Coaching for Founder Performance

Overview

Led by Jon Low, the Polaris Alpha coaching style (more below) is a compound of tactical support and coaching for founder performance— he has been an executive coach since 2013. Over the past five years, Jon has helped founders raise more than $500 million in venture funding. Past and present clients are backed by notable funds such as: Menlo, Sequoia, Goodwater, Tiger Global, Softbank, a16z, Lightspeed, Accel, and Founders Fund, to name a few.

Coaching for founder performance is designed specifically to unlock, augment, and accelerate company-building efforts as it applies to key areas such as:

  • Fundraising.

  • Leadership development and executive (CEO) stance. 

  • Go-to-market.

  • Strategic planning.

  • Operational hygiene.

  • Hiring.

  • Team performance & accountability.

  • Strategic & team communication.

The goal is to cultivate the your capacities so you can be an effective leader and CEO through numerous inflections of growth.

Jon’s philosophy is to help you move the needle anyway(s). Unlike traditional coaching frameworks, he won’t force you into a set curriculum and make you learn a new extensive taxonomy unnecessarily. Rather, he prefers a just-in-time approach to deliver you the right frame(s) for your specific situation and stage of company-building. 

Furthermore, he won’t run away from emotions if they must be dealt with respectfully. But he also won’t make you dwell on them recreationally. He appreciates moving at speed but not with expediency. Whenever you confront unnecessary drag— mental, tactical, material—Jon can help you reorient for speed. 

Who This is For

  • Founders & co-founder duos: This service works just as effectively, 1:1 with Founder CEOs, and with co-founders. 

  • Early/early-growth companies (mature Seed to Series B). Experience working with startups spanning industries such as: Finance, Life Sciences, Hospitality, Aviation, Freight, Advertising & Marketing, E-Commerce, and Education.

Why This Service Matters

The founder journey can be incredibly isolating and lonely. Furthermore, there are ‘Chinese Walls’ that limit what founders can discuss with key hires, board members, and investors. However, at the early stages of company-building, so much hinges on founder decisions and efforts. This service helps fill in the missing piece: 

  • Feel safer and more confident when navigating incredibly stressful, uncertain waters. Founders are often the source of safety for people around them— not the other way around.

  • Cultivate your executive X-Factor: Every founder has a unique way to access their superpowers— they are catalyzed differently. Discover yours and intentionally cultivate it.

  • Un-buffer your brain: founders have impressive supercomputer-like brains—  even then they need to mentally defragment. Quickly organize disparate data-points, offload mental chunks, embrace new information, and develop your ideas.  

  • Embrace new possibilities: challenge your existing train of thought and explore new frames/perspectives which can lead to more effective sets of actions and behaviors.

How The Coaching Works

There are 4 key elements to Jon’s style of startup founder coaching— each works with one another in a seamless whole to support you on your unique, early-stage startup journey. This style is a result of:

  • Having worked with and learned from numerous founders (all types) across different industries, business models, products, and services. 

  • A lifelong journey of learning, exploring, and completing the various puzzles that come with the human experience. 

Element 1: Wired to Win

Early-stage startups hinge on the psychology of its founder(s). Assuming they do things right, the startup will often grow faster than a normal human can keep up with. This change is a stressor on human neurology— we are wired to resist change and these signals can be corrosive to the founder(s) capacities. Coaching for founder performance helps founders:

  • Quickly (as feasible) adjust their psychology for their startups stage of development. 

  • Uncover and dissolve irrational fears and loyalties (guilt and shame) that keep them stuck in non-constructive patterns of behavior. 

  • Discover and augment founder(s) X-factor by understanding the unique levers behind their brilliance. 

  • Quickly recover from shock events. 

  • Reduce the emotional burden that comes with positive growth. 

Element 2: Running Towards Truth

The early-stage of company building requires applying scientific experimentation to answer big questions. This involves a systematized approach to ‘guess work’ to de-risk key variables on the way to scale— transmuting unknowns into knowns. However, founders deal with a compound effect whereby one question leads to another set of questions etc. It is easy to get lost and stay lost— coaching for founder performance provides an external vantage to help them soundboard, synthesize, and evolve how they prioritize resources for maximum business impact. 

Element 3: Contextualize Tactics at Speed

Tactics that work for one startup don’t transfer perfectly to another. Furthermore, the tactics appropriate to one stage of growth can be inhibiting for the next. Coaching for founder performance provides a supporting layer to contextualize tactics for your specific situation:

  • How do you quickly take what has worked for others, filter out the unnecessary/inappropriately contextualized components, and make it workable for your unique situation?

  • How do you validate your thinking using a bottoms-up first-principle approach?

Element 4: Communications of Consequence

Words can make or break relationships between founders, with investors, strategic partners, and employees. A series of words can promote safety, belonging, and alignment— and also create fear, confusion, and distrust. Coaching for founder performance helps you effectively re-frame and frame your communications for self and important others.

Typical Engagement Structure

Jon typically starts with a 3-6 month period to tackle the most immediate need (e.g. fundraising, founder-led sales, operational hygiene/excellence). The focus is on moving the needle on what matters and blocking/tackling key priorities as they arise. 

  • Weekly 45-60 minute calls: (Zoom) with the Founder and/or Co-Founder. Other key personnel can be looped in as needed. 

  • Asynchronous input & support: Responsive (same hour or same day) support via email/text/Slack for example for any confirmatory Q&A, requests for feedback/input, or requests for introduction to key personnel.  

  • Monthly retainer fee: cash retainer only for initial engagement— compensation for a more long-term engagement can be discussed assuming you want to continue working together. 

About Jon Low (Founder & Managing Partner)

Jon Low is a performance coach and tactical advisor to founders and their leadership teams. He helps them move the needle on the hard things such as: fundraising, board leadership, strategic communication, GTM, and operational hygiene & accountability. Over the past five years, Jon has helped founders raise more than $500 million in venture funding (Seed to Series C) from funds such as: Menlo VC, Sequoia, Goodwater, Tiger Global, Softbank, a16z, Lightspeed, Accel, and Founders Fund, to name a few.

Jon was also co-founder of Format One advisory, leading efforts to support founders during clutch moments of their growth journey for over five years. Prior to that, Jon also founded and operated his own strategic communications practice: training and coaching CEOs and executives to engage and lead different stakeholders for five years. 

His professional experience spans the disciplines of design & engineering, business development, training & facilitation, strategic communication, and software development & sales. He has also ghostwritten numerous books including a NY Times Best-seller. Jon also holds a 3rd Degree Black Belt in Taekwondo (Kukkiwon), and a BComm/Engineering (Honors) from The University of Sydney.