Amy is a psychotherapist who coached thousands of the world’s best startup founders at Y Combinator
I spent nearly five years as Y Combinator's first Batch Director, coaching nearly a thousand early-stage founders through every stage of building - the breakthroughs, the crises, and everything in between. What surprised me wasn't the variety of what founders faced. It was how consistent it was. The same fears before a hard conversation. The same overwhelm when things start working. The same pressure, guilt, self-doubt, and hope at every stage.
That consistency told me something: founder psychology is more universal than most founders realize. You're not uniquely broken. You're not doing it wrong. You're experiencing what all founders experience in the process of creating something extraordinary - and almost nothing exists to help you make sense of it, or to grow into the founder your startup demands.
That's why I built Scale Yourself.
Scale Yourself is a home for the emotional, management, and leadership skills that startup schools don't teach - but that the best founders in the world have mastered. Whether you're navigating your first team, a cofounder conflict, or the loneliness of scaling faster than you ever expected, you'll find something here that meets you where you are.
Start with The User Manual for Founder Psychology - a free, growing library of frameworks and insights drawn from thousands of hours of coaching. Or get matched with a founder coach from our trusted network of ex-YC founders, operators, and psychotherapists. Either way, you don't have to figure this out alone.
Press
2024
2023
2020
2020
2019
YC Podcast with Michael Seibel - Founder Coaching & Having Hard Conversations
2018
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2016
Trusted by the world’s best founders
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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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"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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"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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"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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"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
Amy empowers founders to scale in three areas
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Amy helps founders build self awareness, emotional intelligence, and a toolbox of skills to manage the intense emotions that come along with running a startup. She’ll support you in learning how to deploy emotions in your relationships and strategic decisions when needed. She’ll also help clarify your thinking, analyze your options, and develop new cognitive frameworks to overcome all the novel, complex challenges your startup will present you with.
Amy will challenge you to step outside of your constraints and find the best-possible path forward - for you, for your startup, and for the world.
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Amy coaches founders through the transition from IC to manager, to manager of managers, to seasoned exec leading a fully-aligned, quickly-moving, high-performance team. You’ll learn how to build trust by communicating honestly and openly with your cofounders, you’ll learn management skills that will align your team, and you’ll develop an authentic leadership style that will result in an effective and values-aligned c-suite and board.
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Deploying the right process at the right time will maximize your leadership and increase efficiency while minimizing thrash in your team. Amy guides founders through creating and deploying culture and process for the first time, and iterating from there as your internal structure grows alongside your product and team.
Operating Principles
These are the non-negotiable values that guide my decisions and form the foundation of the partnership I offer to founders and products I offer to the world.
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This is a function of empathy. It reflects my belief that 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.
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This is a function of love, which in its highest form is given freely without expectation. I offer the support that I believe will best serve you given what I know, and leave you fully free to make your own choice about what’s right - or wrong - in applying that to your startup. I will not upsell, spam, or push any particular direction on you because I preference the integrity of your decisionmaking, the dignity of your knowing, and your freedom of choice over my revenue (and ego). 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.
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This is a function of nonjudgment. 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. Absent judgment, we’ll look instead at the function of your actions, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and values. Do they help you achieve your vision? Do they hinder you? We’ll 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.
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This is a function of trust and courage - and directly related to my years at YC where I heard hundreds of off-the-record talks about how the best founders achieved their success. Spoiler: Every successful founder’s story is unique. This means that your path to success will not look like anyone else’s. Nor should it. Your startup gives you the opportunity to make choices - big, small, major, minor, daily, strategic - that will enable you to build a product no one else ever has before, because no one else has ever been you. This is how your startup will enable your authenticity, if you let it - because it’s an expression of you. Your authenticity is how you’ll become an outlier, and only outliers win in SV. You win by being yourself. This is simple but not always easy, and my commitment is to support you in courageously executing from your authenticity.
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This is a function of optimism, which I personally can’t distinguish from hope or faith. I believe in making choices that protect and enable the greatest possibilities for all living beings. I believe that our inability to tolerate the fear and ambiguity that come from many unknown, unending paths forces doors closed that don’t need to be shut. Humans have a tendency to preference certainty over possibility because knowing is emotionally easier to tolerate than not-knowing. But until you yourself make the call to shut down your startup, I will always believe in the possibility of your startup succeeding, in your ability to find a way through, and in your ambitious dream being ground into reality and taking shape IRL.
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This is a function of reciprocity and healthy ego. I am an expert in founder psychodynamics and will teach you what I know. But you are the expert of you and I am necessarily your student. Partnership with me should feel 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 offer.
Get in touch
We support the well-being of founders across the globe however we can.
Get in touch if you’re a founder looking for support, a mental health startup looking for advisement, a journalist looking for expertise in founder psychology, or a VC looking for guidance as you build your fund’s psychological resources for founders - we can help.
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