executive-coach
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Patrick Cline and the Trouble With Retirement
After building NextGen, Patrick Cline tried retirement. A few months later, he was developing Lightbeam - and building a second career around the people, partnerships, and unfinished work that kept drawing him back.
Alex Martin
Alex Martin is the Chief Executive Officer of Abcuro, a clinical-stage biotech in Newton, Massachusetts working on selectively depleting highly cytotoxic T cells in autoimmune disease and cancer. A biopharma operator with more than 30 years of company-building and deal-making, he has run Palladio Biosciences and Realm Therapeutics (both acquired), served as COO of Intercept Pharmaceuticals and CFO of BioXell, and held business-development leadership at Novartis. In February 2025 he steered Abcuro to a $200 million Series C led by New Enterprise Associates. He also chairs the board of Veralox Therapeutics, sits on the board of ESSA Pharma, coaches senior executives, and lectures at Wharton and Columbia Business School.
Dane Holewinski
Dane Holewinski is a San Francisco-based executive coach and former venture-backed founder who runs Decode Coaching, where he works one-on-one with startup CEOs and founders at companies like Tonal, Zendrive and RealBlocks. Before coaching, he spent more than a decade building and operating technology companies, including co-founding the mobile deep-linking startup Yozio. He now also serves as CEO & Founding Team Coach at Seen Health, a culturally focused senior-care company. His coaching blends Silicon Valley operating experience with formal training from Harvard's Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey, and a practice grounded in meditation, exercise and breathwork.
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.
Claire Diaz-Ortiz
Claire Diaz-Ortiz is a venture capitalist, angel investor, bestselling author of 10 books, executive coach, and former Twitter Corporate Social Innovation Director - the early employee Wired dubbed 'The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter.' A Stanford and Oxford-educated polymath who co-founded a nonprofit in Kenya, live-tweeted the birth of her child, holds the prized @claire Twitter handle, and now runs The Angel Collective to fund female founders across Latin America while coaching Fortune 500 executives through 100 Coaches Agency.
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.
Julien Smith
Julien Smith is a Montreal-based serial entrepreneur, New York Times bestselling author, and one of the earliest Twitter users (handle @julien). He co-founded Breather, an on-demand private workspace platform that raised $122M+, and later Practice, a coaching management platform backed by a16z. His 2011 free Kindle book 'The Flinch', edited by Seth Godin, remains one of the most-read Kindle books ever, and his viral blog post 'The Complete Guide to Not Giving a Fuck' is widely credited as the inspiration for Mark Manson's multi-million-copy bestseller. Today he coaches first-time CEOs.