In their own words

I came to Sara via the Friends & Family accelerator program, and these have been the best coaching sessions that I have experienced. As a founder, you’re surrounded by people offering advice, but there are very few people you can be completely honest with. There are things I’ve said to Sara that I would never say elsewhere, and having that confidential space has been incredibly valuable.

Sara became a trusted thinking partner for both the business challenges I was navigating and the personal weight that comes with being a founder. We worked through everything from product and go-to-market strategy to team dynamics, difficult conversations, fundraising, and some of the bigger questions about where the company was headed. She could move easily between getting into the details of a problem with me and helping me step back to see the larger picture.

What I especially valued was Sara’s combination of directness and empathy. She challenged my thinking and was willing to tell me when she saw something differently, but I never felt judged. She helped me take things that felt overwhelming or were spinning around in my head and turn them into concrete options, decisions, and next steps.

Sara also understood that being a founder isn’t just about solving business problems. The uncertainty, self-doubt, responsibility, and pressure can be difficult to separate from the work itself. Having someone with her own experience as a founder and CEO who understood that reality, and with whom I could be completely candid, made her an invaluable coach during a very demanding stage of building my company.

I started working with Sara in December 2022, about a year after stepping into my first director role. I had spent most of my career as a designer, and while I was excited by the opportunity to shape product through strategy and leadership, I also felt out of my depth. I wanted to become a better manager, trust my instincts more, and grow my ability to set product strategy and vision—without losing the creativity, empathy, and values that had always been important to me.

This support mattered all the more because I was new to managing multiple people, and I soon found myself facing difficult decisions and conversations, both in leading my direct reports and in navigating relationships at every level of the organization. Sara helped me work through those moments with care and clarity, always making sure I kept the humanity in them, for myself, my team, and the people I worked alongside.

Over the past few years, Sara has helped me grow into a much more confident design and product leader. Our coaching has given me a place to work through difficult decisions, challenge my own patterns, and get clearer about the kind of leader I want to be. She has helped me learn to trust my judgment instead of constantly second-guessing myself, while also giving me practical tools for managing people, navigating organizational complexity, and thinking more strategically about product and design.

One of the things I value most about working with Sara is that she understands that leadership isn’t separate from who you are as a person. From the beginning, I wanted a coach who shared my belief that you can be ambitious and effective while still leading with humanity, creativity, and strong personal values. Sara has helped me become a stronger leader without feeling like I needed to become someone else in the process.

When we started working together, I was questioning whether leadership was even the right path for me. Today, I am more confident in my role and capabilities as a design and product leader, while also still valuing directly creating and building. That shift in confidence and identity has been one of the most meaningful outcomes of our work together, and Sara has played an important role in helping me get there.

Sara never fails to be there for me as a voice of clarity, empathy, and reason during the most stressful and uncertain moments of my journey as an early stage startup founder.

We’ve covered topics ranging from fundraising and product vision to decision-making and navigating difficult conversations. She encourages me to turn ambiguous, tough, and varied problems into tangible option paths and focus on what I can control.

What makes Sara different is that her perspective comes from having lived through many of these experiences herself as a founder and CEO. She understands that the hardest decisions you face as a founder are rarely just business decisions. They can also be about identity, responsibility to your team, burnout, ambition, and your own definition of success.

I’ve also deeply appreciated that Sara creates a space where I feel comfortable being completely candid about what’s going well and what isn’t. Starting from the very first time we met, I’ve always left our conversations with more agency, confidence, and perspective than I had going in.

I started working with Sara when I was the founder and CEO of an early-stage startup. At the time, I wanted to become more confident telling our story, pitching the business, and fundraising. What I didn’t know was just how many different chapters of my career Sara would ultimately help me navigate.

Our work evolved as my circumstances did. Sara coached me through the challenges of being a founder and CEO, and eventually through the incredibly difficult process of shutting down my company. When it was time to figure out what came next, she helped me see that closing one chapter didn’t have to define me or diminish what I had accomplished. We worked together as I transitioned back into engineering and eventually stepped into a VP of Engineering role.

As my responsibilities grew, our coaching evolved again. Sara helped me think through the kind of engineering leader I wanted to become and translate that into how I actually led. We worked on everything from navigating team transitions and developing people to establishing clear product development principles, expectations, and ways of working for my engineering organization. She helped me move beyond simply managing the work to intentionally building the culture and leadership practices I wanted for my team.

Since then, I’ve continued to grow as an engineering leader, taking on leadership roles at larger organizations and expanding the scope and complexity of the teams I lead. Today, I’m a CTO at another early-stage startup.

Sara was a trusted coach through some of the most consequential transitions in my career. She has a remarkable ability to meet you where you are while helping you see beyond the immediate challenge. She can get very tactical when that’s what you need, but she also pushes you to step back and ask bigger questions about who you want to be as a leader and what you want from your career.

When I first came to Sara, I wanted to become more confident as a CEO. Looking back, our work helped me build something much broader: confidence in my ability to navigate change, lead teams intentionally, and keep evolving as my career took turns I never could have predicted.

I highly recommend Sara to anyone looking to grow as both a leader and a person. She supported me through many of the challenges of being a first-time founder and CEO, and we worked together through very different stages of my company, from the early days as a pre-revenue, bootstrapped startup to building a business with a loyal team, predictable revenue, and venture backing.

