At 23, Scott Leese was healthy, athletic - a two-sport college athlete on scholarship at Dominican University of California, playing soccer and tennis, studying psychology. Then, in the span of two days, everything changed. He was hospitalized with severe ulcerative colitis and an autoimmune disease that doctors couldn't get ahead of fast enough.
What followed was four years of hospitals, operations, and pharmaceutical dependency. Nine surgeries total - four of them major abdominal procedures. Two were life-saving. He came out the other side with no large intestine and a serious opioid addiction that had developed under medical supervision. His exit from that addiction was characteristically blunt: cold turkey, against direct medical advice.
He didn't enter sales until he was 27. No background, no training, $30K starting salary at a Bay Area startup. Just a person who had learned, the hardest possible way, that time is finite and pain has to be confronted before anything else can move. That insight became the backbone of everything he'd teach later.
The parallel he drew - between a patient admitting they have a problem before recovery can begin, and a prospect admitting their pain before they'll buy anything - wasn't a clever metaphor. It was lived experience. His first book, Addicted to the Process, made that case with enough clarity that Jeffrey Gitomer endorsed it and it hit #1 on Amazon.
Within a decade of that first $30K sales job, he had scaled six consecutive early-stage startups to $25M+ ARR, each in under three years. One got acquired for $175 million. Another became a unicorn. He'd built a consulting practice that worked with 160+ companies, co-founded a surf retreat in Costa Rica, launched the world's largest virtual sales happy hour, and started writing checks into AI companies alongside OpenAI and Anthropic.
He does all of this from Austin, Texas, with his wife Janet, their two sons Brayden and Caleb, and two dogs named Loki and Mia. He listens to music all day long. He has no large intestine. He surfs when he can. He still plays soccer.
