This episode is a little bit different and a particular delight for me, because we got to talk to one of my colleagues and direct inspirations: Amy Buechler—who is not a startup founder herself, but rather a psychotherapist turned executive coach. And not just any executive coach, but one of Silicon Valley’s most sought-after coaches, having served as Y Combinator’s first and only in-house Founder Couch for nearly 5 years before building her own independent coaching practice.
In this episode we talked about some of the distinct psychological patterns and pitfalls Amy has observed in the countless founders she’s worked with, from feeling empowered and disempowered all at once, to being pushed along by fear; and Amy shares some of her tools and frameworks for addressing those challenges. We also talked about the very scrappy, entrepreneurial path Amy herself has taken in developing her founder coaching methodology, which really resonated with my own experience.