Sara’s own experience as a founder and CEO who built a venture-backed startup from founding through a successful acquisition gave her a unique perspective. She understood firsthand the challenges, pressures, and uncertainty that came with building a company, but she didn’t simply tell me what she would do. She helped me figure out what was right for me.

Her no-nonsense coaching style led to several breakthroughs and insights that have had a lasting impact on me. I was impressed by how quickly she could get to the core of what I was really trying to address. I came away from every conversation with a new idea, realization, or way of looking at a problem that helped me change and evolve.

Working with Sara ultimately changed the way I relate to my work and the role it plays in my life. She gave me a new lens for looking not only at my company and my role as a founder, but at my life more broadly. She was incredibly kind, very honest, and put tremendous care into our relationship. I’m deeply grateful for the impact she had on me and on PartnerPage.

I started working with Sara while participating in an accelerator program, and her experience as a founder and former startup CEO was immediately invaluable. She understood not only the challenges I was facing, but what it actually feels like to be the person responsible for navigating them.

Sara has helped me with everything from fundraising and pitch practice to product strategy and preparing for difficult conversations. She’s equally willing to get into the weeds, whether that means reviewing an important email, helping me think through exactly how to approach a conversation, jumping on a quick call to practice what I’m going to say, or simply calming my nerves before a big moment.

Over time, Sara has become the first person I text when I need a sanity check and one of the first people I want to text when I have good news to share. She has consistently gone above and beyond to support both me and Coblr, becoming not just my coach but a trusted advisor and friend.

Sara has been alongside me as Coblr has grown from an accelerator-stage startup to raising our full pre-seed round and significantly growing the business. We’re no longer figuring out how to get from zero to one. We’re thinking about how to scale thoughtfully. Having Sara in my corner through that evolution has made an enormous difference. She brings the perspective of someone who has actually built and led a company herself, combined with a genuine investment in me as a founder and in what we’re building.

My company was at a major inflection point, and I knew we needed to seriously investigate all of the paths in front of us. Sara became an invaluable partner as I worked through what were some of the most consequential decisions I’d made as a founder and CEO.

Together, we looked honestly at every option: continuing to operate while significantly reducing costs through layoffs and other cuts; rethinking our pricing and packaging; identifying and pursuing strategic partnerships; and ultimately exploring an acquisition. Sara helped me think through each path, understand the tradeoffs, turn ideas into concrete plans, and then actually execute on them. Ultimately, we successfully sold the company.

What makes Sara particularly valuable in moments like this is that she’s been in these shoes herself. She understands the mechanics of what needs to happen and can help you navigate everything from strategy and negotiations to the difficult people decisions along the way. But just as importantly, she understands what it feels like to be the founder going through it.

There is an enormous range of emotions that comes with reaching this stage of a company—the doubt and fear, the pressure and uncertainty, the excitement about what might be possible, and eventually the complicated emotions that come with letting go of something you’ve built. Sara understood all of it. She knew when to challenge my thinking, when to help me see another option, and when I simply needed a thoughtful, experienced person alongside me as I worked through a difficult decision.

Sara was a trusted partner at every step of the process. Having someone who could support both the strategic decisions and the very human experience of navigating them made an enormous difference.

I started working with Sara 14 months ago, right after I was promoted into an SVP of Product role. The organization didn't have much structure, visibility, or predictability at the time, and I needed to build those things while also getting people on board with where we were headed.

The biggest thing Sara gave me was consistency. Routines that hold up, a way to spot the repeat mistakes and comfort zones I kept falling back into, and the push to get out of them. Watching how that changed the trajectory of the teams was the proof it worked. She also helped me plan for changes outside my control, so those events stopped being surprises and started being something we accounted for.

She kept me connected to the 'why,' even when it felt repetitive. I learned that people take in information differently, so the job is to deliver the same message in different formats and become a broken record without apologizing for it.

Sara's coaching was instrumental in pointing me in the right direction and getting our organization and me to our goals a hell of a lot faster than I would have on my own.

Sara has been an invaluable part of our Friends & Family accelerator for the past three years. In our 2026 cohort, we expanded her role to Executive Coach in Residence, giving founders dedicated access to her throughout the program.

Founding a company can be incredibly isolating, and there are challenges that are difficult to discuss with investors, advisors, or even your cofounder. Sara gave our founders a trusted, confidential space to work through the issues keeping them up at night—from cofounder conflict and difficult pivots to fundraising, product strategy, and go-to-market challenges.

What makes Sara especially valuable to founders is that she’s been in their shoes. She brings firsthand experience as a founder, CEO, and product leader: she’s raised venture capital, built and led a company from founding through a successful exit, and served as Chief Product Officer of a public company. That experience gives her a rare understanding of both the personal and business challenges founders are navigating.

The feedback from our founders was consistently enthusiastic. The founders praised Sara not just for her experience and perspective, but for her ability to listen, ask the right questions, and help them find clarity without telling them what to do. Having someone they could be candid with, who understood both the human and business sides of building a company, became an incredibly valuable part of the accelerator experience.

Sara is a trusted friend and partner to Slauson & Co. and the founders we support, and I’m grateful for the care, thoughtfulness, and experience she brings to this work.

Sara and I have been working together for over one and a half years. Her experience as a founder and former CEO, leading a venture-backed company from founding to exit, has been invaluable. Sara navigates inquiry with empathy, knowing when to go deeper on a topic that needs more space and time. She also has very strong product instincts that have helped to shape my thinking and approach to growing my team and business.