Jamie Bryan

Jamie Bryan runs Sayge, a New York company built on a stubborn idea: the private coach that senior executives quietly enjoy shouldn't be a status symbol. It should be a baseline. Sayge's own tagline says it without apology - "Coaching For The Rest Of Us."

Today that means a fully virtual platform pairing employees with ICF-qualified coaches, one conversation at a time. The scoreboard is real: more than 60,000 one-on-one sessions, over 7,000 employees, and 100-plus organizations - names like HelloFresh, Snyk and Cockroach Labs among them - buying coaching not for the boardroom, but for everybody in the building.

It did not start as a business plan. It started as a personal surprise. In 2016, Bryan worked with a coach for the first time. The experience was good enough to be inconvenient - it left him asking a question he couldn't shake: if this is this useful, why doesn't everyone have one?

That question is the whole company. Bryan likes to frame Sayge as a simple act of redistribution. "Sayge takes the premium, executive-level benefit of coaching and democratizes it," he has said, "making it accessible to everyone, at every level." Strip the jargon and it's a plumbing job: take a scarce good, widen the pipe, let it run downhill to the people who never got a turn.

Before any of this, Bryan sold ideas for a living. He spent thirteen years in leadership roles at some of advertising's biggest houses - Ogilvy, DigitasLBi, Deep Focus - working across London and New York. He ran relationships for clients most marketers only dream of pitching: IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Nestle. It was a career built on persuading giant companies to believe in a story. Useful training, it turns out, for convincing them to believe in a new one.

The pivot wasn't loud. Bryan and his co-founder built Sayge in stealth for months, quietly coaching more than 50 people across eight companies before they ever raised their voice in public. Only in September 2017 did they announce the thing officially. By then the proof was already sitting in the room.

What makes Bryan's bet interesting is the timing. He founded Sayge on a belief that sounded speculative in 2017 and looked prophetic by 2020: that ways of working would become increasingly flexible, and that all employees would soon expect access to one-on-one professional development. He was building the coaching layer for remote work before most of the world was forced into it.

He also went back to school for it. In 2021, Bryan earned an Executive Certificate in Leadership Coaching from Georgetown University - a founder learning the craft of the very thing he was scaling, rather than merely selling it from a distance.

The money followed the conviction. In October 2021, Sayge announced a $1.7 million seed round led by Right Side Capital Management, joined by Comeback Capital, EVPI and FiDi Ventures. The round rode a wave of momentum: 200% year-over-year revenue growth, a coaching team expanded by more than 60%, headcount more than doubled, new geographies, new time zones. The plan for the cash was unglamorous and telling - senior hires across coaching, people, product and sales, plus better data to prove that a soft benefit produces hard results.

That word - proof - matters to Bryan. Coaching has always been vulnerable to the charge that it's a feeling, not a metric. Sayge's answer is to instrument it: measure performance, measure engagement, and hand employers a report instead of a vibe. It's the ad-man's instinct again, translated - don't just claim the campaign worked, show the lift.

Around the mission sits a set of values Bryan repeats like a compass: People First, Resourceful, Open-Minded, Purposeful, Encouraging, Lifelong Learners. The company applies a diversity, equity and inclusion lens to its hiring and its client work, runs monthly team training, and backs social-justice organizations including the ACLU, the Equal Justice Initiative and the NAACP. It's a lot of principle for a seed-stage startup - which is either the point or the risk, depending on where you sit.

Inside Sayge, the coaches have their own name: "Sayges." Bryan credits them, not the software, as the thing that actually delivers the mission. The platform is a doorway. The person on the other side of the call is the product.

Boil the whole enterprise down and you get a sentence Bryan uses as a north star: "Enable every individual to realize their potential." It's the kind of line that could be empty. In his case it's autobiographical - he's building the thing he wishes had found him earlier, and refusing to keep it rare.