coaching
(32)
George Lipphardt and the distance between good and ready
A CEO award carries one name. George Lipphardt’s approach to leadership turns attention toward the people still learning the job - and the colleagues who can help them get there.
Dmitry Dumik and the art of changing the plan
Before Chatfuel, Dmitry Dumik sold school reports, mowed American lawns and built an app that failed to travel. His career keeps returning to the same question: what happens when you try something before you feel ready?
Plumm wants payroll to pay for peace of mind
When employers squeezed wellbeing budgets, Plumm moved into the software they still needed to buy. Its bet: put therapy, people management and payroll on the same bill.
The Startup Teaching Horses to Talk Back
A horse can't tell you its left hind is off. Equestic's SaddleClip listens to the gait instead - and riders in 65 countries are now training to what the data says.
Skool
How a deliberately plain community platform - five tabs, one price, and a points-for-likes game - became the default home for the paid-community economy.
Podia
The all-in-one platform where 15,000+ creators sell courses, coaching, and community - and keep the whole business under one roof.
Kajabi
Kajabi is the operating system for human expertise - helping real experts build, sell, and grow trusted businesses with clarity, momentum, and AI-powered support.
GroupApp
Everything you need to run group learning programs, retain your members, and grow your revenue - in one platform.
MindFi
MindFi is a Singapore-based corporate mental health platform that helps global employers care for their people. Through a single app it offers on-demand therapy and coaching, 24/7 text and chat support, guided self-care programs, and community support, matching employees to culturally relevant, multilingual providers. Founded in 2017 and a Y Combinator Summer 2021 company, MindFi positions itself as an APAC-first alternative to Western employee-assistance programs, blending clinical care with wellbeing analytics for HR teams.
Jon Plax
Jon Plax is a Vice President of Software Engineering (Customer Centric Engineering) at Salesforce, where he has spent the bulk of a 23+ year career building and leading globally distributed engineering teams. Known internally as a technically deep yet empathy-driven leader, he has tackled some of Salesforce's most complex scaling challenges - JVM tuning, database bottlenecks, and multi-continent team coordination. He spent five years in Salesforce's Dublin office, briefly detoured to Bumble, then returned to Salesforce. A photography hobbyist with a consistent 'spaceman1066' handle across the internet, he is married to Talia Bailey Plax, a product marketing leader at Atlassian.
Park Padel
Park Padel is a San Francisco-based padel club operator building Northern California's home for the fast-growing racket sport. Founded in 2023 by Jessica Talbert, Neil Chainani, and Katie Lampert after they discovered padel while traveling in Europe, the company runs three clubs - outdoor courts with Bay views at Embarcadero Plaza, a flagship indoor facility at Oyster Point in South San Francisco, and a location in West Sacramento. Park Padel blends court reservations, coaching, leagues, and social events with an app-first booking experience and a community-first approach, aiming to open 100 courts across the US over the next few years.
Nestment
Nestment is a San Francisco-based proptech startup that helps first-time and co-buying homebuyers navigate the path to ownership. It pairs 1:1 human coaches with AI-powered affordability, analysis, and matchmaking tools, and connects buyers to a vetted network of real estate agents and lenders - including a notable model for buying homes with friends and family.
BetterUp
BetterUp is a San Francisco-founded human transformation company that pairs certified human coaches, behavioral science, and AI to deliver personalized professional and leadership development at enterprise scale. It coaches employees at hundreds of companies and government agencies, blending one-on-one coaching, assessments, and data-driven insights, and has increasingly moved toward AI-powered coaching that runs around the clock.
Alexi Robichaux
Alexi Robichaux is the CEO and Co-Founder of BetterUp, the human transformation platform he started in 2013 after a soul-searching walk along the Camino de Santiago. He built BetterUp from a two-person idea into a $5 billion company with 2,800 employees and over $628 million in total funding, pioneering digital professional coaching for enterprises including Google, Salesforce, and NASA. A former product executive at VMware who once struggled with imposter syndrome and public speaking anxiety, Robichaux turned his personal journey with coaching into a mission to make elite professional development accessible to everyone.
Modern Health
Modern Health is a global mental wellness platform built for employers. It blends self-guided digital tools, behavioral health coaching, licensed therapy, and crisis support into one app, with care delivered in 50+ languages across more than 200 countries.
Heather Conklin
Heather Conklin is CEO of Torch, a San Francisco-based digital coaching platform that pairs leaders with expert coaches to drive measurable behavior change at scale. A Salesforce veteran who spent nine years there - culminating as SVP & GM of Trailhead - she joined Torch as COO in 2022 before being elevated to CEO in August 2024. Her philosophy blends behavioral science, data-driven measurement, and the radical idea that vulnerability is a leadership strength, not a weakness.
TaskHuman
TaskHuman is a Palo Alto-based digital coaching platform that connects employees to a global network of 1,000+ live, vetted specialists across 1,000+ topics - from leadership and sales to yoga, financial wellness and sleep. Founded in 2017 by Ravi Swaminathan and Daniel Mazzella, the company sells primarily to enterprises that want to give every worker (not just executives) a personal coach on demand.
TeachMe.To
TeachMe.To is a marketplace for booking in-person private lessons - golf, tennis, pickleball, music, yoga, and more - that matches beginners with vetted local coaches and handles scheduling, payments, and reviews in one place.
