You already know what
to do. Let's find out why you're not doing it.
Executive coaching for founders. Together, we surface the beliefs and patterns quietly capping what your company can become.
Sound familiar?
You're the bottleneck on every meaningful decision, and you know it.
Your co-founder relationship has developed a topic you both route around.
You've hired experienced people and you're still doing their jobs.
Feedback either doesn't happen or happens badly, so you've stopped giving it.
You're running on adrenaline and calling it commitment.
None of this means you're a bad leader. It means you're doing a job you've never done before, without training, in public, with money on the line.
BELOW THE SURFACE
It isn't a skills gap
You've read the books. You know, in principle, what you're supposed to say in the difficult conversation. You still don't say it.
That's not a technique problem, and another framework won't fix it. Underneath most stuck leadership behavior is a belief - usually old, usually invisible, usually one that served you well at some earlier point. That delegating means you're replaceable. That being liked and being respected are the same thing. That if you slow down, it all falls apart.
My work is finding those patterns and naming them precisely. Once a founder can see the belief generating the behavior, the behavior tends to change quickly - often faster than either of us expects. The techniques become almost incidental.
Influence is the only leverage that scales
Founders have surprisingly little formal power. Titles mean little at thirty people. Equity vests slowly. Your best engineer can leave on Tuesday and have three offers by Friday. And the moment you're managing functions you've never performed yourself, you can't lead on expertise either.
What's left is referent power - the influence that comes from who you are to the people around you. Whether they trust your judgment. Whether they tell you the truth.
Connection isn't the opposite of authority. For a founder, it's the source of it.
TESTIMONIALS
What Others Are Saying
"Difficult conversations can be connective"
Jimena has opened me up, time and time again, to the possibility that difficult conversations can be beautiful and connective – that they can unlock levels of depth in a relationship. She's taught me to love hard conversations, because I now believe that most things I want, and most of my opportunities for growth, are on the other side of one.
Arielle Zuckerberg,
General Partner, Long Journey Ventures
"One of the best meetings I've had with my team"
One of my favorite examples of Jimena’s impact was preparing me for a leadership meeting after my team had fallen short again on an important deliverable. I knew I needed to approach the conversation differently if I wanted a different result. Jimena helped me shift from focusing on what I wanted to tell them to thinking through the right questions to ask and leading with inquiry. I walked into that meeting differently, and it ended up being one of the best meetings I’ve had with that leadership team.
Christine Egbert,
GM, Juniper Square
"Jimena has helped me cut distractions and focus on what actually moves my bottom line"
It's hard to imagine my first two years as a founder without Jimena. She's helped me achieve my business goals while feeling more calm, joyful, and confident. Her sales guidance multiplied my conversion rate; I now close most prospective customers. She's helped me cut distractions and focus on what actually moves my bottom line. Our work also helped me let go of old habits that I thought were necessary to be "successful": chasing external validation, feeling not enough, and burning out from overwork. I now trust my ability to both sustain my business long-term and enjoy the journey. Jimena has changed my life, and I recommend her to every founder I know.
Joyce Zhang
Former Stripe, Founder, Dating Coach for Tech Founders
"Jimena can see through my rationalizations"
We all have a tendency to avoid the parts of reality that make us uncomfortable. Having a coach like Jimena has been instrumental in helping me stay in touch with the truth. She can see through my rationalizations and ask the direct questions I need to make hard decisions and change my approach to difficult situations.
Olivia Chen
Former Founder, Senior Director, Grow Therapy
HOW I WORK
No curriculum. A structure underneath.
The work follows what's actually happening in your company this month.
What stays consistent is the arc below — most founders arrive
somewhere in the middle of it, and we start where you are.
See yourself clearly
Most leadership problems look like other people's problems until you look closely. We map your actual patterns — what triggers you, what you avoid, where your instincts serve you and where they cost you. Usually with structured feedback from the people around you.
Lead yourself first
Your regulation sets the ceiling for your team's. If you're reactive, they're guarded. This is the work of managing your own state under pressure — not to suppress it, but so it stops making your decisions for you.
Say the hard thing well
The conversation you've been postponing with your co-founder. The performance issue you've been managing around. Direct, kind, specific feedback is a learnable skill, and most founders were never taught it.
