Founder Coaching

Stay ahead of your startup's growth with support, mentorship, and skillbuilding that develops your leadership and derisks your startup's death by suicide.

Work with Amy

Amy has helped thousands of founders scale themselves at the same speed as their high-growth, high-performance startups.

Amy is a licensed psychotherapist who worked with thousands of startup founders as Y Combinator’s first Batch Director and only in-house Founder Coach. No coach in the world can match Amy’s breadth of experience with founders and her depth of understanding how the pressure, stress, chaos, and joy of running a startup can impact a founder’s psychology, relationships, and well-being.

Amy brings the full force of her experience - and over a decade of clinical skill - into her work as a coach. She guides founders in becoming resilient, authentic, wise, confident, and capable leaders through every twist and turn of scaling a startup. She also brings unrelenting belief and optimism in your highest vision of yourself, your startup, and the world.

Amy empowers founders to scale in three areas:

  • Amy helps founders build self awareness, emotional intelligence, and a toolbox of skills to manage the intense emotions that come along with running a startup. She’ll support you in learning how to deploy emotions in your relationships and strategic decisions when needed. She’ll also help clarify your thinking, analyze your options, and develop new cognitive frameworks to overcome all the novel, complex challenges your startup will present you with.

    Amy will challenge you to step outside of your constraints and find the best-possible path forward - for you, for your startup, and for the world.

  • Amy coaches founders through the transition from IC to manager, to manager of managers, to seasoned exec leading a fully-aligned, quickly-moving, high-performance team. You’ll learn how to build trust by communicating honestly and openly with your cofounders, you’ll learn management skills that will align your team, and you’ll develop an authentic leadership style that will result in an effective and values-aligned c-suite and board.

  • Deploying the right process at the right time will maximize your leadership and increase efficiency while minimizing thrash in your team. Amy guides founders through creating and deploying culture and process for the first time, and iterating from there as your internal structure grows alongside your product and team.

Meet the founders we’ve supported

  • "I see my life as existing in two halves: Pre-Amy, and Post-Amy."

    MICHAEL SEIBEL - MANAGING DIRECTOR, Y COMBINATOR

  • "Amy reveals elegant, values-aligned solutions I otherwise would have missed. She's a great partner — we owe a share of Safetywing's success to Amy's wisdom."

    SONDRE RASCH - CEO, SAFETYWING (YC W18) & KONSUS (YC W16)

  • "Amy's breadth and depth of experience has been instrumental in helping me scale as a founder. She's a skillful, deliberate partner in my personal and professional growth."

    ELI BROWN - CEO, GUILDED - YC S17

  • "Amy guided my transition from being the founder of a small team into becoming an effective, compassionate СТО of a globally-distributed enterprise engineering team experiencing hypergrowth."

    SASHA KLIZHENTAS - CTO, TELEPORT (YC S15) & MAILGUN (YC W11)

  • "Working with Amy is the single most important decision I've made as a founder. Her support gives me clarity, confidence, and calm. And most critically, I've never felt alone on my journey."

    TOM BRUNSKILL - CEO, FORAGE - YC W19

  • "YC healed my startup. Amy healed me as a founder."

    VRINDA GUPTA — CEO, SEQUIN — YC S21

Ready to scale at the speed of your startup?