch up.

His next public project moves that examination onto the page. Grand Central Publishing lists Foundering: The Inner Work of Building-and Surviving-Successful Startups for March 30, 2027. The book considers how qualities that help someone launch a company can become liabilities as the business develops. It is scheduled for publication; the argument’s reception still lies ahead.

Meanwhile, his advice to aspiring coaches remains commercially direct. Choose a clear specialty, demonstrate measurable value, and develop an advantage competitors cannot easily reproduce. He expects artificial intelligence to make the market more crowded. The founder remains interested in how a useful practice becomes a durable business.

Gone Surfing began with the hope that owning a company would leave more time for the things its founders loved. Torch has given Yarbrough a different way to think about ownership: build something other people can help lead. The succession has already happened. The question that gives his career its shape remains open each time someone else takes responsibility.