Build instead of bottleneck
Real delegation — not task handoff, but transferring ownership and living with someone else's judgment. Plus the systems that let a team run without you in every loop.
Scale without breaking
Leading confidently with your board and your team, at a pace you could sustain for years rather than quarters. Founders are surrounded by people happy to spend them. Very few notice the cost until it's already been paid.
I was a pediatrician before I was a coach.
Thirteen years coaching founders and executives through exactly this transition. What carried over from medicine is how I think: the complaint you're presented with is almost never the problem.
I'm an ICF-certified Professional Coach and trained as an Integral Coach at New Ventures West. I work with a small number of clients at a time, because this requires actually knowing your company, your co-founder, and your patterns - not just your calendar slot.
Questions people ask
Can't I just use AI for this?
For some of it, honestly yes. It's good at helping you organize your thinking, draft a hard message, or work through something at midnight when you don't want to call anyone. Some clients use it between sessions and I think that's a sensible use of their time.
What it can't do is work from anything except the account you give it. It gets your version of your co-founder, your version of why the VP isn't delivering, your version of why the conversation hasn't happened yet – and then reasons carefully from inside it. AI is good at identifying patterns. It can't see the invisible limiting belief underneath yours – the one you can't see from where you're standing. Finding what's outside your version is the whole job.
It also tends to agree with you. At eleven at night, when you're assembling the case for a decision you've already made, agreeable isn't what you need.
And nothing is at stake between you and a piece of software. Some of what makes coaching work is being seen by someone who could think less of you and doesn't.
How long does this take?
The honest answer is that it depends on where you're starting and what you're trying to change. Some founders come in with a specific situation – a co-founder conflict, a leadership transition, a conversation they've been avoiding – and we resolve it in a few months. Others come in because something isn't working and they're not sure what, and that work goes somewhere they didn't expect. Those relationships tend to last longer.
What I can tell you is that the first three months will bring enough clarity and movement that you'll know what you want to do next. Most clients keep going.
What's the difference between coaching and therapy?
Therapy tends to focus on healing – understanding how the past shaped you, working through what that cost you, finding a way to carry it differently. That's important work and I have enormous respect for it.
This is different. We're not starting from what happened to you. We're starting from where you are now and what's getting in the way of where you want to go. The past comes up when it's relevant – and sometimes it is – but only because it's showing up in the room right now, in the decision you're avoiding or the dynamic you keep recreating.
The other difference is that I'm focused on your leadership specifically. The beliefs we're working on are the ones that affect how you run your company, how you show up with your co-founder, how you build a team that doesn't need everything routed through you. It's relational and it's practical, even when the work goes deep.
If you're dealing with something clinical, I'll tell you. Most founders I work with aren't – they're up against something they can't see clearly, and that's a different kind of problem.
What if my co-founder is the problem?
That's one of the most common things I hear. And it's worth sitting with, because it's almost never the whole story.
Co-founder dynamics are where everything shows up – the avoided conversations, the unspoken agreements that stopped working, the decision-making patterns neither of you has named yet. When something isn't working between you, there's usually something each of you can't see clearly from where you're standing.
I work with founders on this in two ways. Sometimes individually – helping you see your part of the dynamic and figure out what you actually want to do about it. Sometimes with both of you in the room, which tends to move things faster when there's enough trust to try it.
What I can tell you is that when one person changes, the dynamic changes. You don't both need to be in the room for something to shift.
Is this confidential?
Yes. What happens in our sessions stays between us – and I want to be clear that this isn't just a policy. Confidentiality is what makes the work possible. Founders don't examine the beliefs that are running their leadership in a room where they're not sure what stays there. I'm committed to it absolutely.
The one exception worth naming: if you're working with a board or investors who have engaged me directly, we'll agree upfront on what gets reported and what doesn't. That boundary is set before we start, not after.
Occasionally I share examples in professional contexts – never in a way that identifies you or your company, and only with your explicit permission.
Start with a
conversation
Thirty minutes, no charge, and you don't have to perform. You describe what's happening. I'll tell you honestly whether coaching is the right approach, and whether I'm the right person.
Blossom Executive Coaching · Bay Area, California