The company is bigger than your instincts.

What this stage actually looks like

You hired an exec team under pressure, sometimes in a single quarter, and now you have to lead them. Your co-founder relationship has begun to strain under role clarity questions neither of you wanted to ask early. The board wants a different kind of conversation than the one you were having at seed. The company has started to outrun the version of you that started it.

The patterns at this stage tend to cluster:

• An exec team whose performance is inconsistent, and you can't tell how much of it is your management and how much is their fit.
• A co-founder relationship that has drifted into parallel tracks, sometimes with unspoken resentment stacking up faster than either of you is willing to name.
• A board that now wants reporting discipline, not pitch energy, and you haven't entirely made that shift.
• A you that is still operating at every layer because letting go feels irresponsible and because nobody else does it quite right.
• Personal relationships that have moved into deficit because there hasn't been time for anything that doesn't move a metric.

What the work looks like with us

At this stage the refactor gets specific. We look at where your instincts are still load-bearing and where they've become technical debt. We work on co-founder dynamics, often with both founders in the room over time. We work on how you manage an exec team you didn't fully design and whose performance costs you money every week it's off.

We also do the quieter work: identity, ambition, what you actually want now that the company has become a real thing, and what's underneath the version of you that can't quite rest.

Who's likely to match

We take on growth-stage founders who are already reasonably self-aware, who have been coached or therapized before and know the difference, and who are ready to look at the mismatch between who they were at seed and who the company needs now.

If you want a coach who will hand you a framework, that is not us. If you want a pair of eyes on the pattern that you can feel but can't quite name, we probably are.

The engagement

An open-ended engagement billed quarterly, one coach as primary, with another available when the work needs it (co-founder coaching, exec team interventions, board prep under pressure). We set the rate to the stage the company is at, and share it during the discovery call. Full details on the FAQ page.

Field guides for this stage

Free, no signup, written from the client work at this stage.

• The post-fundraise dip. Why founders feel worse after the round closes, and the ninety days after the wire.
• The board is a relationship, not an audience. The performance trap, the bad-news protocol, and the internal work underneath.
• Firing an executive. Deciding sooner, doing it cleanly, and what waiting actually costs.