Last night I was at a meetup with about 30 engineering leaders from across Silicon Valley. Somewhere in the room I caught myself thinking: I want to help every single one of them.
Not as clients. Just — help them.
We are entering one of the most disruptive periods in the history of technology leadership. AI agents will take over significant portions of development and knowledge work in the next five years. The leaders in that room will be asked to navigate that transition for their teams, their organizations, and themselves. How they do it — with awareness or without it, with empathy or without it — will shape what the other side looks like for a lot of people.
Most leaders I’ve worked with were not held back by their skills or intelligence. They were held back by their fears and desires — the patterns that trap them into predictable behavior, often without their awareness. A decision gets made the same way it always gets made, even when the situation calls for something different. A team dynamic hardens into something nobody can quite explain or fix.
A good manager can sometimes see the pattern. Rarely do they have the tools to help someone work with it. And the power dynamic makes full honesty hard on both sides.
This is the gap I’ve spent the last several years preparing to fill. Since 2016, I’ve been intentionally blending operational roles with coaching, mentoring, investing, and training — a decade of building toward this. Not a pivot. A preparation. I bring to this work the experience of having led product, engineering, and design organizations, failed as a founder and learned what that failure actually cost, scaled teams from 30 to 300 to 3,000, and developed the coaching skills and Enneagram framework to surface what sits underneath all of it.
Across a career spanning nearly four decades, I am now fully focused on Hyperion Leadership Network — serving leaders and organizations in technology and beyond, in Silicon Valley and across the world.
To everyone who made those four decades possible — thank you.
There are too many of you to name, and my fear of leaving someone out kept me from trying. What I can do is acknowledge the roles that shaped me:
The engineers who shipped impossible things under impossible constraints. The product managers who kept us honest about what users actually needed. The designers who made complexity feel simple. The operations and infrastructure teams who held things together in the middle of the night. The QA engineers who held the line on quality when everyone else wanted to move faster. The founders who trusted me with something they’d built from nothing. The leaders who took a chance on me when I was still figuring it out.
To the mentors in the tech industry who showed up when I was a founder and CEO trying to figure it out — you know who you are.
And to the coaches, teachers, and guides who helped me understand myself well enough to do this work — this chapter wouldn’t exist without you.
If any of this resonates — whether you’re someone I might serve, someone I can help in another way, or simply someone on a similar path — I’d love to connect.
Hyperion Leadership Network 
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