To do something you’ve never done before, you have to become someone you’ve never been before.
Amy is a psychotherapist who coached thousands of the world’s best startup founders at Y Combinator
Amy works with a small number of VC-funded founders navigating the growth surge before their Series A - and stays with them as long as the work requires.
Amy is a licensed psychotherapist and Y Combinator's first in-house Founder Coach. She has coached nearly 2,000 founders across every stage of building - from first hire to IPO. She knows what's normal and what isn't, and she knows the difference between a founder who needs support and a founder who needs to be challenged.
Who Amy works with
Amy works with VC-funded founders at seed stage who are experiencing meaningful growth and beginning to feel the pressure of what's coming next. This is typically the richest and most disorienting period of a founder's personal and professional development — the moment when the startup starts demanding more than the founder currently knows how to give.
She works best with founders whose companies are built to have a deep and lasting impact on the world. She meets with clients weekly and is available async as often as needed. The engagement ends when one of you decides it does — typically when the founder's work at the company has, through acquisition or IPO.
What working with Amy is like
My coaching is built on six operating principles that guide every engagement:
Use what you have. This is a function of empathy. I believe you have everything you need to succeed and that our task is to discover, reveal, and apply your existing capability to the challenge you’re facing. The path forward begins exactly where you are, and we’ll find a step forward for you whether we’re starting from your limitation or your strength. This is a function of trust.
This is an offering. I offer the support that I believe will best serve you, and leave you fully free to decide what’s right for you and your startup. I will not upsell, spam, or push any particular direction on you because I preference the integrity of your knowing. I don’t need you to listen to me. I need you to do what you know is right to do, and I will support you in clarifying and moving forward in whatever direction that is. This is a function of love, which in its highest form is given freely without expectation.
Focus on function. Your internal experience is morally neutral. You think and feel and believe what you do because of your life experiences - not because anything about you is inherently good or bad. Rather than judge, we’ll look at function: Do your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors help you achieve your vision, or hinder you? The goal is to maximize the aspects of you that support your highest ambitions, and make a thoughtful choice about how to change, heal, or downsize what doesn’t. This is a function of nonjudgment.
Success requires authenticity. Every successful founder’s story is unique - so yours won’t look like anyone else’s. Nor should it. Your startup is an expression of you, and your authenticity is how you become an outlier. Only outliers win in Silicon Valley. You win by being yourself. This is simple but not always easy. Amy's commitment is to support you in building a company that only you could build, from a version of yourself only your startup could create. This is a function of courage.
Possibility > Certainty. I believe that our inability to tolerate uncertainty forces doors closed that don’t need to be shut. We prefer certainty over possibility because knowing is emotionally easier to tolerate than not-knowing. Until you decide otherwise, I will believe in the possibility of your startup succeeding, your ability to find a way through, and your ambitious vision becoming real. This is a function of optimism, hope, and faith.
We Learn Together. I am an expert in founder psychodynamics and you are the expert of You. Partnership with me feels like a co-created exchange where your expertise, wisdom, agency, and self-knowledge are paired with mine so we can discover together how to apply what I know to what you’re building. This is a function of reciprocity.
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"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)
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"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)
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"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
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"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
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"I see my life as existing in two halves: Pre-Amy, and Post-Amy."
MICHAEL SEIBEL - MANAGING DIRECTOR, Y COMBINATOR
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"YC healed my startup. Amy healed me as a founder."
VRINDA GUPTA — CEO, SEQUIN — YC S21
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"I see real, measurable impact on my performance as a founder: from how I manage my anxiety and fear, to how I can better trust and enable my team."
ESTEBAN CASTANO - CEO, TRM LABS - YC S19
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"Amy brings rational order to a constant barrage of complex novel situations. She empowers me to grow by helping me understand when to trust my instincts, how feelings influence my reactions, and how to land the outcomes I want for myself and my company."
STEVE KIRKHAM - CEO, BERBIX - YC S18
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"There is a life for me before working with Amy and now there’s the life I live now - opened up to an awesome, more emotional, creative way of breaking down problems without disregarding my or others’ emotions. I was scared this would eliminate my edge, but instead it unlocked a whole new level of performance for me and the team."
MARC ANDRE-CAMPAGNA - CEO, GAIIA - YC W21
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"Amy scaled my capacity as a manager: I can now support my team without overextending myself, hold my team accountable, and recognize when to step in to help - and when to trust that the team, its structure, and our culture will carry my company’s needs."
CARLOS SAAVEDRA - COO, MAKRWATCH - YC W15
Trusted by the world’s best founders
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YC Podcast with Michael Seibel - Founder Coaching & Having Hard Conversations
2018
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Work with Amy
Amy typically works with founders at or around their Series A who are struggling to scale themselves at the same pace as their startup’s growth.
Stay ahead of your startup’s growth.
Get tactical advice from a seasoned founder coach who's helped scale companies to $1B+ and beyond. Each week, Amy shares real coaching takeaways, mindset shifts, and leadership strategies you need to scale.