The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination. […] This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one’s potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life.
Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
Amidst the chaos and challenges of running a Silicon Valley startup, at what many in our society would consider the pinnacle of my career, I felt like I was living someone else’s life. I had achieved everything I had set my mind to, but the result felt empty.
I was very fortunate to start working with a therapist during this period who helped me to begin to understand how to reclaim my life as my own. She taught me the beautiful power held in her capacity for unconditional care and acceptance of others. This permission to feel safe and accepting with myself exactly as I was gave me the confidence and freedom to grow. I fundamentally changed my relationship with myself, and in turn to those around me, and how I chose to live my life.
I have deep curiosity and compassion for people in all of their wonderful complexity, and I find joy in building intimate relationships with others. This safety within a container of close trust is where our vitality and growth can actualize itself. It brings me great pleasure to witness and support this process of unfolding in others, just as I experienced it within a caring relationship with someone else.
If you’re both motivated and nervous about the prospect of meeting yourself more fully, I’d love to work with you. You can contact me for an initial consultation.
Cultural background & influences
I grew up in four countries (Mexico, the US, Spain, and England) before the age of 18, and this unusual upbringing opened up my acceptance to the wide variety and nuance of people’s experiences. I’ve seen how arbitrary cultural customs, rules, and thought patterns are, allowing me to more clearly see the individual personal experiences behind them. There are no objective rights and wrongs. We live in a world of human-created subjectivity within which we seek to understand our own life’s meaning.
The majority of my childhood was spent in Spain and England, and I was born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and American father. “Home” is a difficult concept to identify for me, but England and Northwestern Europe come closest. I grew up speaking both English and Spanish, and I have varying degrees of proficiency in Swedish, German, French, and Mandarin Chinese.
Spiritually, I am not religious, but I meditate regularly, and recognize the deep and timeless wisdom in Buddhism’s ancient teachings, which are as relevant today as they were several millennia ago. To deeply know oneself and see the inherent beauty of the world without judgement is the work of a lifetime.
Building thoughtful products
Before I reshaped my life’s priorities, I spent nearly 20 years founding and working for some of the most recognizable brands and technology companies in the world, including Twingate, Dropbox, and Bloomberg. I believe that a product is at its best when the customer is least aware of it, and my specialty is building intuitive, thoughtfully-designed products that “just work” for users.
This experience is so rare in the software market that products that support, rather than frustrate, users’ needs are lauded as “magical” in their experience. Building these types of powerful experiences are the result of deep empathy with target customers, elevating design thinking to a high level of importance across engineering, product, and design, and having strong opinions on how you want your customers to experience you.
As a former startup founder, I work with and advise a select set of B2B startups that are pre-Series C. If the above approach resonates with you, and your company falls into this category, you can read more or contact me to have an introductory conversation.