Katie Kirsch
Katie Kirsch is an Ecosystem Growth Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she builds the connective tissue of one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture firms - designing programs, products, and spaces that bring together the most ambitious founders, operators, and technologists. A 4x startup founder, ex-IDEO product leader, Stanford engineering graduate, and Harvard Business School MBA, she made Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2024 for consumer tech. Before joining a16z, she founded the mentorship platform Twenty and the coaching startup lume, taught entrepreneurship at Stanford's d.school and Harvard's Graduate School of Education, and volunteered in Uganda and India working on women's health and education. She launched the inaugural a16z Growth Engineer Fellowship in 2025, selecting 65 fellows from thousands of global applicants.
Chris Do
Chris Do is a Vietnamese-American designer, Emmy-winning creative director, and founder of The Futur - an educational platform on a mission to teach 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love. He fled Vietnam as a toddler on April 30, 1975, built Blind into a $7M+ annual motion design studio serving Nike, Xbox, and Sony, then pivoted at 42 to education - amassing 2.7 million YouTube subscribers, 500K community members across 190 countries, and a $5,000/hour consulting rate. His philosophy: hard truths, gently told.
Arman Assadi
Arman Assadi is a serial entrepreneur, AI founder, and copywriter who left Google in 2014 with a one-way ticket to Cuba and never looked back. He co-created the EVO Planner (the most-funded planner in crowdfunding history), built 13 different seven-figure product launches for clients like Neil Patel and Jeff Walker, and now leads Steno.ai — an AI digital twins platform backed by Tony Robbins that lets experts scale their voice and personality across web, mobile, and SDK. He co-hosts the Alfalfa Podcast and has spent a decade on a mission to democratize wisdom.
Corey Wilks
Corey Wilks, Psy.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist turned executive coach, speaker, and creator based in Austin, TX. After 15 years in clinical psychology, he left the field following a near-death experience during the pandemic and being fired from a remote therapy position, pivoting to help founders and creators remove the psychological bottlenecks costing them business growth. He runs Creator Alchemy - a newsletter, podcast, and community - and is known for his Four Horsemen of Fear framework. His coaching clients include VC-backed founders, CEOs, and bootstrapped entrepreneurs across AI, tech, CPG, and media.
Ken Norton
Ken Norton is a veteran Silicon Valley product leader turned executive coach. After co-founding Grand Central Communications (acquired by Google as Google Voice), spending 14 years at Google and GV shaping products used by over three billion people, he pivoted to running Bring the Donuts - a coaching practice for CPOs, VPs of Product, and Founder/CEOs. His 2005 essay 'How to Hire a Product Manager' is still considered the canonical PM career bible two decades on.
Teresa Torres
Teresa Torres is the founder of Product Talk and the author of 'Continuous Discovery Habits' (2021), the definitive book on modern product discovery. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who transitioned from front-end engineering to product management to coaching, she pioneered the Opportunity Solution Tree framework and has trained more than 18,000 product professionals through Product Talk Academy. She coaches product teams at companies like Spotify, Tesco, CarMax, and Snagajob, and is widely recognized as one of the most influential people in global product management.
John Cutler
John Cutler is a product thinker, writer, and systems overthinker best known for The Beautiful Mess newsletter (59,000+ subscribers) and the viral concept of the 'feature factory.' A college dropout turned touring musician turned video game creator turned product executive, he has written nearly 1,000 pieces on the messy intersection of product, people, and organizational design. He co-authored Amplitude's North Star Playbook, spent years as a product evangelist coaching teams worldwide, and is now Head of Product at Dotwork — a platform for building product operating systems.
Matt Ragland
Matt Ragland is a creator-economy builder, founder of HeyCreator, and host of The HeyCreator Show podcast. He went from camp counselor to ConvertKit employee #5, to full-time creator, building a 100,000+ audience across YouTube, newsletters, and social media. Through HeyCreator and Good People Digital, he helps creators turn their expertise into sustainable businesses via courses, communities, and newsletters. Known for radical transparency, outdoor adventures, and a systems-first approach to creative work.
Kent Beck
Kent Beck is the creator of Extreme Programming (XP) and a pioneer of Test-Driven Development, pair programming, and the Agile Manifesto. A programmer with 52+ years of experience, he co-created JUnit with Erich Gamma, co-invented CRC cards and design patterns in software with Ward Cunningham, and spent seven years coaching at Facebook. Today he runs the 'Software Design: Tidy First?' Substack newsletter (123,500+ subscribers in 195 countries), hosts the Still Burning podcast, and explores augmented human-AI coding. In April 2026 he publicly announced a Parkinson's disease diagnosis, continuing his mission to help technologists feel safe in the world.
Paweł Huryn
Paweł Huryn is a Warsaw-based product management expert, creator of The Product Compass - a Substack newsletter with 133,000+ subscribers ranked #1 in product management worldwide by Favikon. A former software developer turned CPO turned full-time educator, he brings 15+ years of hands-on product experience to weekly deep-dives on AI product management, strategy, and discovery. His philosophy: build it first, test it, then teach it.
Tara McMullin
Tara McMullin is a writer, podcaster, and business philosopher who helps small business owners build sustainable, humane companies. Formerly known as Tara Gentile, she spent a decade building a formidable reputation before reclaiming her own name in 2018. She is the founder of What Works, a digital platform and podcast downloaded over 2 million times, co-founder of YellowHouse.Media, and author of books including 'What Works' (Wiley). Drawing on feminist theory, critical sociology, and media studies, she challenges conventional business wisdom with intellectual rigor and a sharp editorial voice.
Shreyas Doshi
Shreyas Doshi is one of Silicon Valley's most respected product management voices - a former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo who now runs High Leverage Labs, advising founders and executives while teaching 4,000+ senior product people through his courses and content. Known for frameworks like LNO prioritization and Radical Delegation, he has built a 400,000+ follower audience with candid, no-nonsense writing on product strategy, leadership, and career growth.