founder-coaching
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Clay Whitehead and the one callback that became a company
Fifty-two calls to California agencies produced one callback. For Presence co-founder Clay Whitehead, that small opening began a career spent building companies, backing founders, and thinking about how people work together.
Jason Albanese and the art of becoming less necessary
He built a consultancy by getting deep into other people’s businesses. At Lightning Capital, Jason Albanese is backing founders who must learn a harder trick: letting other people get on with theirs.
Brian Halligan and the business of keeping the crowd
A Grateful Dead fan helped turn inbound marketing into a software company. Brian Halligan’s next lesson was harder: getting people to show up is only the beginning.
Noah Isaacs and the trouble with keeping score
He helped build Bowery Valuation by giving appraisers better tools. Now Noah Isaacs is coaching founders through a problem he knows from the inside: a growing company can outgrow the person running it.
Clate Mask and the business of getting your life back
He joined his brothers-in-law to sell software and get out of debt. Two decades, a company sale and a book about chaos later, Clate Mask is helping Arizona founders build businesses they can actually live with.
Michael Narea and the company you keep
Before he backed education founders, Michael Narea brought students, surfers and conservationists together. At Transcend Network, he is still working on the same question: what can people build when they have someone beside them?
Amy Buechler Built a School for the Part of Startups Nobody Puts on the Pitch Deck
After nearly five years inside Y Combinator, Amy Buechler turned a thousand founder conversations into a practical curriculum for leading when the map runs out.
Huw Edwards Built a Career on Knowing the Numbers - Then Learned to Ask Better Questions
After Oxford, Goldman Sachs, Harvard, Bridgewater and three founder chapters, Huw Edwards changed the unit of measure. His work now turns on a harder calculation: what is a leader actually trying to build, and why?
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.
Matt Lerner
Matt Lerner is the founder and CEO of SYSTM, a growth coaching and accelerator program for seed-stage startups. A former PayPal GM who helped grow the SMB business from $800M to $10B+, and ex-500 Startups partner who ran the Distro Dojo growth program in London, he now works personally with up to 80 founders per year helping them find their growth levers. He is the author of 'Growth Levers and How to Find Them,' an international bestseller advocating that 10% of what startups try drives 90% of their growth.